The Daily Agenda: Budget cuts are easy, right?
The (line-item) veto queen? ... You'll live longer in #Scottsdale! ... And the tragic, predictable end to Steve's small mammal saga.
The upcoming legislative session will be bruising, considering Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican lawmakers will have to find a bipartisan agreement to solve a $800 million budget shortfall.
But if history is any guide, it may be mercifully short.
There’s an old adage in politics that says it’s a lot easier to agree on how to cut a budget than how to increase one. When spending is going up, everyone wants credit for appropriating the extra funds, and the list of potential recipients of largesse is nearly infinite. But when the budget is shrinking, nobody wants to take the blame, and the list of places that can legally or politically be slashed is much more limited.
In 2015, for example, Gov. Doug Ducey and lawmakers announced in January that they had already reached an agreement to solve a $1.5 billion shortfall through sweeps, cuts and dipping into the state’s rainy day fund. They finalized that agreement by mid-March and wrapped up the legislative session not long after.
But that conventional wisdom hasn’t always panned out, and it hasn’t been tested in Arizona’s new split government.
The last time a Democratic governor had to make cuts alongside a Republican Legislature was in 2003 when Gov. Janet Napolitano first took office and had to immediately cut more than $300 million from the existing budget her predecessor had crafted. (Experts also predicted a roughly $1 billion shortfall for the next year, but that was mostly tamped down by a housing boom and a federal bailout.)
2003 wasn’t a quick legislative session: It took until June for policymakers to reach an agreement. And calling that budget an agreement might be overstating it, considering Napolitano used a line-item veto to slash many of the cuts that Republican lawmakers proposed.
Napolitano’s path through budget cuts — which relied on a mix of cuts and one-time measures like fund sweeps and delaying spending on planned projects — may provide something of a roadmap for her first Democratic successor nearly 20 years later.
An obvious starting point will be looking to claw back some of that $2 billion in one-time spending lawmakers and Hobbs approved last year. Lawmakers funded plenty of pet projects on either side of the aisle, from $150 million for the Housing Trust Fund that Democrats wanted to roughly $90 million appropriation for Interstate 10 that Republicans championed. Sweeping or recalling just those two items would solve 30% of the problem.
But that earmarked pork spending greased the skids for last year’s bipartisan budget and canceling the spending won’t be easy. Instead, lawmakers may look to claw back some of Ducey’s former victories, including his three-year $1 billion water plan, which many lawmakers were never that keen on to begin with.
Some lawmakers are already advocating for a small cut across all state spending, but much of the state’s spending is locked in by law, meaning some major expenses, are largely off-limits to lawmakers legally, while others are simply politically impossible.
On the other hand, the need for bipartisan budget cuts may create some unique opportunities. Democrats will surely seek a cap on spending for school vouchers, for example, after the cost ballooned beyond expectations when lawmakers approved last year’s universal school voucher law. This year, that was a nonstarter. Next year, who knows?
In the end, it’ll require a mix of solutions and a fair amount of compromise to produce the first bipartisan budget cuts in two decades. And Hobbs might have to break out that line-item veto pen.1
Lifespans are shrinking: Arizonans’ life expectancies dropped to 76.3 years in 2020, folding to the national average of 77 years, the Republic's Stephanie Innes reports. The decline is largely fueled by COVID-19 and drug overdose deaths, health experts say. Lifespans are shortest in minority-dense areas and highest in wealthy areas, and community leaders in south Phoenix are hoping to reverse the trend. Axios’ Jessica Boehm reports the Equality Health Foundation is pioneering a campaign called “Blue Zones” to create community changes that correlate with healthier lifestyles, like walkable cities and access to healthy food. A 2015 study shows south Phoenix natives’ life expectancies are 14 years shorter than those born in north Scottsdale.
But business is booming: The $500 million in general obligation funds Phoenix voters approved this week are likely to go toward key developments near Sky Harbor, ASU’s med school and the Rio Salado riverfront, Phoenix Business Journal’s Audrey Jensen reports. Meanwhile, Downtown Phoenix’s economic output last year reached $21.2 billion, KJZZ’s Christina Estes reports. An economic consultant estimates employment in the urban core will increase by 10.6% over the next five years as it attracts high-wage jobs from biotech, sports and tourism. And more economy-fueling developments are already on the way as seven construction tower cranes are currently assembling mixed-use sites and apartments downtown, the Republic’s Corina Vanek reports.
Do-gooders do good: The Local News Initiative of Southern Arizona launched yesterday, aiming to raise $1 million over the next year to help support local, independently owned outlets like our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, per our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda. Its advisory board includes people with decades of experience in the journalism industry and deep ties to Southern Arizona.
“Lee and Gannett (the co-parent companies of Tucson’s daily paper) … they’re still taking $10 million a year out of this community. And they’ve taken it out of your brains because you’re not getting the information that you want and that you need,” advisory board vice chair and former New York Times journalist Stephen Golden said.
Is this bipartisanship?: Sixteen Democratic Arizona lawmakers asked Joe Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attack while asserting the Israeli government is violating the Geneva Conventions, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. (Biden said Thursday a cease-fire isn’t possible, according to the Associated Press, but Israel has agreed to pause attacks for four hours every day to allow civilians to escape.) And Arizona schools chief Tom Horne wants public schools to terminate UNICEF and Amnesty International-sponsored clubs after student-led chapters of the groups held a meeting with pro-Palestine talking points at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez reports.
Stick to mining cavities: U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar is attempting to reverse Biden’s mining protection for lands near the Grand Canyon via an amendment on a spending bill, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith reports. The amendment, which has little chance of becoming law, would bar the Department of the Interior from enforcing the president’s designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. That designation prohibits mining on the nearly million acres of northern Arizona land.
“The area in question is home to the highest grade and largest quantity of uranium deposits in the United States,” Gosar said. “And having this area under the no mining protections not only affects Arizona but also harms the national security of the entire country.”
They’re special: Two dark money groups — the Center for Arizona Policy and the Free Enterprise Club — want a judge to exempt them from a new voter-approved law requiring them to disclose the names of their donors, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. They say that if people knew who their funders were, those funders would become targets for harassment campaigns.
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They’re working on it: Lawmakers on the Arizona House Ad Hoc Committee on Abuse and Neglect of Vulnerable Adults are working on legislation for January to fix the state’s disjointed system for handling adult abuse and neglect cases after an auditor general’s report found that three agencies share jurisdiction but little else, leaving many cases uninvestigated or unsubstantiated, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. Vulnerable adults without housing who live with conditions like dementia don’t have access to shelter space that meets their needs, KJZZ’s Kathy Ritchie reports. Seniors are the fastest-growing population of unhoused people, and many have complex, undiagnosed medical conditions.
They’re not working on it: A Cochise County judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Mormon church, saying an Arizona man’s admission to clergy that he was sexually abusing his daughter is protected by clergy-penitent privilege, the Associated Press reports. Arizona law includes an exemption from Arizona’s child sex abuse mandatory reporting law. The church stifled Paul Adams’ admission, and he continued to abuse his daughter for seven years and eventually started sexually abusing his six-week-old daughter. Republican Rep. Quang Nguyen has already pledged to block any attempts to change that exemption law.
The Humane Society of Southern Arizona and its San Diego counterpart are now pretty sure they know what happened to those 250ish small mammals that got rehomed from California to Arizona and then miraculously adopted en masse.
As suspected, they were almost certainly fed to snakes, the two organizations announced in a press release yesterday.
That’s not at all funny.
But the fact that this is the scandal that will cap the career of noted animal-loving politician Steve Farley is a little funny, right?2
If you want to geek out on Arizona’s line-item budget veto, here’s a handy little guide.
Let’s all give a round of applause to Arizona Public Media reporter Danyelle Khmara for singlehandedly bringing this story to life.
Tom Horne apparently doesn’t know the law on clubs in public schools. Though he also claims to know the law as a lawyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Access_Act
I don’t usually feel proud of the Az state legislature but want to make a shout out to those that signed the call for a ceasefire. Murdering children in our name and with tax dollars that could better be spent helping them is just wrong. As Rashida Tlaib asked her colleagues recently “the cries of israeli and palestinian children sound the same to me— why don’t they sound the same to you?” And finally , what does a “humanitarian pause” in the killing mean when we are arming the conflict? Are our policymakers just making sure that remaining palestinian civilians get food to eat before our bombs kill them? CEASEFIRE NOW! And END THE OCCUPATION!