Senate President-designate Bob Burns

The winter holidays are over, a New Year has arrived, and much of Arizona’s political attention now turns the pending opening of a new Legislature followed shortly thereafter by a new governor (unless Janet Napolitano unexpectedly runs into confirmation problems with the U.S. Senate). This could be a legislative session unlike any other in living memory — if incoming Senate President Bob Burns has anything to say about it.

Burns has pledged to prevent any bill from reaching the Senate floor until the Legislature has addressed the state’s massive budget problems. This promise hasn’t really discouraged rank-and-file lawmakers from writing up bills, with House members filing more than 900 proposals and the Senate adding another 550 so far.

Legislative leaders have tried before to halt all business to compel lawmakers to focus on budget matters like a laser. One prominent example was in 2002, when all bills were frozen in their tracks mid-session for about three weeks.

While this tactic makes lots of common sense to outsiders, it never has worked as legislative leaders intend. As a budget deal wasn’t immediately forthcoming, those lawmakers not involved in the closed-door negotiations (and that would be most of them) would get bored and then anxious about their special bills slowing twisting in the wind. They would start linking their support for specific budget proposals to getting their own bills moving again. Legislative leaders couldn’t appear to be giving special treatment, so they turned the spout on again, bills resumed flowing through the legislative session, and the budget would again be rushed to a finish at the end of the session.

However, it could be much different this year. Burns strikes me as committed enough or stubborn enough to withstand psychological pressure for a long time. He will have a loyal ally in this endeavor with his appropriations chairman, Sen.-elect Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, who has pointed out repeatedly that adopting a balanced budget is the only action that the Legislature is required to do by the state constitution.

And at the outset, Democratic leaders Rep. David Lujan and Sen. Jose Luis Garcia have said they support no action on non-budget bills until the fiscal woes are handled. It’s going to hard for them to take back these public statements later and criticize Burns or incoming House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, for holding up measures not directly related to spending or taxes.

In January and February, we should see one of the most interesting sets of early days in a legislative session in Arizona history.

    REP. DAVID LUJAN

Last summer, a small group of Valley journalists and people from other careers met at the Tempe Public Library to discuss possible ways to make government more transparent to the public, with an emphasis on freedom of information and open records law.s The meeting was organized by the 21st Century Right-to-Know Project as part of a national listening tour for the purpose of developing proposed policy changes for the incoming new president (whether it turned out to be John McCain or Barack Obama).

While most of the discussion focused on federal agencies, state Rep. David Lujan, D-Ariz., spoke to the group about how Arizona law works and where potential gaps might be. The back-and-forth led to the point that while Arizona has a robust open records’ law that most lawmakers support, the Legislature always has been exempt from obeying it. Lujan noted the irony that the Legislature expects other government agencies to follow a statute that lawmakers won’t impose on themselves.

Lujan pledged before the group to draft and introduce a bill next year that would generally include the Legislature under the open records statute. Now, I wouldn’t expect such a bill to get anywhere. Individual lawmakers and legislative agencies actually are quite good about releasing records and other data from their offices, if only to avoid the appearance of trying to hide something from the public. But a number of lawmakers I’ve talked to don’t believe the open records law should apply to the Legislature, to protect those rare instances in which they choose not to share anything. They see such a law as intruding on the constitutional authority of individual lawmakers as elected officeholders (even though the same law already applies to county board of supervisors and city councils).

What’s interesting here is House Democrats decided last week to name Lujan as their new leader, replacing Phil Lopes of Tucson. So if Lujan keeps his pledge, he could give more visibility to a bill that requires the Arizona Legislature to release its records, instead of simply trusting lawmakers to do so.