By Caitlin Sievers | AZ Mirror
A judge ruled against a citizen-led initiative to increase Arizona’s minimum wage on Thursday, just hours after the backers of the measure announced they would abandon their effort to put the issue to voters.
Facing a likely defeat in a lawsuit aiming to keep voters from raising Arizona’s minimum wage to $18 an hour, the political action committee that spearheaded the initiative said Thursday morning that it wanted to voluntarily pull the measure from the November ballot.
Later the same day Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney confirmed the campaign’s fears and ruled against the measure via a consent decree that the backers of the initiative agreed to, the Arizona Republic reported.
In the announcement Thursday morning, the Raise the Wage AZ campaign said that it intended to withdraw the more than 350,000 voter signatures it had gathered to get its measure on the November ballot. Instead, the political committee said, it would focus its efforts on raising the minimum wage at the state legislature in 2025.
