The Farley Report: February 23, 2010

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Time once again for the Farley Report from Rep. Steve Farley (D-LD 28):

Welcome to the Farley Report's 100th Edition! I hope you are still aglow over US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's visit to Tucson last Thursday.

You can visit my website (http://www.FriendsOFarley.org) to see a photo of the Secretary and I holding that big $63,000,000 check that represents the final piece to the funding puzzle for Tucson's Modern Streetcar.

It's been nine long years of working together with many of you to get this done, and we deserve to savor a true victory for Tucson. The streetcar will produce hundreds of jobs this year, and thousands more in coming years as it makes Downtown Tucson the economic engine for the region, powering us out of this recession.

Yes, you and I will be riding the Streetcar from the University Medical Center through the UofA campus, Fourth Avenue, Downtown, and the Westside Mercado District in less than two years. I'm hoping our dedication day will coincide with the Arizona Centennial — February 14, 2012.

Meanwhile up I-10 a ways, it's Striker Week here at the Arizona Legislature wherein many otherwise inoffensive bills gain strange new evil powers when their guts are stripped out and replaced with all new internal organs.

It not only sounds like a horror story, it is!

Republican legislators always drop a few bills per member each session that make technical corrections or declare milk as our state beverage (yes, that's a real one — Rep. Pratt's HB2611 — I say, why not horchata?) or duplicate other bills that they have introduced.

These bills routinely pass through committees, and then, when you least expect it, they become the dead hosts for parasitical language that is not required to bear any resemblance to the original subject. That is known as a Striker Amendment, a tool only available to lawmakers of the majority party.

This chilling transformation can happen at any time in any committee in the House or the Senate, but it is most likely to happen on the last week to hear House bills in House committees or Senate bills in Senate committees. This is that week.

We heard one of these strikers in Ways & Means yesterday in the form of HCR2057. This bill is a near-duplicate of a bill passed last week which would phase out the business personal property tax. Once that bill passed, HCR2057 became the perfect victim for a striker amendment.

The parasitic language in this case is an all-star zombie that has risen from the dead ten separate times after being vetoed by every governor of both parties since Jack Williams forty years ago. It would put before the voters a constitutional amendment to allow the Legislature to spend restricted federal money any way it deems appropriate.

Aside from adding to what promises to be a record-breaking number of referenda for the November ballot, this is a completely illegal grab of funds (such as CDBG — community development block grants) that local governments and nonprofits have in many cases spent years seeking in order to fund a specific local priority. It would violate major federal laws, possibly including the US Constitution, and was placed in the form of a referendum specifically to end-run another Gubernatorial veto.

Federal law-breaking aside, you may ask how it's going with that budget problem we used to talk so much about. The Republicans are now meeting with their own members only in small groups behind closed doors, and the word is that they are going to try to get the budget done next week for fiscal 2010 and 2011.

Whether that will happen or not is anyone's guess, but their sadly predictable exclusion of Democrats from the process indicates they believe once more that they can go it alone.

They are going to introduce a budget that is very similar to the Governor's proposals. You may remember that she wanted to toss 400,000 kids, seniors, and people in poverty off their health care, cut $750 million from education, and chop many other vital services amounting to $1.3 billion in additional cuts in the next two years, EVEN IF voters PASS the one-cent sales tax on May 18. If we do NOT pass that tax, she will take that as a mandate to slash and burn most of what's left of what used to be our government.

The Republican Legislative budget will likely include "triggers" that will indicate what will be cut and by how much if the sales tax is not approved, and what will be saved if it is approved.

We do not yet know a couple of things.

1) Will the Republicans still insist on their corporate bailout package that would jack up property taxes on homeowners while giveaways to big corporations and the rich blow an additional billion-dollar annual hole in our deficit? How will that get paid for?

2) How will the new budget make up for the faulty assumptions in the Governor's proposal that a) the sales tax would be in place next month, and b) she is no longer pushing for a tax on repair services that would have increased revenues by $160 million a year?

The Governor's proposal to roll back the voter-approved Prop 204 funding of healthcare for people in poverty at least recognized that this move needed to be re-approved by voters. But the Legislative Republicans are now proposing to just override the voters' will on their own, and kick these 310,000 Arizonans off their health care immediately.

This is a pretty clear case of breaking the law that protects voter-approved initiatives (Prop 105), and will be overturned in court after we spend a few million dollars more in legal fees, so it is unclear that this will do anything but cost us money and put 310,000 people out in the cold while the lawsuits play out.

And it will force our hospitals to treat these folks in their emergency rooms without reimbursement, causing insurance premiums to rise and hospitals to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Hey, there's that leadership thing again!

But don't worry… We can always drown our sorrows in a nice cold glass of Arizona's new state beverage, Milk.