The Daily Agenda: Welcome to silly season
Laws are serious business, but the Legislature looks like a circus ... Still, there is a method to the madness ... Pima County gets more asylum funding.
Despite all appearances, the Arizona Legislature actually kind of makes sense. You just have to squint a little.
When you’re looking at the Legislature from Tucson, you could be forgiven for throwing up your hands and saying “Why the [expletive of your choice] are they talking about that idiotic [another expletive] when we have so many other, more important, problems to fix?”
That temptation is going to be particularly strong over the next few weeks as legislators introduce bills, some of which are downright wacky. It happens at the start of every legislative session. Remember all the bills about drag shows last January? They know most of these bills have no chance of becoming law. It’s all about making headlines right now.
Welcome to “silly season,” as Hank Stephenson, founder of our sister newsletter the Arizona Agenda and a longtime capitol reporter, describes the first month or so of the legislative session. Hank and Curt sat down last week to figure out how Tucsonans could make sense of what they see legislators doing in the far-off capitol.
The broad strokes are that lawmakers introduce about 1,500 bills every year and about 300 are signed into law. So far this session, we’re at about 400 bills and counting. With so many bills in play, legislators have to put procedures in place to winnow them down to a manageable number.
Republicans control the Legislature. All the committee chairs are Republican and they are the gatekeepers who decide which bills make it to a vote. We also have a Democratic governor who vetoes a ton of bills and enough Democratic lawmakers to make it very difficult to override her veto.
Looming over it all is a $400 million budget deficit, unlike the billion-dollar surplus we had last year. So instead of the $20 million slush fund each legislator got last year, they are going to have to make painful cuts somewhere.
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The Tucson area sends a dozen or so legislators to Phoenix. Most of them are Democrats who legislate at the mercy of the Republican committee chairs. We also have three Republican legislators, all from Legislative District 17. They are on the winning team, so their bills have a much better chance of making it through the legislative process.
So what are our local legislators up to during silly season? They’ve co-sponsored about 60 bills, and counting. Here’s a sampling:
All three local Republicans, Sen. Justine Wadsack, Rep. Rachel Jones, and Rep. Cory McGarr, co-sponsored SB 1011. It would deny cities like Tucson the right to include anything in their general plans that would cut down on car traffic, such as building bicycle routes. That is scheduled for a hearing next Tuesday in the Senate Transportation, Technology and Missing Children Committee. So it’ll probably pass.
HB 2259, a bill popular among local Democrats, including co-sponsors Reps. Christopher Mathis, Nancy Gutierrez, Betty Villegas, and Sens. Rosanna Gabaldon and Sally Ann Gonzales, would force Republican legislators to give up the right to tell cities like Tucson they can’t impose rent controls. The bill hasn’t been assigned to a committee and there is no hearing scheduled.
SB 1006, another bill co-sponsored by all three local Republicans, would make the state divest from any company that promoted abortion for minors or referred K-12 students to sexually explicit materials. The bill was assigned to the Finance and Commerce Committee, but no hearing is scheduled yet.
HB 2221, co-sponsored by Gutierrez, would require a three-day waiting period after the purchase of a firearm before the purchaser can take possession of the firearm. The bill hasn’t been assigned to a committee and there is no hearing scheduled.
The clock is ticking on all these bills. If they don’t make it through committee and then a vote by the chamber before mid-February, they’ll face a “quiet death,” as Hank calls it, that claims about half of all bills every year. That’s when “crossover week” arrives and the bills approved in the House are sent over to the Senate, and vice versa.
If a bill doesn’t cross into a new chamber by the end of crossover week, it’s dead. (Although no bill is ever truly dead as long as the Legislature is in session.) After crossover week, silly season ends and the serious negotiations begin.
Until then, the Tucson Agenda will be right beside you as silly season unfolds.
Do you have any ideas about what our legislators should be doing? Any issues you think need urgent attention? Write a letter to the editor (email Curt at curt@tucsonagenda.com). Or you can give an earful to your state representative or senator.
More COVID funding: Pima County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve an additional $2.75 million in funding to help fight the spread of COVID-19 among asylum seekers, the Arizona Daily Star’s Charles Borla writes. This brings the total amount spent on housing for affected migrants to nearly $20 million, most of it federal funds. Supervisor Steve Christy did not support the additional funding, which comes from the Immigrant Emergency Care and Testing Grant, a new source of funds from the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Calling in reinforcements: Cochise County supervisors approved a $50,000 funding request by the elections department for the purchase of 10 new ExpressVote machines, Arizona Public Media’s Summer Hom reports. Supervisors learned in December that some vote centers in the 2022 election reported wait times greater than 30 minutes. State law and the Elections Procedure Manual require the officer in charge of elections to approve a plan to ensure voters don’t have to wait for more than 30 minutes.
Muddy waters: There’s no “black and white fix” to handling the sustained influx of migrants crossing the U.S.- Mexico border into Arizona, the Republic's Elvia Díaz and Phil Boas said on KJZZ’s “The Show.” Díaz said there’s been no discussion of massive immigration reform at the federal level and the pair agreed that even with the recent reopening of the Lukeville Port of Entry, President Joe Biden still has plenty of work to do to address key problems at the border.
“When you look at the American people and their trust in him to manage the border, he has a real problem on his hands and these pictures are not going to stop,” Boas said. “They're going to continue through this election. They're going to be trouble for him if they, if he doesn't find some kind of solution and show that he's taking action on the border.”
One-time pass: The University of Arizona offers a diversion program for students under the age of 21 who are cited by campus police for violating alcohol or marijuana policies, El Inde Arizona’s Ainsley Helen Thomas writes in the Daily Wildcat. The Student Health Alcohol and Drug Education program provides resources and education about the effects of alcohol and drugs to first-time offenders, but students will face consequences if they’re cited again. If they’re caught again, campus police will either arrest the student or write them a paper ticket, depending on the circumstances.
Helping hands: A local nonprofit travels around town in a bright yellow burrito trailer, serving warm meals to people experiencing homelessness, Natasha Cortinovis writes for the Arizona Luminaria. Anna’s Abundant Blessings visits encampments and shelters across Pima County, setting up picnic tables, chairs and playing music as they hand out food. The nonprofit also serves meals to homeless veterans in Southern Arizona, partnering with organizations offering mobile shower units and groups that help people who are living in poverty.
“You see people’s lives change,” said volunteer Diane Yeoman. “You see people month after month, some are doing better, some get out of here, get homes.”
Misleading the public: The announcement by UA President Robert C. Robbins that the university’s CFO Lisa Rulney had resigned during a financial crisis, even though she actually just took a different job at the UA, was “intentionally misleading,” Tucson City Council member Steve Kozachik wrote in a guest opinion in the Star. (He was referring to a story the Agenda broke earlier this week)
“If [the Arizona Board of Regents] was not complicit in the deceptive presentation, they must act. If they were then the governor must act. President Robbins told ABOR that at some point ‘the bleeding stops.’ It’s time to stop the bleeding of this scandal now,” Kozachik wrote.
$2.5 million: The amount the University of Arizona and the Arizona Board of Regents are paying as part of a settlement with the family of Thomas Meixner, a professor who was shot and killed by a student on campus in 2022.