The first definition of the word “staff” on onelook.com, the online dictionary, is it is a “strong rod or stick with a specialized utilitarian purpose.” The fifth definition was more relevant: Staff members are men and women who assist their superior in carrying out tasks.
But the first definition might as well apply.
During the next seven months, the Senate likely will have to cut $3 billion or more from this year’s and next year’s budgets.
That means the Senate will need a sturdy staff on which to lean.
For advice, historical perspective and research, Senate Republicans rely on the experts from the office of the majority; Democrats do the same with members of the minority staff.
There will be adjustments for both members and staff; The GOP will have a new Senate president in Bob Burns, a lawmaker from Peoria; Victor Riches, the chief of staff, and Brian Townsend, a senior policy adviser, will be leaving the Senate to take positions in the House; and Burns has picked Wendy Baldo, a senior policy adviser, to take over Riches’ post.
The role of Michael Hunter, another senior policy adviser, also could be expanded. One former staffer, Greg Jernigan, was rumored to be on his way back to the Senate.
With or without deficit, staff’s role is critical
The majority office includes the chief of staff, a general counsel, three senior policy advisers, another policy adviser, a constituent services officer, a communications adviser and two administrative assistants.
The minority office has about the same number of personnel providing roughly the same services. 
In addition to the minority and majority offices, there is the cast of men and women who make up the Senate Secretary’s Office, the research analysts unit, the Rules Committee office, the resource center, the security staff, and the interns, who run errands for everybody.
The staff’s role in the legislative process cannot be overemphasized. They serve lawmakers who make up one of three branches of government and whose actions reverberate far and wide. 
Underneath the visible part of lawmaking, such as committee hearings and floor debates, lies a complex array of operations that make sure that, first of all, the Senate is running as efficiently as possible. There are myriad tasks to juggle — assignment of bills, preparation for committee hearings, scheduling of measures for caucus and floor action and reformatting bills after they have been amended.
A seemingly simple task of scheduling the time for a floor session, for example, can be complicated. A missing member, whose vote is critical to a bill’s passage, could stall Senate business. Incorporating changes made to a bill during a Committee of the Whole debate could also take time to finish. All take coordination not just among the Senate staff, but also in conjunction with the House staff. 
There usually is a rhythm to the process of lawmaking. On most days, Mondays are a little light, caucuses are scheduled on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and bills are third-read late in the week. Members get Fridays off.
Part of the job of the majority and minority staff is to give advice on legislation, and the enormity of their task can be glimpsed in a few statistics.
About 1,400 measures on the average have been introduced each year during the last four years.
Many of the bills are dead on arrival, and a good chunk never gets past the first committee.
Bills that make it to the process go through so many hoops, tracking them becomes challenging.
Some bills logically require more work than others. During the 2008 session, for example, a bill to change laws regarding driving under the influence violations was revived after it was vetoed. It was modified and finally passed — in the form of a 44-page amendment attached to a bill that dealt with liquor-licensing.
A staff member had been instrumental in finding a way to tack the DUI amendment onto the liquor-licensing bill, employing a device called “building a bridge” to make it work.
Sounding board, researcher, etc.
At times, lawmakers use the staff as a sounding board to see if an idea is worth pursuing or even if it could be written into law. Not every good idea should be legislated, lawmakers often say, and some ideas can be difficult to translate into bill form.
Lawmakers also rely on staff for advice, not just on the soundness of potential legislation but also regarding its chances of passage.
Sen. Jim Waring, a Republican from Phoenix, has high praise for members of the majority office, where he often camps out during legislative sessions.
Waring works closely with Hunter, the senior policy adviser for budget and finance, and House-bound Townsend. 
“That’s a tough loss,” Waring said of Townsend, who worked with him on DUI and cell-phone legislation this year. “He does a little bit of everything, a kind of a jack of all trades.”
Waring said Townsend would contact constituents, draft bills and sit in on meetings. He would check other states to see if they had passed similar legislation and how that went, so a bad idea, if the legislation turned out to be unwise, is not replicated in Arizona. 
“On the bills I have really fought for and care about, and I think a lot of members feel the same way, he is invaluable,” Waring said.
“I use, for example, Brian (Townsend), Victor (Riches) and Michael (Hunter) very much as sounding boards as well. But it’s not a partisan staff. It’s can we get the bill passed? How can we get it passed? What committee, which chair do we want to work with?” Waring said.
The staff plays a huge role considering individual state lawmakers don’t have dedicated staff, except his or her office assistant. Assistants, too, are technically nonpartisan employees of the state Senate.  
Chaperones to a high school dance
Townsend began working for the Senate as an intern in 1996.
He advanced to become a senior policy adviser, working mostly in the areas of government, commerce and transportation. He was tapped to join Speaker-elect Kirk Adams in the House.
Someone once told Townsend his job is like that of a chaperone to a high school dance.
“All these people are coming at them with all these ideas and positions and we kind of try and filter that stuff down to – this is the reality of it,” Townsend said.
That is, he gives lawmakers the facts based on information he has gathered and distilled: Who is for a bill? Who is against it? What happened in the past?
“They look to us for feedback,” he said, as stakeholders, including lobbyists, contact them to relate positions on particular bills. The information is then shared with committee chairmen.
“They always ultimately decide. But they do look to us for: What have you heard? What do you know?” Townsend said.
Typically, lawmakers bring along a policy adviser to meet with a constituent group or with someone who has an idea for legislation.
When the member has decided what to do, Townsend said he will take that idea and turn it into a bill. Fine-tuning is regularly done and a bill often undergoes several revisions before it is filed. More often than not, the measure will continue to be modified in the process.
“I think where our role comes in is they will say ‘I want to do this’ and you say, ‘great, but when you do Y, X is going to happen,’” he said. Depending on what the lawmaker finally wants in bill form, the job is then to tighten it and eliminate as many unintended consequences as possible. 
Institutional memory
Long-time staff members provide added value. They have institutional memory, a precious commodity in times of term limits.
A la
wmaker can serve up to four terms or eight years in each chamber. But the issues lawmakers tackle are quite complex and take time to learn.
Water policy, for example, which requires an understanding of geography and details of agreements between states and tribes. That is why the loss of a lawmaker who has dedicated many years of work on water is profound.
Next year, three lawmakers known for their expertise on water legislation won’t be coming back to the Senate—Tom O’Halleran, who was defeated in the primary, Marsha Arzberger, who is term-limited, and Jake Flake, who died in June several days after falling off a horse.
The staff doesn’t face term limits. Waring said he could ask them if an idea has been tried in the past and get an idea of how the previous effort fared. 
Baldo, the incoming chief of staff, has worked at the Senate for 16 years, starting from the bottom up — quite literally. She first worked at the constituent services office in the basement of the Senate building.
She became a research analyst, then moved “upstairs” (the second floor) to work on health and human services policy, and was promoted to senior policy adviser under then-Senate President Ken Bennett.
When Senate President Tim Bee took over in 2007, Baldo was promoted to operations adviser, assisting the chief of staff.
“I have a great deal of respect for Wendy,” Burns told the Arizona Capitol Times. “She knows the system. She knows the people. She knows the issues. So, I think she will do a tremendous job in that position.”
Part of Baldo’s job is to recommend bill assignments to the Senate president.
“You read every bill, line for line, and you can’t just say this is a tax bill so it should go to Finance,” Baldo said a few days after Burns picked her to be his chief of staff.
“I’ve done all of that, and I’ve known Mr. Burns for 16 years and we kind of clicked over the years,” Baldo said. “We’ve worked together on many, many different issues. And I’m just really honored that he has the confidence in me to give me this position.”
Ultimately, it is the Senate president’s prerogative to send a bill to any committee.
As chief of staff next year, Baldo will work closely with the majority leadership in developing a program. The chief of staff sets the floor calendar, the third reads, the caucuses, and the Committee of the Whole deliberations. The chief of staff also oversees the building and security operations.
The art of giving advice
Policy advisers often discuss the implications of a bill with the sponsor. How candid advice is delivered depends on the adviser’s relationship with the lawmaker, Baldo said.
“You build a relationship with them and, depending on that relationship, that’s going to guide how frank you are,” Baldo said. “We work for them. They are the elected officials, and I can’t stress that enough.”
Institutional memory is a boon. It also can be a problem.
Sen. John Huppenthal, a veteran lawmaker from Chandler, remembers walking into meetings in the early 1990s to negotiate with House members.
“I just would be a little bit shocked by who was calling the shots. I wouldn’t be negotiating with a House member. I’d be negotiating with their staff,” he said. “That’s the flip side of institutional memory. The staff becomes an extension of the power of the president or the speaker and instead of supporting the members… they get in control of the institution.”
Huppenthal said he hasn’t seen that during the last two years in the Senate.
“I feel very good (about) Wendy moving up,” he said. “She has been absolutely great. She is very sharp and very good at working with people.”
Indeed, when Bee became Senate president he replaced four top administrators of the Senate. Bee said he wanted to build a staff that was supportive of both the members and the public. He also said he felt the long tenure of many of the staffers had become a detriment.
“The staff that we have has served us very well, but they’ve been here for a very long time, and I felt it was time for some new blood,” he said at the time. “When you have staff that’s been here longer than members, there sometimes can be a blurring of the lines in the roles.”
Big task ahead
Next year members and staff would be “stretched to a degree unlike they have ever experienced before by the nature of the challenge that is coming,” warned Huppenthal.
“We are in the process of falling off the cliff, and we are going to fall all the way till next June,” he said. “I just don’t even think people have a clue as to how severe this is going to get.”
Staff input will be critical.
“They are the locomotive engine when it comes to policy ideas and what your options are,” Huppenthal said. “They are simply going to have to be on their toes to a degree unlike anything we have ever seen (and) ever needed before in terms of making it clear what the ramifications (of) the different choices are.”