Barrett Marson, a former Tribune reporter and press secretary for the Republican majority in the Arizona House of Representatives, has provided some interesting insight into a joint statement this week about the state’s budget woes from House Speaker Jim Weiers, Senate President Tim Bee and Gov. Janet Napolitano. The news release explains that lawmakers will start meeting Jan. 7, a week before the 2008 regular session begins, to work on eliminating a projected $1 billion shortfall in the current $10.6 billion General Fund.
But Marson reveals in his official blog that lawmakers also will suspend all regular business during the week of Jan. 21, to focus on crafting the next budget for the 2008-09 fiscal year. That budget faces a potential shortfall of $1.5 billion to $2 billion, Republicans say, depending on how this year’s potential deficit is handled.
Marson says the goal is to write the state budget in two weeks, a process that usually takes two months or longer. Legislative leaders want to resolve the budget problems before they move on to other issues.
Good luck with that.
Lawmakers say every year the budget should be the Legislature’s top priority and that task should be wrapped up before other bills are sent to the governor. Inevitably, the budget is one of the last issues to be resolved before the Legislature ends the regular session in May or June. As I noted in a Tribune column earlier this year, legislative leaders use budget and spending matters as leverage over rank-and-file lawmakers to get their votes on other bills and to keep them engaged in the entire process. As soon as the budget is finished, many lawmakers start inching to end the session so they can return to their lives and, in an election year such as 2008, to jump fully into their campaigns.
So color me skeptical that the 2008 Legislature will finish a budget much sooner than its predecessors in recent years.
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