Making sure it all adds up
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Burns follows the presentation with a handout of well-crunched numbers.

Now that a Senate committee has given approval to that chamber’s budget proposal, legislative leaders are meeting to forge a compromise between the House and Senate spending plans.
Republican and Democrat leaders from both chambers met May 8 to discuss differences between the two budgets. Staff from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee guided the lawmakers through every inch of the dueling plans and explained the divergences between them.
House Minority Leader Phil Lopes said tax cuts will be one of the main points of contention, as the House plan includes $62 million of tax reductions, while the Senate proposal only sets aside $7 million.
“We didn’t talk about tax cuts,” Lopes, D-27, said, “but that’s obviously going to be a big to-do.”
House Majority Leader Tom Boone, R-4, said the negotiations will shift focus in the upcoming meetings.
“We’ve talked about the differences, now we’re going to talk about the process [of resolving them],” he said.
Mike Haener, a lobbyist for the Governor’s Office, said there was no indication when the governor would become involved in the budget negotiations, though he said she definitely would be at some point.
“She said she would sign [the Senate] budget,” he said. “If there are changes made to it, we would have to see what those are.”
The Senate budget was negotiated over several months by Republicans, Democrats and Gov. Janet Napolitano. The House plan received some Democrat support in committee, but was crafted almost exclusively by Republicans.
Both budgets include about $10.6 billion in spending, though the chambers differ in their priorities. Among the major differences are $46 million in the Senate budget intended to pay all teachers at least $33,000 per year, while the House proposal includes only $8.7 million for teacher pay raises.
Tax cuts in the House budget include a 2.5-percent corporate income tax cut and allowing income tax deductions for donations made to college savings plans. The Senate provides for business property tax cuts.
After the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the budget bills May 7, Sen. Karen Johnson, R-18, praised the work that had been done in crafting a proposal that was so widely accepted.
“I think it’s a real tribute to the Senate that we’ve come up with a bipartisan budget,” she said.