After several days of intense negotiating, legislative leaders missed a June 7 goal for reaching a deal on the budget. More pressing to House Republicans, though, is the lack of information they have received about the negotiations.
In House Republican caucus June 7, Majority Leader Tom Boone said he would like to share information about the progress that has been made, but he is precluded from doing so by an agreement he and other House Republican leaders made with the Senate to keep the details under wraps.
“We’ve been asked by the other members of the negotiating team to not talk about the details of the negotiations,” he said. “We are at a tentative stage.”
Boone, a District 4 Republican, said his preference would be to meet with House Republicans in small groups and go over, in detail, all of the compromises that have been struck. For the past three years, the House majority caucus has conducted budget talks largely through the use of small group meetings.
Some lawmakers reacted negatively to hearing they wouldn’t be getting more than vague generalities about the budget talks.
“This isn’t how I like to do business — I like to be involved,” Rep. Andy Tobin, R-1, said. “If the Senate says we should not be in communication, that bothers me.”
Similarly, Rep. John Kavanagh, R-8, complained about the gag order Republican leadership faced. If leaders can’t give briefings on the progress, he said he hopes they will speak with members in the event a deal cannot be reached with the Senate.
Boone agreed with the lawmakers’ frustrations regarding the process, but said things were what they were.
“We are where we are and that’s what we’ve agreed to at this point,” he said.
When describing the negotiations to the caucus, Boone said the two sides had made “substantial progress” and that meetings were expected to continue until a compromise was reached.
Last month, both the House and Senate approved separate budget plans. While both spend about $10.6 billion, the House package includes more tax cuts and lower funding for health and welfare programs than the Senate proposal, among other differences.
The Senate budget was crafted through negotiations with legislative Democrats and Gov. Janet Napolitano; the House budget was approved solely by the votes of that chamber’s Republicans. Leaders have been meeting for several weeks to reach an agreement. During the week of June 4, negotiations intensified when the Legislature suspended business for two days to allow budget talks to continue uninterrupted.
Boone was confident a deal would be reached soon and promised House Republicans they would be “informed immediately” when that happened.
“As soon as something is done and finished, we’ll be getting it to you for your perusal,” he told lawmakers.
House Minority Leader Phil Lopes, D-27, said negotiations began slowly, but the leaders have since started working on the “more challenging” differences between the two plans. He said the final budget will look more like the Senate proposal than the House’s for the simple fact that four of the five camps at the negotiating table — Republicans in the Senate, Democrats in both the Senate and House, and the governor — support that package.
The most pressing issues, he said, are to figure out how the state will spend its money. Most of the policy matters in the budget have already been addressed.
“I suspect that the big discussion on the money will be around K-12 [education] and charter schools and tax cuts,” Lopes said.
He hoped the budget could be approved by mid-June.