A budget deal struck between the Democrat governor and Republican legislative leaders earlier this month appeared at first blush to be too good to be true, a fact that became obvious with the governor’s May 20 vetoes of two bills.

One was critical for conservatives to support the overall budget package and the other’s place in the budget agreement is debated.

The finger pointing has begun and the he-said-she-said argument is in full swing.

Republican leaders have been distributing bumper stickers that sum up their feelings about the governor’s vetoes. They read, simply, “She Lied.”

Governor Napolitano contends Republican leaders broke their word by not reaching a compromise with legislative Democrats on a bill to meet a court order to pay for students to learn English, and by sending her a bill to allow corporations to use part of their state tax liability to fund private school scholarships for poor students with language she never approved.

Republicans counter that the bill to comply with the judge’s request in Flores v. Arizona was never part of the budget deal and the governor and her staff had ample time to review the language in the corporate tuition tax credit proposal.

“In my view, they broke the deal,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview to be published in its entirety in the June 10 issue of Arizona Capitol Times. “In their view, I broke the deal. I could easily say, ‘Well, I don’t trust you either.’ The plain fact of the matter is I’m still the governor. They’re still the legislative leadership…”

House Speaker Jim Weiers, R-10, said, “Everything in this budget was based on integrity, honesty and keeping one’s word and that’s gone down the toilet in one fast flush when it came to the vetoes.”

Senate President Ken Bennett, R-1, said it showed a lack of character that the governor would veto the item she had the biggest problem with but sign other parts of the budget she favored.

“If this one part of the budget was a deal-breaker to her, then she should have vetoed the whole budget,” he said. “But to pick and choose and sign only the things where she got what she wanted, and veto the ones where she gave a little and we got the things that we wanted, that is inappropriate and it’s a total lack of honor.”

However, the governor disputed the claims that the corporate tuition tax credit bill was a straight-up trade for full-day kindergarten and medical school funding, saying it was part of an overarching budget agreement that was “replete with compromise.” For that reason, she said there was no need to veto the entire package.

Leaders ‘Mystifed’

Republican leaders said they were “shocked,” dumbfounded” and “mystified” that the governor vetoed S1527, the corporate tuition tax credit measure. Mr. Weiers said that without the governor’s assurance that the tuition tax credit bill would be included in the budget, the rest of the package – including Republican concessions to fund expansion of the full-day kindergarten program and to help pay for a medical school in downtown Phoenix – would not have been approved, “period. That was the glue that kept the deal together.”

In her veto message, Ms. Napolitano said the corporate tuition tax credit program was to include a sunset provision after five years to automatically repeal the law. Instead, the bill as passed contained a review of the program after five years and would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to repeal.

Mr. Bennett said the language that was passed was in the original version of the bill, which was available to the Governor’s Office for three weeks before the Legislature took any action on it.

“If the sunset review was a problem with the corporate tuition tax credit, she should have had the courtesy and the decency and the integrity to bring it up personally with either [myself or Mr. Weiers],” he said. “She never did so.”

House Majority Whip Gary Pierce, R-19, said he believes the governor “cowered” to the more liberal members of her party who were unhappy she accepted the corporate tuition tax credits in the first place.

“I guess it was worth it to her to break her word to do it,” he said. “I think she’s just wrong – it wasn’t worth it.”

Ms. Napolitano said she was not trying to appease liberals with her veto. She agreed to the tax credits, she said, in order to ensure funding for key Democrat programs, like full-day kindergarten, the medical school and child care subsidies.

“Given the numbers that conservative Republicans have in both houses of the Legislature, you have to give something to get all those things,” she said. “If they’d sent it to me in the form I agreed to and with [a Flores] bill that had been agreed to, I would have signed it. It was part of the deal.”

Mr. Bennett said the Governor’s Office only expressed concern about two parts of the bill: how the $5 million statewide cap on tax credits would work and how participating private schools would fingerprint their employees.

He declined to say Ms. Napolitano was a liar, instead saying she had “broken her word.” Another lawmaker was more blunt about it.

“There’s no way in the world she can claim that she didn’t have a chance to review or look at that,” said Rep. Russell Pearce, R-18, one of the House Appropriations committee chairmen. “She knew exactly what was in there…and she ignored the deal. She simply lied.”

Besides failing to hold up her end of the budget bargain by vetoing the corporate tuition tax credit bill, Republican leaders also say Ms. Napolitano is trying to change the terms of the deal after the fact, by insisting that a bipartisan compromise on the Flores bill, H2718, was part of the agreement.

In her veto letter, Ms. Napolitano cited the unwillingness of Republicans to forge a deal with the Democrats as the primary reason for vetoing the bill, saying that, “As part of that [budget] agreement, you pledged to work with Democrats in the legislature [sic] to develop a bi-partisan bill to satisfy the state’s obligations in the Flores v. State of Arizona litigation. That did not happen.”

In 2001, an Arizona district federal court ruled that Arizona was not fulfilling its obligation to teach English to students who did not speak it as a primary language. In January, a federal judge ordered the Legislature to develop a plan to meet the 2001 court order by the end of the regular session.

Republicans leaders say they did just that, but say it was never a negotiating point with Ms. Napolitano that an agreement on the plan be reached with legislative Democrats.

“She asked if we would sit down with the Democrats; we did sit down with the Democrats,” Mr. Weiers said.

Legislative leaders from both parties met several times to discuss a Flores plan in the days leading up to the May 13 vote on the plan, but the two groups could not find common ground. Democrat leaders say the negotiations were not in good faith – while they made four counter proposals to the Republican plan, their GOP counterparts didn’t budge on any of the Democrat requests.

Sen. Aguirre: Veto Was Fitting End

“I really felt like we went into that room and they were playing a game with us,” Senate Minority Leader Linda Aguirre said, adding that the veto was a fitting end result. “You know, you play chicken on one end and you get played on the other.”

House Assistant Minority Leader Linda Lopez, D-29, said she hopes Democrats will retract all but their initial counter proposal to the Republican-b
acked Flores plan.

Republicans were also angered with the veto because, they said, the governor should have let the judge decide if the plan passed muster. However, Democrats say the court would have rejected the proposal.

Hogan: No Retribution, ‘Get This Problem Solved’

Tim Hogan, director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest and the lawyer who represented the Flores family in the case, agrees with the Democrats’ assessment. He said he will seek to block the state’s access to federal highway money and ask the court to fine the state if progress is not made on a new Flores plan in the coming weeks. Court, though, is a last resort.

“I’m not interested in just retribution here – I’d kind of like to get this problem solved,” he said. “If people aren’t going to indicate a willingness to sit down and work this out, we’ll evaluate it and obviously we’ll go back to court when we think there’s no possibility of further action, but there’s no bright line to that.”

8 Republicans Seek ‘Fair’ Flores Plan

A group of eight moderate Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Ms. Napolitano, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Weiers urging them to work together to come up with a Flores plan that they all can agree to and “is fair to both the children and the taxpayers of Arizona.”

The letter says that the system passed by the Legislature – four of the signers voted in favor of the measure, one voted against it and three were absent – would not meet the requirements set by the court because it could be arbitrarily applied and different for each school.

The letter continues, “We owe it to Arizona’s children to help them acquire English language skills, to help them become positive contributors to Arizona’s economy and communities. The Flores lawsuit is now 14 years old. Arizona has failed to meet the needs of an entire generation of Arizona’s children in this area. It is time we addressed and resolved this critical funding issue.

“Too often, Arizona has delayed addressing court orders, costing Arizona taxpayers countless millions of dollars defending the lawsuits, just to end up back at the original solution proposed. In the last 10 years, Arizona has spent over $20 million on plaintiff’s attorney’s fees the State was ordered to pay after losing various court cases.

“We do not want to see history repeat itself, with Arizona failing to meet court orders and thus, ceding policy decision to the courts. This only harms Arizona’s children, citizens and taxpayers. Rather, we encourage legislative leadership and the Governor to do the right thing and negotiate a resolution.”

It was signed by Sens. Carolyn Allen, R-8, and Toni Hellon, R-26, and Reps. Jennifer Burns, R-25, Pete Hershberger, R-26, Steve Huffman, R-26, Bill Konopnicki, R-5, Marian McClure, R-30, and Tom O’Halleran, R-1.

Special Session Demands

In her veto letters of the two bills, Ms. Napolitano said that she is willing to call the Legislature into a special session to address the issues, but only after the problems with the legislation have been worked out in a bipartisan fashion among legislative leaders.

Republican leaders say they are not willing to make any compromises.

“If we go to a special session,” Mr. Pearce said, “what she’ll get is what we gave her before.”

Mr. Tully said he would not accept a linking of the two vetoed bills in a special session, saying the Republican caucus would only be willing to discuss the Flores issues after the governor signs the corporate tuition tax credit – as it was previously passed – into law.

“Linkage happened before – that’s why there’s medical school, that’s why there’s all-day K,” he said. “We’re not buying the cow and paying for the milk.” —