Oscar-winning actress and lifelong activist Jane Fonda’s Climate PAC expanded its slate of clean energy candidates in the upcoming utility election in Arizona next Tuesday.
Conservative political group Turning Point USA ramped up its efforts for the same race through its Elected Leadership for SRP slate.
Where TPUSA wants to keep “Green New Deal extremists” off the SRP board, the Fonda PAC hopes to usher in proponents of renewables through the Clean Energy Team.
As per their website, the Elected Leadership slate, led by Chris Dobson, the candidate for board president, prioritizes “common sense” regulation and affordability, while the progressive camp is focused on renewables.
Clean Energy Team candidates argue they are concerned that data centers in the Phoenix region will influence this land-based voting system.
The election, scheduled for April 7, will decide who sits on the board and council of the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association and the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, the two bodies that regulate the SRP. Early voting has already begun.
What’s different this year?
While most election laws changed following the end of the Civil War, this race is one of the only elections in the U.S. that still requires voters to be landowners.
Here, the value of each vote is tied to the acreage of land owned by the voter. A standard one-fifth acre counts as a 0.20 vote, but a neighbor with a larger chunk of land has more say.
This year, the race drew attention from well-known political advocacy groups.
“It’s usually … a quiet, low-key affair, very under the radar, with a very small number of votes that get cast for this every two years,” Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda told Arizona PBS. “There are a couple of outside groups that are heavily involved in the race right now, pushing for this slate. Turning Point is by far the more well-known one.”
One longtime Scottsdale resident in a post on X concurred with Duda, saying that for the longest time, the election was largely ignored, allowing one side of large land dwellers to win simply by showing up. “At SRP, if you live on a standard 1/5-acre lot, your vote counts as 0.20,” said Terry Shadley.
“Now, the other side has woken up and is fighting to get those seats back,” he wrote, adding that “both sides are finally realizing that whoever controls these seats controls our water and our power bills, and they’re finally treating it like the high-stakes race it actually is.”
Outside groups make their case ahead of Arizona’s utility board election
In this election, where the land votes, not the people, outside groups on both sides of the aisle and data center lobbyists have heavily influenced the 2026 race.
Even though businesses can’t vote, large landowners with substantial acreage hold significant sway over the election. The SRP board — favoring agriculture and established property interests — has a conservative majority, but a shift has been underway as a few “clean energy” candidates won seats by campaigning on expanding Arizona’s solar energy potential and keeping data centers from hiking energy prices.
Casey Clowes, propped up by Lead Locally, Sierra Club and the Fonda PAC as the board vice president candidate for the Clean Energy Team, wrote in an X post from February, “SRP is the largest public power company in the country. It needs to lead on a just transition to renewable energy and make data centers pay their share.”
Last year, Turning Point USA set its sights on Arizona’s utility board election in 2026. “The SRP territories, they’re pretty blue,” Turning Point Action COO Tyler Bowyer told Politico. “If we can get turnout and activate the toughest place in the state for us right now, that could play a huge role for us later on in November.”
They hosted ballot-chasing events across the Phoenix valley in the days leading up to the elections. The flyers promoting the TPUSA slate in Scottsdale list several promises from the opposition, including achieving net zero emissions by 2050, expanding solar energy and battery storage facilities, and making data centers pay their fair share.
At the bottom, the flyer says, “Dark money groups are spending heavily on candidates making false promises. Their policies will increase your rates, lead to California-style blackouts, and damage the Arizona economy.” The campaign material also claims that the Elected Leadership slate has a combined experience of over 70 years in “keeping power and water rates low, the grid reliable, and responsibly moving toward a cleaner energy future.”
Fonda, known for promoting a “resist” movement against the Trump administration, launched her namesake Climate PAC in 2022. This PAC has backed anti-fossil fuel candidates in the SRP elections for years.
“This ‘local utility’ is the largest public utility in the nation, serving ~2 million people in one of the most water-hungry and sun-rich states in the nation,” the clean energy PAC said in a Substack post, before noting the change in the landscape as of late.
“Now the GOP is coming for these seats, too,” the post said, adding that TPUSA is “investing in their own slate of GOP-backed, oil-loving candidates for these SRP seats; putting up billboards and making their presence known.”
The PAC argued that the SRP services about 240,000 acres in three major Arizona counties, namely Maricopa, Gila and Pinal, that have “some of the highest solar irradiance in the world — and severe water scarcity.”
“If a public utility like SRP can successfully transition to 100% clean energy while keeping rates low for consumers, not only will 2 million people be plugged into a more sustainable power grid, but the ‘affordability’ excuse will evaporate for every other utility in the nation,” the post said. “Oh, and we can make a dent in the water crisis, too.”