By February of 1998, the Deloitte Consulting firm was under contract with the State of Arizona and had embarked upon what would become an extensive ten-month evaluation of the primary components of Arizona’s Juvenile Justice System. The main focus of the audit from the beginning was the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Juvenile Justice Services Division, the juvenile courts and their probation departments, and the Department of Juvenile Corrections. As part of the audit, both financial and program audits were conducted related to prevention, diversion (early intervention), probation and treatment. In December of 1998, Deloitte Consulting issued its final report to the Committee. The report, which consisted of hundreds of pages of detailed findings, concluded that “It is our assessment that the Arizona Juvenile Justice System is one of the best in the nation.”

The Renewing Arizona Family Traditions program responds to the needs of Arizona's youth and families by providing intensive, family-oriented services to court referred youth. This report reviews the successes as well as the opportunities for growth within the RAFT program and examines the program through a presentation of the data collected by the Administrative Office of the Courts through its contract providers and other sources. The data is recorded by provider agencies and their respective regions and includes intake and discharge/outcome information.

The data for this report are extracted each year from fourteen juvenile courts’ Juvenile On-Line Tracking Systems. JOLTS is the automated juvenile court information management system. After using JOLTS for more than 25 years, July 1, 2008, Maricopa County upgraded to their new Integrated Court Information System. Each juvenile court actively participates in collecting and maintaining the data to ensure quality and accuracy. This report provides an overview of the juveniles processed at various stages of the juvenile justice system statewide.

This study investigated whether highways acted as barriers to gene flow for pronghorn in northern Arizona. DNA samples from 132 pronghorn were analyzed using eight polymorphic microsatellite loci. Samples represented animals living on opposite sides of US Route 89 (US 89) and State Route 64 (SR 64). Two different modeling approaches indicated that both US 89 and SR 64, and to a lesser extent US Route 180 (US 180), acted as barriers to gene flow. The genetic structuring caused by highways, especially across US 89, is consistent with behavioral data that demonstrated pronghorn rarely cross this highway. This study found no evidence of inbreeding or reduced genetic variation in any of the populations examined, but those effects may take longer to appear. Based on these results, the researchers recommend future genetic monitoring of these populations or assessment of genetic variation across highways with larger traffic volumes or longer histories to determine whether the barrier effects documented here lead to loss of genetic diversity.

The Arizona transportation history project was conceived in anticipation of Arizona’s centennial, which will be celebrated in 2012. Following approval of the Arizona Centennial Plan in 2007, the Arizona Department of Transportation recognized that the centennial celebration would present an opportunity to inform Arizonans of the crucial role that transportation has played in the growth and development of the state.

The report consists of a historical narrative and a series of topical essays. The seven-chapter historical narrative is a history of Arizona’s highways that extends from the pre-Columbian era to the present. The 14 topical essays extend the scope of the history beyond the state’s highway system. They include overviews of the development of other transportation modes (railroads, aviation, and urban transit), a brief history of highway pavements, a lighthearted look at the motoring experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and an exploration of how changes in transportation infrastructure affected some Arizona communities. The topical essays also provide additional historical information on bridges, urban freeways, the Interstate system, ADOT and its predecessor agencies, and famous roads such as U.S. Route 66, U.S. Route 89, the Black Canyon Highway, and the Beeline Highway.

The report also includes a timeline of transportation-related developments. This chronology not only provides an accessible overview of Arizona’s transportation history; it also places that history in a larger context by including transportation-related developments from the rest of the nation and around the world. Finally, the report contains a guide to archives in Arizona that hold significant collections of historical photographs related to the state’s transportation history, a bibliography of published historical sources related to the history of highways in Arizona, and a discussion of how the historical narrative and topical essays could be used to produce publications and media that would be made available to the public.

Arizona’s vulnerable populations are struggling on a daily basis but usually do so in silence, undetected by traditional radar and rankings, often unaware themselves of their high risk for being pushed or pulled into full crisis. Ineligible for financial assistance under strict eligibility guidelines, they don’t qualify as poor because vulnerable populations are not yet in full crisis. To be clear, this report is not about the “poor,” at least not in the limited sense of the word. It is about our underemployed wage earners, our single-parent households, our deployed or returning military members, our under-educated and unskilled workforce, our debt-ridden neighbors, our uninsured friends, our family members with no savings for an emergency, much less retirement.

Arizona's recently adopted budget for fiscal year 2015-16 includes dramatic reductions in assistance to low-income families with children. On July 1, Arizona will become the first and only state to limit lifetime eligibility requirements for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to 12 months (federal law allows for eligibility time limits of 60 months). That means come June 30, 2016, many Arizona families no longer will receive TANF benefits even if they otherwise would be eligible under federal guidelines.