Budget bargaining begins
Budget bargaining begins
A bipartisan bummer … A ringtone to remember ... And Uber for gangsters.
The governor and legislative budget leaders claim a bipartisan budget deal is “imminent” and bills could be introduced today and signed into law by the end of the week.
That may be a bit ambitious.
But when budget documents start floating around the halls of the state Capitol, you know that budget season has officially begun.
We got our hands on a leaked copy of the latest “budget docs” — those elusive spreadsheets outlining the sticking points in ongoing state budget negotiations — that lawmakers are poring over this week.
They show lawmakers and the governor are considering plugging Arizona’s estimated $1.3 billion budget hole through a host of cuts to state agencies and departments, some sweeps and postponing a lot of one-time spending on infrastructure projects.
As we previously explained, budget docs don’t show every policy that may be in a budget.
The budget is a package of bills hundreds of pages long. The main bill is called the “feed bill” and it outlines the numbers. The rest of the bills in the package are “budget reconciliation bills” or BRBs1 that outline the specifics of how to spend that money within categories like education. That’s where we may see the school voucher restrictions Gov. Katie Hobbs says are part of the deal.
The budget docs do show lawmakers are considering putting a cap on School Tuition Organizations, which offer corporate tax credits for donations to pay for private school tuition.
The documents only offer a snapshot of negotiations, which will surely continue until the final moment.
But they show us who’s on the chopping block as the state heads into its first real budget crunch in nearly a decade.
$700 million in sweeps
The first tool lawmakers and the governor are calling on to balance the budget are “sweeps,” which is essentially just taking money from dedicated funds and throwing them into the larger state General Fund.
The deal includes nearly $700 million in proposed sweeps, comprising the biggest part of the proposed solution to the deficit. The sweeps would touch nearly every aspect of government. But water would be hit the hardest.
This budget year’s proposed transfers include:
$157 million in projects from the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, like the Long-Term Water Augmentation Fund and Water Supply Development Revolving Fund.
Not to mention the budget proposal nixes plans to deposit $333 million into WIFA in the upcoming fiscal year.
$70 million from the Arizona Department of Administration’s Risk Management Fund
$56 million from the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Arizona Competes Fund
$40 million from AHCCCS prescription drug rebate fund
$34 million from the Trust Land Management Fund
$500 million in cuts to one-time spending
The budget is also balanced on major cuts to one-time spending.
When budgeteers talk about one-time spending, think projects, not positions. Building a schoolhouse is one-time money, for example. Filling it with teachers and students is ongoing money.
Cutting one-time spending is often easier to stomach since it’s cutting funding for things people need rather than things they already have.
The negotiated proposal contains about $500 million worth of one-time cuts, mostly to road projects, including:
$108 million in savings to move the I-10 widening to fiscal year 2028
$48 million to halt West Adams Building renovations
$29 million get rid of the remaining fiscal year 2023 pavement rehabilitation funding
$300 million in ongoing cuts
These are the hardest cuts to make – direct, ongoing cuts from programs and agencies.
Some of the solutions lawmakers came up with in this category are gimmicks, like their plan to shift $115 million this year and next into the prison budget from the opioid settlement fund, which is dedicated for opioid education, rehab, harm reduction and prison opioid programs.
Other items aren’t gimmicks, like the 3.5% cuts to many of the state’s major agencies, totaling about $44 million in cuts.
Of that, more than half is coming from the university system, including:
$11 million in cuts to Arizona State University
$9 million in cuts to Northern Arizona University
$8 million in cuts to the financially struggling University of Arizona
That includes a $1.5 million cut to the UA Health Sciences
Hail to the Chief: Former Gov. Doug Ducey is one of 19 witnesses prosecutors listed in Arizona’s ongoing fake electors case, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. The famous clip of the governor ignoring a call from Donald Trump while certifying the 2020 election results could influence the Arizona attorney general's decision to call Ducey to testify about election subversion efforts. Rusty Bowers is also on prosecutors’ witness list, and the former state House Speaker previously said Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani called him with broad election fraud claims and a mechanism to overturn the election results.
Budgeting in the dark: Arizona’s school boards are finalizing next year’s budgets without knowing how much they have to spend as the state Legislature and Gov. Katie Hobbs have yet to release a spending plan or waive the Aggregate Expenditure Limit that holds schools to 1980 spending levels, Paul Maryniak reports for the East Valley Tribune. Even though school districts had money to spend, the AEL in the past two school years forced school boards to the brink of making unnecessary budget cuts.
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Stolen valor: Steve Slaton, a candidate for state House in LD7 who owns a Trump merchandise store in Show Low, claims his identity was stolen and subsequently, his military discharge papers were altered, per the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl. The candidate has been busted by “stolen valor” activists who say he never saw combat and never served during the Vietnam War as he has claimed.
Stolen people: The University of Arizona’s Arizona State Museum, the largest anthropological museum in the Southwest, doesn’t have enough staff, space or funding to conduct adequate repatriation efforts on its vast collection of Native American remains and artifacts, a new report from Cronkite News and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found. The museum is actively working to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, which provides for the protection and return of Native American remains and belongings, but its associate director called the museum “willingly noncompliant.”
Send the assistant: Phoenix police revealed a sprawling Crime Reduction Plan for 2024 that strategizes approaches to youth violence, fentanyl use and traffic violations, which were left out of last year’s plans, KTAR’s Kevin Stone writes. The department is also planning to send more police assistants to non-emergency calls like parking complaints and abandoned vehicles to free up time for a short-staffed group of sworn police officers, KJZZ’s Christina Estes reports.
A TikTok famous rideshare service called BlackWolf launched in Phoenix and Scottsdale last week. It’s like Uber, but it connects riders to gun-toting drivers with police and military backgrounds, per Axios’ Jessica Boehm and Martin Vassolo.
The company halted its operations after Axios started asking if it was authorized to operate in Arizona. Spoiler alert: It’s not.
"It's a tough journey but we are here to stay and operate correctly and legally!" The company’s founder said in an email.
Pronounced like burb as in suburb.
"that lawmakers are pouring over this week" -- should be "poring over".
Hard to believe, given that we have a Democratic Governor who campaigned in the arts community, but once again, the Arizona Commission on the Arts has been zeroed out of the appropriated budget. This makes 15 YEARS (since the Great Recession) that the agency and the advocacy group, Arizona Citizens for the Arts, has had to fight for minimal funding. through "one-time" budgeting. Last year, the Governor took a big step in restoring funding, by putting $5 million into the budget, again as one-time funding. That money was swept in this year’s Executive Budget along with other one-time funding lines even though it really isn’t really “one-time” funding since it’s the ONLY legislative appropriation the agency gets. The Commission and Arizona Citizens for the Arts got vague indications that it would be restored in the negotiations. It hasn’t so far. And it means about a 90% cut.
You can learn more by contact Patick McWhortor, the current Az Citizens ED,.
Join the Advocacy Network » Arizona Citizens for the Arts (azcitizensforthearts.org)