Epic Fail Part Three: The Accidental Governor and the GOP Insane Clown Posse Cannot Pass a Budget

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Accidental Governor and the GOP insane clown posse leadership may have one final shot today at passing a budget. The Senate convenes at 10:00 a.m. and the House convenes at 1:00 p.m. But no capitol observer believes that they are any closer to passing a budget today than they were yesterday when they could not find 16 votes in the Senate from their own GOP caucus.

The Accidental Governor and the GOP insane clown posse are now resigned to the fact that the measures they want to refer to the ballot cannot be done on November 3. Due to election law requirements, the next feasible date is December 8, according to the Secretrary of State. Sales-tax hike won't be on Nov. ballot:

Senate President Bob Burns, still unable to garner the votes to pass a state budget fix, acknowledged Tuesday that it's now too late to hold an election in November asking voters to raise the sales tax.

If Republicans can manage to find support for the tax referral in the Legislature, the soonest that election could be held is now is December, likely the 8th, Burns said.

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"I think Nov. 3 may have slipped beyond us," said Burns, talking to reporters after adjourning the Senate without the votes to pass the measure. "I think we're basically being forced into a date because of the fact that we can't get this done."

The Accidental Governor has likewise abandoned hopes of a Nov. 3 special election on a temporary sales-tax increase, as the politics and mechanics of making it happen have proven insurmountable. Brewer drops hopes for Nov. 3 tax vote

I have previously written here that the Legislature is most unlikely to schedule a special election during the holiday season. If an election is to occur, it will most likely be in January. The next feasible date after January is in March. Maricopa County elections director Karen Osborne said it is easiest to follow the state's election cycle. The next regularly scheduled election would be March 9. Brewer drops hopes for Nov. 3 tax vote The problem with the March date is that it comes so late in the fiscal year that the sales tax, if approved by voters, would go into effect too late to produce any tax revenue towards the FY2010 budget.

As previously reported here, "lawmakers also now face a Monday deadline if they want to meet their goal of eliminating a $250 million state property tax. If they don't act before then, the tax rate will be added to property-tax bills scheduled to be mailed out by the 15 counties by month's end. The tax would add about $58 to the bill of a home assessed at $176,200, according to an Arizona Republic analysis."

So we have yet another deadline watch: Monday, August 17.

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee yesterday exposed the lie of this "Sham-Wow!" budget deal: even with the temporary sales tax in place, the state would face deficits that would require further cuts in state services. As reported by Jim Nintzel at the Tucson Weekly's The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Old Pueblog:

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee estimates that the tax cuts would ensure that Arizona would have budget shortfalls years into the future, even if voters were to approve the temporary one-cent-per-dollar sales tax that Gov. Jan Brewer wants. It’s perplexing that Brewer would recognize the need for additional revenue through a sales-tax increase, but then agree to massive cuts to corporate and income taxes that will cripple the state’s ability to fund social services that she purports to be concerned about, along with a property-tax cut that will primarily benefit business interests.

If the sales tax is approved, JLBC estimates that the state would have a $892 million shortfall in fiscal year 2011, which lawmakers will have to address when they start writing a budget five months from now. The numbers get worse from there: $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2012 and $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2013.

If the sales tax isn’t approved, the numbers are even more grim: A shortfall of $1.9 billion in 2011, $3 billion in 2012 and $3.1 billion in 2013.

This does not strike us as the fiscally responsible way of addressing the state's structural deficit, no matter how happy it makes Grover Norquist.

Read the JLBC report here: FY_2009_-_2013_Balance_Sheet__08-04___2_.pdf

The Accidental Governor is trying to sell voters on a temporary sales tax increase as panacea for the budget deficit that ails us while at the same time the GOP insane clown posse seeks to impose new long-term structural deficits — no doubt for living out their Grover Norquist fantasies of shrinking the government to the size that they can drown it in the bathtub.

This "Sham-Wow!" budget deal is a terrible budget with long-term negative consequences to the state. If we had any leadership in this state, the Accidental Governor would invite the GOP insane clown posse leadership and the Democratic minority leadership to a budget summit and start over from scratch to hammer out a bipartisan budget with pragmatic solutions that jettisons the ideological policy bullshit included in the "Sham-Wow!" budget deal, and achieves the one objective that the Arizona Constitution mandates: a balanced budget.

Unfortunately, we are without leadership. We are witnessing the deadly combination of ideology and incomeptence produce an epic failure of leadership.

UPDATE: The Arizona Capitol Times blog (subscription required) in a post entitled "Budget delay could stall referral for months" further explains why a December election is unlikely to occur:

If the vote cannot be held on Nov. 3, the same date voters will cast ballots on a number of municipal, school district and other elections, the special election may have to wait until January. According to Amy Bjelland, elections director at the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, it may not be feasible to plan an election during the long Thanksgiving-to-Christmas holiday season.

“I think the counties would probably say no,” Bjelland said when asked whether a special election could be held during the holiday season. “I think Nov. 3 would probably be the best date for everybody at this point, just from conducting an election standpoint.

A holiday season election presents a number of complications, Bjelland said. The churches that often serve as polling places during elections will be in the midst of their busiest time of year, and may not be able to accommodate voting, especially in December. Additionally, she said, it is harder to get Election Day volunteers during the holiday season. Maricopa County alone must recruit at least 3,500 volunteers.

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A January special election could also put greater strain on the state’s finances. If voters do not approve the tax increase until midway through the fiscal year instead of in November – assuming the measure passes at all – that would mean the state has two fewer months to collect the additional revenue from a 1-cent sales tax hike, which the Governor’s Office hopes will generate about $1 billion per year.

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If the vote were held past Nov. 3, the state and counties also would have to pay for an entirely new election, which would cost about $10 million. The counties foot the initial bill for the election, then the state reimburses them, “up to a certain amount,” Bjelland said.

“It’s intended to approximate the actual costs, but in reality it doesn’t come close to reimbursing them for their actual costs. But it’s something,” she said.