Gov. Jan Brewer presented her five-point budget plan to a joint session of the Legislature.

Almost immediately after becoming governor, Jan Brewer was barraged with questions from the media and lawmakers seeking her input to solve a massive fiscal 2009 budget deficit, to close an estimated $3 billion shortfall next year and regarding the prospect of billions in federal aid to bail out Arizona from one of the worst financial crises the state has ever faced.
The answers, at least to the budget questions, were fairly non-committal. Almost daily, reporters were told “all options are on the table.” Details and specific direction were sparse during Brewer’s first 41 days as governor.
Then, on March 4, Brewer laid out her five-point plan for balancing the budget and restoring Arizona’s fiscal health. But those five points — long-term reform of the budget process; overhauling the Voter Protection Act; $1 billion in additional spending cuts; tax reform; and a temporary tax increase, approved by the Legislature or by voters — were outlined in a purposefully vague fashion.
Specifics, such as where Brewer would prefer to cut spending or which taxes could see a temporary hike, were absent from the proposal. The governor instead called on the Legislature to fill in the blanks, a call to action that has inspired mixed feelings among lawmakers.
Where lawmakers stand on the details appears to depend heavily on which side of the aisle they sit. Many legislative Republicans, who were less than enamored with the fiscal 2010 budget proposal submitted by Brewer’s Democratic predecessor in January, were more than happy to work out the specifics.
“By leaving it broad, it allows these bodies to do what these bodies are supposed to do — debate, go over the details, debate the details, make sure that what is moving forward to the Governor’s Office has been fine-tuned,” said Rep. Warde Nichols, a Chandler Republican. “She’s given the Legislature some direction, and now we need to hammer out the fine details and see what we can do.”
Sen. Thayer Verschoor said fewer details leaves the Legislature with more flexibility, and pointed out that determining the state’s budget is a legislative process.
“It’s our constitutional duty, and this is where the details will be worked out,” the Gilbert Republican said.
A number of Republican lawmakers have strongly criticized the proposal, and Sen. Ron Gould and Rep. Carl Seel walked out of Brewer’s speech in protest the moment the words “temporary tax increase” left her lips.
“We traditionally put the budget together. We’re four-fifths of the way with the governor. It’s just that last one-fifth tax that I don’t think is necessary,” said Rep. John Kavanagh, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
Democrats, on the other hand, offered their own criticism of the governor’s proposal, including her decision to leave many of the details up to the Legislature.
“I was surprised that we didn’t see more details,” said House Minority Leader David Lujan.
Assistant House Minority Leader Kyrsten Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat, said she had hoped the governor would present a budget proposal.
“But we didn’t get a budget plan,” Sinema said. “We got, actually, some contradictory information that is kind of confusing. She wants to raise taxes, she wants to lower taxes. She says don’t sweep funds that are intended for a certain thing, and then she said let’s raid the voter protected funds and use them for something that they weren’t intended for. She said we’ve got to protect education, but she wants to take the voter protected education funds. It was confusing. I just feel like we don’t have any more guidance today than we did yesterday in terms of how to move forward on the 2010 budget.”
Not all Democrats were as critical of Brewer’s approach. Rep. Manny Alvarez said he would rather the details get sorted out in the Legislature.
“That way we have a chance to say yes, either we agree with it or we don’t. The other way is just going to be shoved down our throat and we’re going to end up living with it, and I feel the other way would be a lot easier. That way we have input into it,” the Elfrida Democrat said.
Republican Sen. Jack Harper viewed the lack of specifics in some areas of the proposal as being typical of the way the executive branch operates, though he said he expects to eventually see a more detailed proposal.
“I think in the political real world, the executive branch usually talks in general terms so that it’s not perceived as a loss when their exact terms are not met,” he said.
Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman said it is not the governor’s place to proscribe to the Legislature what mechanisms it should use to reform the budget process or which taxes should be temporarily increased. Addressing the tax issue in a post-speech press conference, Brewer reiterated that notion.
“I served in the Legislature, both in the House and the Senate, and it was always my understanding when I was there that was our responsibility,” said the governor, who spent four years in the House and 10 in the Senate.
Sen. Russell Pearce, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he expects Brewer to provide more input as the Legislature crafts a budget, determines spending cuts and ponders tax and budget reform.
“There was not a lot of detail there. But I would hope that that’s because we’re going to talk about that and fill the blanks in together. And if that’s the case, then that’s a respectful thing and I appreciate that,” he said.
A formal budget proposal has not come down from the Ninth Floor since former Gov. Janet Napolitano submitted her fiscal 2010 budget, just days before she resigned to join President Barack Obama’s Cabinet and left Brewer at the helm. Brewer provided a short list of spending items that she asked the Legislature to preserve while lawmakers crafted an adjustment to the fiscal 2009 budget in late January, less than two weeks after her inauguration, but she has provided no additional guidance, at least publicly, since then on where she would like spending to be cut or saved in 2010.
Senseman said a number of issues that arose from Brewer’s quick transition to the Governor’s Office have made it difficult to craft a full budget proposal like Napolitano’s, which was roundly rejected by legislative Republicans. Among the most vexing problems has been figuring out exactly how much federal money Arizona will reap from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $787 billion stimulus package signed by Obama in February.
The Governor’s Office is primarily responsible for coming up with a plan to distribute the federal stimulus money, yet it was the Joint Legislative Budget Committee that took the early lead on crunching the stimulus package numbers.
At one point, the JLBC gave a presentation to lawmakers in which it requested that the “Executive provide a more comprehensive report” to assist with the process of digesting the more than 1,000 pages included in the stimulus package.
The state will likely be eligible for several billion dollars over the next two or three years, Senseman said, but the complicated piece of federal legislation has left lawmakers across the United States scrambling to determine what kinds of strings are attac
hed to certain portions of the stimulus money. When asked last month about the governor’s plans regarding the stimulus money, Senseman said staff was still studying the provisions of the ARRA.
In addition, the administration’s race to fill open staff positions as Brewer begins her governorship and the expectation that state revenue projections will continue their downward trends has made the budget process more difficult, he said. To prepare for multiple revenue projections, the administration has asked state agency heads to outline the ways in which they could cut their budgets by 5, 10, 15 and 20 percent.

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