Arizona government assets fire sale?

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by David Safier
I would like to understand this better. Napolitano and Democrats proposed borrowing against future tobacco funds and lottery revenues to balance the budget. Republicans said that's mortgaging our future, making our children pay, and so on. (Somehow, drastic cuts in education don't fit the "making our children pay" line of reasoning for them.)

But now they want to sell off state property to balance the budget.

House Appropriations Chairman John Kavanagh, one of the Legislature’s most vocal supporters of state asset sales, said he would like to see Arizona generate about $600 million per year until 2012 with the sale and leaseback of some assets and the outright sale of others.

My understanding of "sale and leaseback" is that the state would eventually own the property once again after it paid back the loan, or the sale price with interest, or whatever. How that's different in its long term outcome from borrowing against tobacco and lottery money is beyond me. Basically, isn't the state simply using its assets as collateral for a loan?

I think this next paragraph indicates where the idea is heading in the Republican heads that are proposing it: privatization.

Probably the most frequently mentioned proposal involves the sale and leaseback of state prisons. Five prisons in the state, along with one county jail, are already operated by private companies, and some lawmakers would like to see that model applied to other prisons in the state. Kavanagh said he assumes such a plan would be applied only to low- and medium-security prisons.

Sell prisons to private companies, who will run them. I know we're doing it already. And I know prisoners are a growth industry so long as we keep putting people away at numbers that astound the rest of the world. I guess it creates prison jobs and keeps the prisoners off the unemployment rolls. That's a good thing during a recession, right?

Prisons are far from the only state assets that could wind up on the bidding block. Sen. Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said there are other facilities besides prisons that might be better run by private companies, such as some state parks.

If you've visited any of our great national parks since they were turned over to private companies to run, you know how much we've lost in the process — and I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about the quality of the service and amenities.

Privatization. I think our state government is the Bush administration, circa 2001. Maybe Arizona should attack Mexico. I bet we'd be greeted as liberators.