[2] Before entering politics, Burns worked as a real estate agent and helped run a family business.
Burns said that she wanted to work with the legislature, which had previously proposed legislation that would have stripped many of the powers from the Commission.
During her tenure in the legislature, she had fought for limited regulations and remarked that some of her friends found it funny that she had been elected to the regulatory body.
In September 2013, Burns published an op-ed in The Arizona Republic, bemoaning the decision by three of her fellow Commissioners to shut down an investigation into electric retail competition.
She lamented that Arizona had "hit the "stop" button on 21st century modernization and [we] are stuck with, for now, a 19th-century model of electric service.