Saying the budget proposal scheduled to reach the floor of the House and Senate in the coming days meets the needs of Arizonans, House Republican leaders have said they plan to adjourn sine die once the budget is passed, possibly as soon as May 3.

“That’s the plan, that’s what I hope,” Rep. Rep. Russell Pearce, R-18, said. He is the chairman of the House Appropriations P Committee.

The budget currently moving through the legislative process is the second of the session. Governor Napolitano vetoed the first budget package last month. House Majority Leader Steve Tully, R-11, said the new budget addresses several of the concerns the governor expressed to Republican leaders about the initial spending package.

“We’ve listened to her…and we plan to send up another budget that meets some of her demands — some of which we don’t particularly like but we can live with, and some others we agree with her — and so, we plan to try again,” Mr. Tully said.

However, Democrats say several provisions in the budget virtually guarantee it will receive a veto as well, making a special session a near-lock.

“The meaning of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result,” House Minority Whip Pete Rios, D-23, said about the budget and its private school voucher measure. “This will get the same result [as the first].”

Members of the Democratic caucus also say they have been frozen out of the appropriations process.

“They expect us to go in there and just vote for things because…‘trust us.’ We don’t,” Senate Assistant Minority Leader Harry Mitchell, D-17, said. “They’ve left us completely out of the process.”

The two House Appropriations committees have approved the $8.2 billion budget package, largely by party-line votes, as has the Senate Appropriations Committee. The new budget is based on the one vetoed in March but with additional spending of more than $70 million.

Funding to expand full-day kindergarten, build a downtown Phoenix medical school and subsidize childcare for the working poor remain among the key issues that Democrats say are not properly addressed in the latest budget.

“We don’t like what the whole budget has in it right now. It doesn’t have anything we want,” Senate Minority Leader Linda Aguirre, D-16, said.

Expanding the state-funded full-day kindergarten has been one of the governor’s top priorities this session. Unlike the first budget, the newest proposal includes more than $17 million to allow more lower-income students to attend. However, the kindergarten plan proposed by the Legislature contains several caveats that may make it a non-starter.

Republicans have agreed to expand the program, but only if the governor signs off on a voucher program that would give state subsidization for some low-income kindergarteners to attend private schools.

The voucher program is capped at 1,500 students a year whose parents earn up to 185 per cent of the federal poverty level and would cost the state $5.5 million next year, eventually costing $70 million a year when fully implemented. The students would be able to receive the vouchers throughout elementary and high school.

“We’re trying to address [full-day kindergarten],” Mr. Tully said, “maybe not the way she absolutely desires it, but, again, we don’t get everything we want in life.”

According to the Arizona Daily Star, Ms. Napolitano said the voucher plan killed any chance she would sign the bill.

“I’ve been very clear with the Legislature. They need to expand kindergarten and it needs to be a clean bill,” she told the Star. “Vouchers are not a solution to public education in Arizona.”

The Legislature’s full-day kindergarten plan also would require all school districts to verify the income of parents who sign up their children for the federal Free and Reduced Lunch program.

Opponents say the burden is too great for school districts to comply and that the state has no oversight over a federal program, while supporters say Free and Reduced Lunch statistics drive the funding for several state-funded programs and fraud could cost the state millions of dollars.

Medical School

The newest budget also does not include $7 million for start-up costs to fund the proposed downtown Phoenix medical school. The governor has said she will not sign any budget that does not include the funding.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Burns, R-9, prepared an amendment to S1410 in the committee’s April 27 meeting that would have established a $5 million Health Profession Education Fund and a study committee to evaluate the plans for the medical school. Mr. Burns did not offer the amendment because there was not enough support for it, and the bill was held.

Republican opponents of funding the medical school, which will be run by the University of Arizona, say there is no clear plan how the money will be spent or whether there will be any impact on the shortage of doctors in the state.

Child-Care Funding

In the March budget, the Legislature imposed reforms on the childcare subsidy program that would have limited the amount of time a parent could receive money for day care costs for a child. That budget also did not increase funding for the program to include more than 5,000 additional children as the governor had sought.

The new budget includes an additional $5.9 million and removes the two-year per child cap on receiving the subsidies and a stipulation that the income of the entire household be used to determine eligibility. It does, however, limit each family to five years of subsidies, requires co-pays for each child and caps the number of children per family at six. —