House Republicans draft competing budget as Senate nears deal with Hobbs

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a day ago

Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Arizona lawmakers are at odds again, but this time it's the Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate who can't agree on how to forge the state budget.
Creating the state budget — deciding how much to allocate to departments, projects and initiatives or whether to fund them at all — is the most important job that legislators do each year, and the only thing they are constitutionally required to complete.
Before the group of bills that will become the state budget becomes law, it must be approved by a majority in both the Arizona Senate and House — which are both controlled by Republicans — and garner a signature from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
In recent history, budget negotiations in Arizona have occurred behind closed doors among the governor and legislative leaders in the House and Senate.
But this year is different, with Hobbs and Republican leaders in the Senate nearing a deal after weeks of negotiations. GOP leaders in the House, who haven't been involved in those talks, have responded by drafting their own budget, which was introduced late Wednesday afternoon.
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'This is a sound, disciplined budget that delivers safe communities, strong families, and a government that lives within its means,' House Speaker Steve Montenegro said in a Wednesday evening statement. 'We're raising pay for our state law enforcement officers, reducing tuition at public universities, fully funding school choice, fixing critical infrastructure and roads, and protecting taxpayers. Our budget reins in government and puts it back to work for the people it serves.'
But the spending package, which is chock-full of proposals that are unlikely to pass muster with Hobbs, will never become law. Instead, it is better viewed as a way for House Republicans to lay down a marker in order to force Hobbs and the Senate to move closer to the House's proposal.
Republican political consultant Barrett Marson said House GOP leaders are hoping to demonstrate that the chamber can pass a spending plan in order to get leverage in the negotiations.
'Sometimes there's just gotta be movement to unstick a sticky situation,' he said. 'The House has an equal voice. And unlike previous years when one or both chambers had a go-it-alone ethos, the House isn't looking to be draconian or anything. They want something more responsible.'
Marson said a major point of contention between the House and Senate is what to do with the budget surplus. While the Senate and Hobbs have settled on copying the novel process from 2023, in which each lawmaker was given a pot of money from the surplus that was used to fund whatever initiatives they wanted, the House wants to negotiate all of those details and not surrender control of that money to individual legislators.
During a House Rules Committee meeting earlier Wednesday afternoon, House Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos, of Laveen, said he was disappointed in the way the budgeting process was happening this year.
'We should not be moving forward with a House Republican-only budget that is destined to fail,' he said. 'This will not get signed by the governor. I don't even think it's going to pass out of the Senate.'
De Los Santos even questioned whether the proposal would get enough votes to pass through the House, where Republicans hold 33 of the chamber's 60 seats.
'What we do know is that this is not a negotiated, bipartisan deal in good faith,' he said. 'House Democrats are at the table negotiating in a bipartisan way with the executive, with our (Senate) counterparts across the courtyard. That is the way to get things done in shared government.'
But Republican Rep. Neal Carter, of San Tan Valley, replied that the work of governing should be done transparently, instead of in private — and that it should allow for input from the public.
'As a Republican, I stand for full transparency and not for back-room deals or negotiated budgets with parties that are somehow outside of this public process,' Carter said.
The House Republican budget, introduced by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Livingston, proposes significant changes in how federal money allocated to the state, but not restricted to specific uses, is controlled. The billions in unrestricted federal funds, currently controlled by the governor, would shift to legislative control and could only be spent on essential government services.
The House GOP's budget proposal would also place new restrictions and monitoring requirements on entitlement programs, like the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System — the state's Medicaid program — and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps.
Both programs would be monitored on at least a quarterly basis for participants who don't qualify, to be kicked off. And any participants who win $3,000 or more through gambling or playing the state lottery and don't report those winnings would become ineligible.
It would also give the Arizona Department of Economic Security the authority to screen recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families for illegal drug use and would ban anyone who tests positive for drugs not prescribed to them from the cash assistance program for a year.
House Republicans also intend to increase the percentage of money spent in K-12 classrooms, as opposed to on administration; to decrease tuition for students attending the state's three public universities; and to ban those universities from using public or private money to give scholarships to students without legal immigration status.
Hobbs introduced her budget proposal, which includes a much different list of priorities, back in January. Shortly after that, Livingston and Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix, panned her proposal for leaving out projected cost increases for programs like AHCCCS.
Hobbs spokesman Christian Slater told the Arizona Mirror on Wednesday that Livingston and Gress were to blame for the House's lack of collaboration on the budget.
'This is DDD all over again,' Slater said via email, referring to a fight earlier this year over funding for the Department of Developmental Disabilities. 'It's another circus led by the Speaker, David Livingston, and Matt Gress where they have refused to participate with any caucuses, including their Republican counterparts in the Senate, in a meaningful manner and are once again just trying to score some political points even though they know their plan is going absolutely nowhere.'
Livingston and Gress, a former budget director for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, were both key players in the fight over an extra $122 million in emergency funding for DDD that put vital services for the developmentally disabled in jeopardy.
'Rather than being productive, the House Republican leadership continues to show they are in over their head and unserious about governing,' Slater said.
The House Appropriations Committee is set to discuss the proposal Thursday morning. The Senate Republicans have not introduced their budget proposal.
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