Legislature Moving Ahead with Arizona Budget

Budget negotiations between Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the Republican-controlled Legislature are picking up steam, several officials involved in the process said.

House Speaker J.D. Mesnard said he expects to complete the budget by the end of April.

“I would think we will be 80 to 90 percent of the way there come April,” the Republican Mesnard said. “But the last 10 or 20 percent are generally the hardest to negotiate especially if both sides are dug in. I have a high degree of confidence we don’t go beyond April but certainly not into June."

He said a hangup could be legislative resistance to Ducey's proposal that the state's three universities be allowed to borrow money against their sales tax receipts to finance building maintenance and repairs. The Legislature stripped much of that funding away in the last decade, and the universities say they have hundreds of millions of dollars of upgrades that need to be done.

A coalition of business groups, including the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, sent a letter to the Legislature last week backing Ducey’s plan for university maintenance funding.

In the House, the budget process has returned to the old way of operating after several years of Republican legislative leaders handling negotiations in private, revealing a budget and pushing it through in short time.

This session, the two chambers' appropriations subcommittees have worked on the budget, and Democrats were given a seat at the table.

The minority party issued a report for each subcommittee and last week sat down with House leadership to lay out its spending priorities.

Ducey has proposed a $9.8 billion budget that would include increases for K-12 education, the university building maintenance funding mechanism and cuts in welfare and other areas.

The proposal as released by the governor's office in January did not include consideration for the effects on the state of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Through the law, the state gets hundreds of millions in federal money for Medicaid.