Rep. Steve Farley’s Legal Judo Heads Off Planned GOP Raid on Local Transportation Funds

Steve Farley recently headed off the GOP from tapping local transportation funds to balance the budget, which would have added to the over $400 million in deferred infrastructural repair costs the ruling party has already saddled Arizona with for the ideological agenda.

Here’s an except from Farley’s latest newsletter:

"One thing Rep. Pearce and Sen. Burns would like to do to balance their version of the 09 budget is to raid State Shared Revenues and HURF funds, starving cities and counties of millions of dollars, quite literally passing the buck to local taxpayers to come up with the difference.

A little background to explain the lingo:

• HURF are the funds used for transportation projects in the state, predominantly made up of the state gas taxes. These funds are already approved for work in every county, and any use of these funds to balance the budget will mean the cancellation of many projects that are already under construction. Arizona’s transportation planning will be thrown into disarray.

• State Shared Revenues are 15% of the state income taxes redistributed to cities and towns in the state, which are used by the City of Tucson to help pay for fire and police protection as well as neighborhood street maintenance and other vital services. Any reduction in these funds will endanger these services.

So you can see that raiding these funds will make us all hurt pretty badly. Luckily, I thought the majority might do this, and requested a legal opinion in memorandum form from Legislative Council, a bipartisan group of attorneys run by the Legislature to analyze bills.

They confirmed in their January 11 memo that 1992’s Proposition 108 as enacted by voters requires that any raids on HURF or Shared Revenues would require a two-thirds vote of each house to pass. This was something Mr Pearce and Burns did not count on, and hopefully will preserve those funds for our local governments."

Congratulations to Steve for his victory in this bout of bureaucratic in-fighting. This sort of maneuver is exactly why we need sharp and engaged leaders like Steve in the opposition, and after 2008, in the majority.