Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

Democrats have tried nearly every conceivable strategy in the past four months and have, at times, sounded like a broken record as they seek an invitation from Republicans to negotiate the fiscal 2010 budget.

Now that the fiscal 2009 budget gap has been readjusted — hopefully for the last time — leaders will hunker down and try once more to hammer out a deal on the fiscal 2010 budget. “We got a lot to do on (fiscal 2010) yet,” Senate President Bob Burns said May 13, the day the Legislature fixed a $650-million hole in the fiscal 2009 budget.

The Citizens Clean Elections Commission voted this morning to remove Rep. Doug Quelland from the Legislature for violating campaign spending rules. The Phoenix Republican was also fined $45,000. The commission voted 4-1 to kick Quelland out of office for spending more than he was allowed to under Clean Elections rules. The commission determined Quelland had hired a political consultant but did not report the expenditures on his campaign finance reports.

The use of federal stimulus dollars to help balance the budget may help keep Arizona's public schools afloat through the end of the fiscal year, but Gov. Jan Brewer believes it underscores the need for the controversial tax hike she is proposing.

The Senate and the House approved a plan on May 13 that suspends a payment of $300 million to school districts until the next fiscal year and instead allows them to tap into their excess cash balances to cover ongoing expenses. The plan is part of a two-bill package aimed at solving a $650-million budget deficit in fiscal 2009.

Lawmakers on a House panel generally agreed an emergency measure intended to repair the fiscal 2009 budget amounts to bad policy, but the bill still managed to gain approval along a party-line vote. One by one, legislators explained their objection to using accounting gimmicks and raiding funding in schools' bank accounts.

Last fall, Carol Vandercook and other Democrats in District 10 received a copy of a contract between Valley political consultant Larry Davis and House candidate Doug Quelland that raised suspicions that Quelland had failed to report critical campaign finance information to state election officials.

Legislative leaders have been stymied for more than a month in their effort to coax Gov. Jan Brewer to divulge how she intends to spend federal stimulus money, despite several informal requests and a letter signed by the House speaker and the Senate president.

Dear Governor Brewer: For the last two months, we have met with your staff on a regular basis to discuss ongoing budget issues, tax reform and progress related to the federal stimulus funds. Concurrently, members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have continued their work toward a legislative budget proposal. We have spent considerable time with the members providing educational opportunities so that they would have the information needed to make budget decisions

The biggest differences between the Republican budget proposal released April 27 and a draft leaked to the press a month earlier were two components designed to generate more than $500 million in revenue without raising taxes. And those two ideas have created the biggest backlash against the latest proposal.