PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona lawmakers began a special session Monday, with legislative leaders proposing bipartisan bills to restore vetoed funding for K-12 public schools and keep the state eligible for billions of dollars of federal stimulus funding.
The centerpiece of the four-bill package introduced by Democratic and Republican leaders and scheduled for House and Senate committee hearings later Monday would re-appropriate $3.2 billion of funding for K-12 schools.
Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed that funding and other key parts of the budget just hours after the Legislature approved it Wednesday.
Eric Kurland, a parent and Scottsdale Education Association president, tries calling state house representatives on his cell phone as he is joined by hundred of teachers and parents at the Arizona Capitol to protest the proposed budget cuts to education Saturday, June 27, 2009, in Phoenix. State legislators were taking the unusual step of holding budget hearings on Saturday. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
The Republican governor objected to some budget provisions but particularly wanted lawmakers to send her proposed sales-tax increase to voters. Most lawmakers balked at the possibility of a tax increase which Brewer contends is needed to help preserve important state services in the face of budget shortfalls.
Despite the veto of K-12 education funding, school districts aren’t yet in a funding pinch. That’s because the system on Wednesday received a $600 million appropriation that was delayed from the last fiscal year to help balance that budget. However, charter schools aren’t included in that $600 million payment and now must await a regularly scheduled July 15 payment that Brewer’s veto would block.
The four bills introduced Monday by lawmakers don’t touch the sales-tax issue but there were indications that lawmakers didn’t regard the four bills introduced Monday as the final word on what the Legislature would do in the special session.
Those indications include the fact that one of the bills makes temporary changes to school funding only through Oct. 1. Also, one of the bills deals only with the daily expense money that lawmakers will get during the special session. That bill generally allows payments only on days when the full Legislature is meeting.
Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman said the governor’s office was reviewing the bills and was not immediately able to say if Brewer would accept or object to the package.
The Legislature’s budget director told a joint House-Senate session that Brewer’s line-item vetoes of portions of the budget’s main spending bill and vetoes of entire companion bills apparently meant the state was not in compliance with federal requirements for stimulus funding.
Without any money appropriated for K-12 schools, the state wasn’t maintaining its spending at the level required by the stimulus program, putting $1 billion of “stabilization funding” for education and general government in jeopardy, said Richard Stavneak, Joint Legislative Budget Committee executive director.
An additional $1.3 billion of stimulus funding for health care for the poor is at risk because Brewer vetoed a budget bill that had provisions needed to hold down counties’ costs, Stavneak said.
“I don’t know that the governor’s office fully understood what they were doing with these vetoes but if they did it was entirely reckless,” said House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa. “It imperils all of the stimulus money.”
Senseman acknowledged that the state is out of compliance with requirements for the stabilization funding, but he said it wasn’t clear whether that was also true with the health-care money.
Stavneak said other vetoed budget provisions or bills eliminated $775 million of spending cuts throughout parts of state government and erased $1.3 billion of other budget-balancing steps, including $735 million of borrowing through refinancing prisons and other state facilities.
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Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
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