This week at the Arizona Legislature: Budget plan release could end Hobbs' bill moratorium

Arizona's legislative Republicans say they’re ready to share their budget proposal publicly; that could happen on Monday.

And that could mean two things: one, the plan could be on the governor’s desk by the end of the week, and two, it could end the moratorium Gov. Katie Hobbs implemented on lawmakers sending her bills.

Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services Joined The Show to talk about what's happening this week in the Arizona Legislature.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Howie.

HOWARD FISCHER: Good morning. We're all out here praying for the end of the session, which should have ended — according to their own schedule — last week.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, that never happens, though. Come on. What do we know about what might be in this budget proposal?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, what we mainly know is what's not in this budget proposal. For example, the governor balanced her $18.7 billion budget by a cap on income for families with vouchers. That's over $80 million. She had a tax on short-term rentals to pay for a program to provide some utility relief. She had a fee hike on certain kinds of sports betting. And she also was counting on sending back an extension of Prop. 123 to voters. This is the one that creates about $300 million a year coming out of a state trust fund. It was approved in 2016, expired last year, and right now that $300 million is coming out of the general fund.

MARK BRODIE: Money for schools.

HOWARD FISCHER: None of that seems to be there.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so that stuff the governor wanted that won't be in there. Is it safe to assume there'll be stuff that is in there that the governor won't want?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, this is hard to say because I think that they're looking at a "skinny budget." They're looking at something in the neighborhood of $17.8 billion, know know, $900 million less, which doesn't leave a lot of room for pork. I mean, even some of the Republican — and I use the term loosely — pork programs, for example, lane widenings and traffic signals and things like that, seem to have to be left on the table because you don't have the revenues.

Now, the way they are balancing the budget are some across-the-board cuts for some agencies, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5%. You can save some money there. There is some money, some revenues coming in a little higher than they expected, although not as high as they were hoping for.

They also are going to do fund sweeps, which is the legislative equivalent of: "Are there coins in this couch somewhere?" and they think that they can make something balance.

Now, the tricky problem becomes certain things are going to have to be raised. K-12 education is formula-driven, so if you have more students plus inflation, you have to provide more state aid for them. You have a state prison system that's under a court order to fix the healthcare or end up with a federal receiver. I'm sure lawmakers are hoping to kick that can down the road. You also have the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. While there are fewer people in there, the people who are left there have more acute conditions, and so that's going to cost some more.

So, you know, there's not a lot in there that I think the governor, you know, is going to say, "No, I don't want that." I think it kind of comes down to what new things that she wanted, what new programs that she wanted, are just not going to make it just because the money's not there unless you raise the revenues, which Republican lawmakers so far are unwilling to do.

MARK BRODIE: So Howie, what are folks at the Capitol saying in terms of whether this is — like, this is the budget, whether the governor might actually sign it, whether this is sort of a restarting point for negotiations? Where do we think they stand?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, I don't see the governor signing this, assuming it reaches her by the end of the week. This isn't anything close to what she wants. But what it does do is restart negotiations. As you pointed out, they have been talking for a while and then she walked away in March and said, "You're not being serious, you're just telling me what you don't like about my plan."

And when things didn't restart, about a week or so ago she said, "OK, we'll do it the hard way. Don't send me any bills because if you send me anything, anything at all, I will veto it." In fact, as they tried to test her and sent her three bills, and of course she vetoed them. They might have been veto bait in the first place.

So this at least gets people talking again, No. 1. And No. 2, is it kind of eases up on the fact that we've got a bunch of bills that have just been sitting on the sidelines waiting for this moratorium to end and send them to her and, again, she'll sign some, she'll veto some. She has a veto ratio so far this year north of 40%, which if she's going at this rate, she's definitely going to beat her 174-bill veto record from last year.

MARK BRODIE: What are some of those bills, Howie? I know that you mentioned there's a bit of a pipeline, a logjam in that pipeline of bills that the Legislature has not been sending to the governor, because they know that she'll veto it. It sounds like — and you've reported that — she's ready to end that moratorium.

What kinds of bills are we talking about that might be heading her way?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, there are a lot of election bills, some of which are clearly not acceptable to her in terms of some additional ID and such. But for example, there's a measure that would propose some fraud requirements for ballots, like holographic foil or something like that, or what they call optically variable inks. You see them sometimes on a check, you put your thumb on it and it changes color.

You've got the whole issue of vaccines, where they want to say you cannot tell people that they can't go into a business or a government or can't be hired by a business or government if they're not vaccinated or perhaps if they're not wearing masks.

You have the debate over Sharia law and religious law — probably veto bait in that one in the first place.

But there are some things that the governor probably would support. For example, right now if you're a parent and you put your kids on TikTok and make a lot of money off of that, you can take it and, you know, buy a new Hummer or something like that. This says you have to put some of that money aside in a trust fund for the children.

There are some other things that might pass muster. For example, the perennial fight over what flags homeowner associations can ban and what they can't. For example, your HOA can't say you cannot have a U.S. flag or a tribal flag or a state flag. They want to add to that Israeli flags. That's a harder one because there's a lot of politics involved, obviously, with that.

MARK BRODIE: All right, lots to keep our eye on as usual. Howard Fischer with Capitol Media Services. Maybe happy budget week?

HOWARD FISCHER: Maybe, maybe, maybe. As my grandmother would say, “From your lips to God's ears.”