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Appropriations chair says Hobbs’ voucher proposal dead

Bob Christie, Capitol Media Services//January 21, 2025//[read_meter]

Deposit Photos

Appropriations chair says Hobbs’ voucher proposal dead

Bob Christie, Capitol Media Services//January 21, 2025//[read_meter]

A Republican lawmaker who plays a key role in negotiating the state budget with Gov. Katie Hobbs on Tuesday pronounced the Democrat’s plan to cut $150 million in spending on Arizona’s universal private school voucher law dead on arrival.

Rep. David Livingston of Peoria, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said Republicans who control the Legislature won’t stand for Hobbs’ plan to deny parents earning $200,000 or more access to state cash to send their children to private or parochial schools using Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, the formal name of the school voucher program. The proposed income cap would gradually decrease the amount of money families get starting at an income of $100,000 and end it entirely if their earnings hit the $200,000 a year mark.

Livingston, Prop 400, transportation tax
Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria

Livingston’s comments came at the end of a joint hearing held Tuesday by the Senate and House appropriations committees to hear details of Hobbs’ $17.7 billion spending plan for the coming budget year from Marge Zylla, the governor’s legislative and fiscal affairs director. 

It didn’t go well for Zylla, who was hammered by GOP lawmakers for what the budget plan contained, what is left out, and what Hobbs wants to cut.

Republicans particularly questioned Zylla for Hobbs’ failure to include estimates for spending growth in the state’s Medicaid program, known as AHCCCS, in the second and third years of the spending outline. That leaves out $846 million in spending that the Legislature’s independent budget analysts expect to see in expenses.

Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix, who was former Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget director, was astonished that Hobbs would leave out such a big chunk of expected expenses from the spending plan that is supposed to cover the upcoming year and the two budget cycles following it.

“Ms. Zylla, you’re talking to me like I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Gress said.

“We have a three-year budget window, ” he continued. “That’s how this all works, you know that as well as I do.”

He said the governor should have built in anticipated spending for AHCCCS the way it did for future expenditures for things like providing services for the developmentally disabled.

Zylla repeatedly said that Hobbs’ team was still working with the Legislature’s analysts to come up with a number.

Other Republican lawmakers questioned why Hobbs wants to spend $20.7 million on a victim fund that is facing big federal spending cuts instead of working to reduce drug smuggling at the border. Democrats countered that the money supports crime victims of all kinds, not just those who are hurt because of fentanyl and other smuggling.

The morning-long presentation brought out other differences between Republicans and Hobbs, including the lack of substantial new highway spending in a growing state.

In addition to the lack of accounting for expected Medicaid spending, GOP lawmakers pointed out several other issues where revenue or spending was in their view misstated in Hobbs’ plan. But it was Livingston’s direct confrontation on vouchers that hit a key part of Hobbs’ plan and showed it will not be easy for her to strike a budget deal.

It is the third straight year that Hobbs has tried to rein in voucher spending.

Her first two efforts sought to kill the decision by lawmakers in 2022 to expand the decade-old program, originally designed for students with special needs, to allow anyone to get more than $7,000 a year of state funds for private or parochial schools or for home schooling.

Hobbs estimates that about 73% of the nearly 95,000 students now getting vouchers never attended a public school — meaning their parents were already paying to send them to private school or homeschooling.

Those prior efforts went nowhere.

Now Hobbs is trying a scaled-back approach: Tie state funds to family income.

Without changes that Hobbs wants, spending on vouchers is set to near $1 billion a year. 

If Hobbs’ plan becomes law, that number will drop by $150 million. But about 21,000 children would lose some or all of their state voucher money.

The governor wants the money for other priorities, including new spending to help parents pay for child care and a series of new or expanded initiatives to help boost home construction to address Arizona’s housing shortage.

Livingston made it clear the governor’s modified effort to trim the cost of universal vouchers is no more acceptable than her prior efforts to repeal them.

“As chairman of appropriations, I said ‘no’ to the first one in ’23, I said ‘no’ in ’24, and I’m just telling you ‘no’ now,” Livingston said.

“We are not going to sacrifice 21,000 students that will either lose their ESAs in total or lose a partial ESA to gain $150 million to spend in other revenue,” he continued. “That is not a serious consideration. The (GOP) leadership and I over the last three years have repeated that publicly and privately multiple times.”

Livingston had said he had hoped for an early budget deal, but said he now finds that unlikely.

“This proposal that you send us does not add up – I mean, we’re not even close,” he told the governor’s budget director. ““I’m just very concerned how far apart the executive and leadership in the House and Senate are.”

 

 

 

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