Despite the hand-wringing from critics who said the committee formed to examine the employer sanctions law would not lead to significant changes to the law, House Speaker Jim Weiers says there is little doubt the committee will produce legislation next year, if not actual changes to the law.
“I can almost guarantee you…that there’s going to be legislation, and maybe several pieces of legislation,” Weiers said at the Nov. 1 meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Business Owners and Work Site Enforcement.
One area of the law Weiers said will almost certainly be addressed by lawmakers next year is the addition of language to ensure all 15 county attorneys use the same standards to accept complaints about businesses. In the committee’s Oct. 24 meeting, many members voiced concerns that Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas was the only county attorney who had not agreed to accept only complaints filed on a standardized — and notarized — form.
Because businesses work best under predictable conditions, Weiers, himself a business owner, said there needs to be a consistency in enforcement from one county to the next.
“I would just hope at this point there’s not going to be some confusion between Maricopa County and 14 other counties, because that would not be good,” he said. “I can nearly guarantee you this is one of those issues that will be addressed in legislation.”
But Mark Faull, special counsel for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said his office hadn’t agreed to use a standardized form because the office was not prepared to publicly discuss how the law will be enforced. At issue, he said, was the constitutional challenge of the employer sanctions law, which has been filed in federal court.
A hearing in the lawsuit has been scheduled for Nov. 14, and a decision is expected to be rendered before the end of the year.
If the courts determine the law is constitutional and can be enforced beginning Jan. 1, Faull said the county attorney’s office would then reveal how it plans to enforce the law.
Weiers, who was visibly frustrated by Faull's evasiveness before the committee, expressed his disappointment that the county attorney’s office couldn’t provide better answers.
“I’m not happy with it,” he said.
Weiers and Faull also clashed while discussing how the county attorney’s office will determine if a complaint alleging a business is knowingly hiring illegal immigrants is both “false and frivolous,” the standard under the law that allows the complainant to be prosecuted as a class 3 misdemeanor.
Faull said the county attorney’s office would not investigate complaints that were obviously frivolous. Weiers argued that because there would be no investigation into the veracity of those complaints deemed frivolous, the county would not be able to prosecute anyone who files a complaint that is both false and frivolous.
But Faull said not investigating the frivolous complaints didn’t preclude the county attorney’s office from determining they were also false.
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” Weiers said after several minutes of back and forth on the topic.
Weiers said the committee will likely meet once more, possibly Nov. 18, to review a draft of a report that will detail the concerns raised during the committee hearings. The report will then be issued to all lawmakers and the Governor’s Office, he said.
“I hope it’s the most read thing” next session, he said.