This week at the Arizona Legislature: No Pinal County rebate checks, more vetoes

Residents of Pinal County will not be getting rebate checks for a tax that was deemed illegal by the state Supreme Court — at least not yet.

A proposal to send the money directly to residents died as the Legislature ended its session this month, but a provision in the new state budget holds open the possibility of it happening at some point down the road.

Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services joined The Show to talk about it — and some more vetoes by Gov. Katie Hobbs late last week.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Howie.

HOWARD FISCHER: Good morning. They finally went home. Yay! Yay!

MARK BRODIE: You’re not excited, are you? So, let’s talk about this provision in the state budget. It goes back to a tax that Pinal County voters had enacted that the state Supreme Court eventually said was not done legally.

HOWARD FISCHER: Yes. What the — obviously, for example, Maricopa County has a transport tax, Pima County has transportation tax. What Pinal did is they set up a two-tiered system so that certain businesses over a certain amount would not pay the tax, and certain businesses under it would pay it. And that went to court, and the Supreme Court said, duh, you can’t do that. You can’t decide who’s exempt from the tax and who’s not.

That’s fine, except for the fact that they had already collected, at by that point, I think somewhere in excess of $80 million. Now, some of it was refunded to the businesses because we’re not a sales tax state, we’re transaction privilege tax state, and technically, it’s the businesses that own it.

But that left between $45 [million] and $50 million that, for whatever reason, businesses didn’t apply for, or that got out of business, or they decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Question is, what do you do with that? The judge said, unless you come up with a plan, it just goes to the general fund. And a lot of lawmakers said, “Well, wait a second here. Why does the general fund get Pinal County money?”

So Rep. (Teresa) Martinez from Casa Grande said, “Tell you what, I’ve got some road projects here. Why don’t we just put in the budget for some specific road projects?” She couldn’t get any traction on that. What did get traction is a proposal by Rep. Justin Olson (R-Mesa) to say, “Tell you what, anybody who is a taxpayer during that period, who’s still a taxpayer now, would get a $300 check.”

It didn’t necessarily match up the people who paid the taxes with the people who are owed it, but it was at least some way of getting it back. That also stalled. So given that nothing got accomplished, and so they decided, “Yell you what, we’re just going to leave it in, essentially, the bank, and we will decide perhaps next year how to deal with the money because, again, you’ve got $45 [million] to $50 million sitting there. Somebody should get it, and, you know, why should it be the state general fund?”

MARK BRODIE: OK. So Howie, late last week, the governor vetoed 88 bills. Now, of course, we don’t have time to talk about all of them, but what to you are some of the highlights? What are some of the ones that might be the more noteworthy ones here?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, one of them that has gotten a lot of attention has to do with things like religious and Sharia law. And there were two bills on that — one that specifically bans Sharia law and then specifically bans certain practices, for example, honor killings and everything else. And what the governor said is we don’t have Sharia law here, and all of the things that were listed — like honor killings like going ahead and marrying multiple wives and such — aren’t legal here.

Obviously, a lot of lawmakers say, but it’s coming, we have to worry about it. You know, we had one lawmaker from Benson who said, “I had this bad experience at a halal restaurant, which showed me how bad Sharia law is.” Now, what that had to do with Sharia law, I have no idea. But that was one of the reasons that the bill passed. The governor said no.

The governor also said, we’re not going to do any other bills that say you can’t take religious laws into account. Curiously enough, the sponsor of that, Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), said, well, but you can take a religious marriage into account if it’s between one man and one woman. So everybody has their idea of exceptions.

Other big, high-profile issue — excuse my tongue this morning — is the issue of gender transition. Back in 2022, the Legislature said you cannot do gender-reassignment surgery on minors. That’s the law. Lawmakers, however, decided to pass two other bills that dealt with it — one making the doctors liable, and one making the doctors have to pay for gender re-transitioning if, in fact, that is what the person wants after they turn to adults.

Governor said, we don’t need it because the process is illegal. Now, she did veto a third measure that would have also prohibited giving hormones to minors — something which had to be done with the parental consent. She just simply said, well, we have a ban on gender transition surgery, so it doesn’t matter. So I don’t know that she actually read the bill, but clearly she was never going to sign anything on that.

A lot of other funny little things. Photo radar — perennial issue here. There is a measure going to the ballot, we talked about, that will allow individual communities to decide. This David Gowan (R-Sierra Vista) bill said, if you’re caught speeding, I’ll tell you what, the maximum fine will be $75. These tickets can run like $200, $250. And we won’t report it to your insurance company, and we won’t let it count the points so you can’t lose your license. The only exceptions are things like red-light running and school zones. The governor said, why would we do that? That doesn’t make roads any safer.

You have small modular reactors. This wouldn’t have banned small modular reactors. The bill ... would have taken away from the board of supervisors the ability to say where they should go.

MARK BRODIE: Right.

HOWARD FISCHER: She vetoed that. We have issues like whether 15-year-olds should be able to get learners’ permits. Governor said that’s too young. Um, whole bunch of other things. As you say, you know, we’ve got six minutes here, 88 bills. That’s about, uh, what, 12 seconds per bill?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, talk fast.

HOWARD FISCHER: Let’s just say it was a veto-fest last week.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so what is still left? I mean, obviously, the Legislature passed a lot of bills in their last few days. The governor has to deal with them in the coming days. Do we have a sense of how many are left and what’s still left?

HOWARD FISCHER: We think there are about 40, and I’m trying to get a firm handle on that. I’m not even sure the governor’s office knows. I think they’re digging through the paperwork because there was a bunch of stuff sent to them at the last minute. And as you know, under the constitution, anything that was on her desk when they adjourned sine die, she gets 10 days to sign it. So she’s still got a little bit of time.

One of the more interesting ones is kind of a rerun. You probably remember the whole dust-up over Sunshine Residential, which got a larger contract from the state for housing foster children. The question was, did any of that have to do with the fact that they contributed money to her inaugural fund? They contributed money to the Democratic Party, had made other contributions. And so T.J. Shope had a bill to say, tell you what, anybody who has a contract or wants a contract has to disclose any money they gave in the past five years.

And the governor vetoed that a year ago, saying, well, wait, but it doesn’t deal with lobbyist travel. That’s true. So fine, we’re here this year. Nobody from the governor’s office pushed a lobbyist bill, other than through press releases. No Democrat introduced it.

So T.J. Shope came back with his original bill, which is sitting on the governor’s desk, to say, look, your bill, while it would have provided some disclosure, actually had a bunch of loopholes. For example, it might have provided the name of the company, but it wouldn’t necessarily say that you could find out what they gave to a legal defense fund or an inaugural fund, both of which the governor had.

So, I’m assuming there’ll be another veto, another bunch of chest-beating on both sides, and we will we will once again be in a position where it’s much harder to find out who’s giving money to the governor, who’s giving money to the Democratic Party — or the Republican Party, if in fact, the governor happens to be Republican — and what contracts they wind up with.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. That is Howie Fischer with Capital Media Services. Howie, thank you as always.

HOWARD FISCHER: But I have so many more bills to talk about!