End of GOP budget fight? Seriously?

By Jim Small - jim.small@azcapitoltimes.com

Published: January 22, 2010 at 2:04 pm

For the first time in at least six years, the annual release of budget plans by the Arizona Legislature and the governor didn’t result in bickering.

Of course, it helps that the legislative Republican majority didn’t put out anything even closely resembling a budget plan this year.

Instead, what budget analysts released was more of a summary showing where the state was headed in fiscal 2011. They described how big the state’s budget hole is, but offered no shovels to fill it.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jan Brewer fulfilled her constitutional duty to produce a balanced budget by the end of the first week of the legislative session and pointed out exactly what she thinks the state needs to do to fix the budget problem.

Although many of the options would have been unthinkable two years ago - raising the sales tax by a penny, undoing a 2000 ballot measure that expanded health care coverage and eliminating the Department of Juvenile Corrections - not much upset Republican lawmakers.

“In the broad strokes, there’s a lot of agreement,” House Speaker Kirk Adams said. “I’m not ready to declare peace, but I am encouraged.”

Adams said the Joint Legislative Budget Committee didn’t publish solutions to the budget deficit because there isn’t much to add to what has been discussed since last year.

“I don’t think there is any mystery what the options are,” he said.

The state will have to borrow, cut spending and increase revenues, Adams said, and the ways they can do those things are limited.

The most obvious sticking point between Republican lawmakers and Brewer was the governor’s insistence that the Legislature set aside partisanship and raise the state’s sales tax by the end of February.

The request is almost impossible because a constitutional provision approved by voters in 1992 requires two-thirds of each chamber to approve any measure that increases state revenues.
That means Brewer would have to lock up 20 votes in the Senate and 40 in the House, less than a year after she was unable to secure the simple majorities in both chambers needed to put the sales tax increase on the ballot in a special election. And that would have to happen in an election year, no less.

“I think that’s a hill to climb,” Senate President Bob Burns said.

Burns said he would talk to Senate Republicans about the idea, but wasn’t optimistic it could be done. Nor, he said, would he go to great lengths to twist arms to make it happen.

“I’m not going to wear myself out,” he said. “We can only convince so far before it’s time to move on to something else.”

Several Republican lawmakers who last year supported sending the sales tax increase to the ballot - many of them did so only after large, permanent tax cuts were tacked on to the measure - said they have no intention of voting for the governor’s temporary tax increase.

“There’s no way I’m doing that. I want to be able to vote against it at the polls,” said John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.

Adams said he has been speaking to his caucus about voting on the sales tax increase and has had meetings with House Democrats to gauge their interest.

House Democratic leaders said they’ve been pushing all along for the Legislature to pass any tax increase instead of punting it to the voters. But even though they seem to support that idea, they had critical reviews for the rest of Brewer’s budget proposal. The cuts to education and health care are reckless, they said, and her plan fails to address problems with the state’s tax code.

Assistant House Minority Leader Kyrsten Sinema said the state should do away with several sales tax exemptions, such as the one for country club memberships.

“Special interest groups and big corporations have not had to pay their fair share in Arizona,” she said.

Democrats have focused almost exclusively on where new tax revenue could be generated, and they did so again during a Jan. 19 press conference.

House Minority Leader David Lujan repeatedly refused to specify even a single area of state government that could be cut. He attempted to shift the discussion to sales tax exemptions, and then told reporters to look at a Web site his caucus used last year to post its budget plan.
However, the budget options on the site have not been updated since May 2009, and were designed for fiscal 2010, not fiscal 2011.

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