Budget brain damage
Who let David negotiate? ... A triple feature ... And from woke to broke.
Arizona finally has a budget. Almost.
After months of fixating on spending plans that have no chance of earning the governor’s signature, lawmakers in the House worked late into the night yesterday to mark up the budget that Gov. Katie Hobbs negotiated with Senate Republicans weeks ago.
And with just days ahead of a government shutdown, the House finally approved the negotiated budget and sent it back to the Senate for final approval.
But not before lawmakers in the House put their own tiny twists on it.
And we do mean tiny.
Republican Rep. David Livingston, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, repeatedly swore the Senate budget couldn’t pass the House without massive changes.
But in the end, only a handful of small tweaks were added before lawmakers put the Senate/Hobbs compromise budget up on the board in the House — and it passed easily.1
“Budget’s biggest loser: Livingston,” as one lobbyist put it. “No contest. All this bullshit to get 98.9% of what the Senate gave them from the start. What a fun week of brain damage this was.”
In fact, the $17.6 billion budget that came out of the Senate is still $17.6 billion. Lawmakers in the House added, per our back-of-the-napkin math, less than $30 million in spending (not including a few million they cut). That’s roughly a change of 0.15%.
Still, Livingston and House Speaker Steve Montenegro stood by the messaging that House Republicans prevented a government shutdown, even though they abandoned the typical budgeting process and dragged the legislative session out.
Livingston continued to boast about making a single-day veto record by sending two doomed budgets to Hobbs. Despite previously insisting he can’t support other budgets, he said the one Republicans approved was the best they could do with a Democrat in the executive tower, and that “communication is lacking between the House and the Senate and the governor.”
And even though he had a spat with Montenegro earlier this week, Livingston thinks he’ll keep his spot as Appropriations Committee chair.
“I woke at the pleasure of the speaker, and I think the speaker's happy with me,” he said.
Montenegro said he didn’t give up on his own budget plans, but finally worked things out with the Senate and Hobbs.
“We're making sure that we're representing the people that sent us here,” he said. “We will never apologize for standing up for the people of our districts from every corner of the state.”
Democrats largely swallowed their complaints about funding for school vouchers and immigration enforcement and voted for the package.
But not all of them.
Sister lawmakers Alma Hernandez and Consuelo Hernandez repeatedly shamed their Democratic colleagues for providing immigration enforcement funding. They hammered the fact that the budget says Arizona will strictly enforce its notorious anti-immigrant legislation, SB1070, which was mostly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court years ago.
Or, as Alma put it, “contributing money for people in my community to be terrorized.”
“This is also the first time I'm voting no on a budget. I'm going to go home and know that I can sleep that night because I didn't turn my back on my community,” she said.
However, every single budget she has ever voted for contained that exact same language. Sometimes with slightly more money to “enforce SB1070.”
And just as progressive lawmakers felt ashamed of their colleagues for supporting the budget, conservative Republicans also shamed their colleagues for supporting a budget that “is not, in fact, even remotely conservative,” per Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin.
“This will do severe damage to Republicans, and it’s a shame a Republican body is passing it,” Kolodin told his colleagues. “And the reason Republicans are passing it is there is a lack of backbone in this Republican body.”
But budgets aren’t just numbers. They’re also policy.
The policies also didn’t change much in the House.
Republican lawmakers proposed dozens of amendments to the budget that would have:
Made the Attorney General and county attorneys get permission from the Legislature before filing election-related lawsuits.
Cut state Medicaid by $40 million.
Put more restrictive reporting requirements on SNAP recipients.
Gave a bunch of money to the Yuma and Maricopa County recorders.
None of those were adopted. In fact, a supermajority of the Republican-led House shot them down.
Instead, the last-minute dealmaking amendments we’ve been waiting so long for included fairly minor changes like:
$2.3 million for “Fire Incident Management Grants”
$1 million for a “nonprofit horsemen's organization”
$500,000 for the state Education Department to give out grants for automated external defibrillators.
In the end, compromise finally won the day.
Nobody was fully happy with the package, as Republican Rep. Teresa Martinez noted. But it beats shutting down the government.
“This body has already sent two budget bills to the governor, and she has vetoed them both,” she said. “I do not believe in shutting down the government, because then DPS doesn't get paid. Our teachers don't get paid. … There are so many ramifications of shutting down the government, and none of them are good. And it blows my mind that people would rather shut down the government and hurt millions of people for politics.”
The budget now goes to the state Senate for final approval today at 10 a.m.
After that, it’s on to the Governor’s Office, where it’ll be signed into law.
There’s only one other thing that the Senate still needs to do before they can close out the year successfully: PASS THE DON BOLLES BILL.
We wanted to give this week’s verticals a cinematic kick, so we had our art intern, ChatGPT, make movie posters about them.
The self-driving car company Waymo has big plans for Arizona. They’re planning to double production of autonomous vehicles at their new facility in Mesa.
But everyday riders are a little hesitant. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a Waymo vehicle was caught driving the wrong way on a Tempe street.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s competitors, like Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox, are trying to get ahead.
Is that what Mesa is going to look like? ChatGPT seems to think so.Want to know the latest on the self-driving car race? Don’t miss this week’s edition of the A.I. Agenda.
Meanwhile, a Japanese company wants to invest $1 trillion in Arizona’s robotics and AI industries, and University of Arizona researchers are trying to take the uncertainty out of pregnancies.
Plus, if you’re looking for some thoughtful discussion, and a little dark comedy, we’ve got two great short films to show you.
Arizona lawmakers were trying to crack down on troubled school boards — until Gov. Katie Hobbs stepped in.
She vetoed a bill that would’ve forced school board members to resign if their district’s finances fall apart, calling it “blatant legislative overreach.”
Our art intern, ChatGPT, really keyed into the drama of the debate and made an over-the-top movie poster.The Isaac Elementary district’s financial crisis sparked the debate, but lawmakers say it’s up to local voters to decide who sits on school boards.
And, really, who are lawmakers to point the finger at school districts’ financial troubles? The Legislature is still bumbling through the process of passing its own budget.
Elsewhere in education, Arizona’s school voucher program finally got a new handbook, but not all parents are thrilled about it. And federal funding cuts are hitting everything from tribal colleges to school lunches.
Want the full scoop? Check out this week’s edition of the Education Agenda.
The mysterious “Project Blue” promises high-paying jobs and tax revenue from new data centers. The project also could give Southern Arizona a shot at competing with Phoenix in the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry.
But it raises big questions about water use and power consumption, not to mention public trust.
The actual data centers will probably look more like warehouses, but this is much more cinematic.Pima County officials already approved the land deal, and now all eyes are on the City of Tucson and Tucson Electric Power to see what they do.
Catch up on one of Arizona’s biggest — and most controversial — economic development deals in this week’s edition of the Water Agenda.
Also, President Donald Trump tapped an Arizonan to lead the agency that oversees the Colorado River, and that agency has given the basin states a deadline for their river-sharing negotiations.
If you’re a Democrat hoping to be elected in Arizona next year, you probably won’t find today’s laugh “ha ha” kind of funny.
However, Republicans — today’s your day to giggle.
Arizona Democratic Party Treasurer Greg Freeman posted a video of his analysis of the party finances, and things are very, very bad.
And they’re only going to get worse if state committeemen don’t vote to remove Chairman Robert Branscomb at their July 16 meeting, he said.
Freeman noted that the party has been in the red every month this year, and has already burned through almost a third of their roughly $1.5 million war chest for 2026.
You may be thinking: the party can’t get donors because of its high-profile battle between the party leaders and the elected officials he’s supposed to promote, a battle that kicked off when Branscomb sent an open email smack-talking them.
But the problem is deeper than that, Freeman explained.
“We didn’t see a large drop (in fundraising) after that email because we’re already scraping the bottom,” he said. “Our fundraising has been historically poor in 2025 and we are on pace for the worst fundraising year in the past decade.”
Worse yet, Branscomb is burning what little cash the party has, Freeman said.
Freeman said he sent Branscomb a letter “begging him to stop additional spending,” right before Branscomb announced new hires and plans to spend an additional million that the party doesn’t have.
“The Arizona Democratic Party is dealing with very serious financial issues. Chairman Branscomb has shown a limited understanding of these issues and neither interest nor effectiveness in addressing them,” Freeman said, adding that, “Removing the chair is the only way to create an Arizona Democratic Party that not just survives but makes a meaningful difference in the upcoming election.”
Anyway, the July 16 meeting should be a doozy!
And that’s with four Republicans not even bothering to show up for the vote: Leo Biasiucci, Matt Gress, Laurin Hendrix and Nick Kupper.
Meanwhile the rest of us have been waiting for one of your handy guides on this very topic...
Question: does the vote board you show report a vote on a combination of the amendments you list, or on just one of them, or some of them? I'm quite curious about which of those floor amendment votes were being reflected in that image. Thanks.