With hardly time to pause, policymakers lunged from one budget solution to another at the height of the recent fiscal crisis, spawning a chaotic period of accounting gimmicks, borrowing and budget slashing.

The powerful Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House is getting a new chairman. Term limits barred long-serving committee Chairman John Kavanagh from running for re-election to the House, and he was elected earlier this month to the Senate.

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Optometrists want the ability to prescribe steroids, hydrocodone pain killers and other potentially dangerous drugs, but lawmakers say a bill allowing them to do so is circumventing the legislative process and would put the public at risk.

Citing a need to protect government against the costs of excessive public records requests by citizens, lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a bill that would increase the cost of obtaining public records that take government employees more than eight hours to compile and redact.

The award for best legislative batting average for the session — the calculation of bills introduced versus bills signed into law — goes to Rep. David Livingston, a freshman Republican lawmaker from Peoria who has been vocally critical of the governor.

The bill moratorium that rankled lawmakers as Gov. Jan Brewer started applying pressure to pass her Medicaid expansion plan helped push her to a near-record number of vetoes in 2013.

Brewer vetoed 26 bills this year, the second highest total of her career, behind the 29 she rejected in 2011.

The push to refer Gov. Jan Brewer’s Medicaid expansion plan to the ballot began in earnest as opponents of the bill rallied at the Capitol before fanning out across the Valley to collect signatures.

The bipartisan coalition forming around Medicaid expansion flexed their political muscle on Monday, shooting down a pair of amendments and approving another amendment to a Medicaid expansion supporter’s bill involving school bonding.

Arizona lawmakers have slashed $1 billion from public education dollars in recent years and gone to court to avoid mandatory increases in school funding. Now they want taxpayers to directly cover the costs of new construction, repairs, equipment and school buses.