John --

Welcome to our fourth weekly update from the state capitol! I hope you enjoy these updates each week. Our deadline to drop bills was last week, so we are fully in the thick of hearing lots of bills in committees and long floor sessions where we cast our final votes on bills to send them over to the House.

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Let’s start with some good news! I had several bills move through the legislative process last week, including one bill that passed the full Senate.

On Tuesday last week, I had two bills unanimously pass the Senate Education committee. The first was SB 1174, which would allocate $2 million from the state general fund for STEM internships for students throughout the state.

The second bill was one that I’ve worked hard on the last couple of months, SB 1376. This would require that mental health instruction be included in all school health curriculums throughout the state in grades K-12. 

SB 1174 still needs to go through the Senate Appropriations committee (because it has a dollar amount attached to it), but SB 1376 is ready for the floor, and it could come up for a vote as soon as this week.

On Wednesday last week, another bill of mine, SB 1004, passed the Senate Finance committee unanimously. It would create a state finance review task force, which would compose a panel to look at state revenues, tax credits, and other investments, and compile a report to see how Arizona is doing compared to other states and recommendations for ways we could improve our state budget.

On Thursday last week, my bill to create a state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), passed the full Senate by a vote of 26-3. This is a big deal: 29 states have a state version of the federal EITC, and it would directly help low income working families throughout the state when they file their taxes. It’s now headed over to the full House.

A lot of bills! I’ve now had two bills pass the full Senate, with a couple more moving along through the legislative process this week.

Next week is the final week for Senate bills to be heard in Senate committees, so I’m spending quite a bit of time this week talking to some of my colleagues who are committee chairs to ask them if they will hear my bills. There was a record number of bills introduced in the Senate this year (over 800!), so many of my colleagues are having the same conversations.

The final week of Senate committee hearings for Senate bills always leads to very long committee hearings. This week is going to be pretty taxing as well: in Senate Appropriations later today, we have 21 bills on the agenda. Yes, you read that correctly: 21.

And in Senate Finance tomorrow morning, we have 19 bills on the agenda. That’s 40 bills across two committees, and then my Senate Commerce committee Wednesday afternoon only has eight bills on the agenda.

So if you are keeping score, that’s nearly 50 bills that I need to vote on this week in committee, on top of all the bills that we are tracking that are going through the Senate through other committees that may head to the floor for a full vote sometime this week.

Once Senate committee hearings end at the end of next week, the following week is something called “Crossover Week,” where there are no committee hearings (except for Appropriations), and we have marathon floor sessions to pass the last bit of Senate bills to send over to the other chamber. The House does the same thing over there, as they seek to send their bills over to the Senate.

There are a lot of bad bills making their way through the legislature as well, particularly around voting rights. This year in particular, coincidentally right after an election, there are scores of bills that would make it harder to vote, go after our state’s Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL), and voting by mail. There are also bills that go after our initiative process, seeking to make it more difficult for citizen initiatives to pass.

There are also at least a dozen bills that would pretty dramatically reduce state revenue, including proposals to completely eliminate our state income tax and our state corporate income tax. Because who needs revenue, right? 

And finally, there are over a dozen bills that would harm our state’s public schools, including yet more ESA voucher expansions and further growth of STO (student tuition organizations) scholarships. 

So for those of you who have been calling and emailing our office chiming in on many of these bad bills: thank you. I hear you, and while I try to respond to as many constituents as I can, sometimes I can’t get to everyone. 

I’m hard at work talking to my colleagues in the Senate to convince them why some of these ideas are misguided, and why they should consider voting no. We won’t be able to stop every bill. And there’s no guarantee a bill would automatically pass the House if it gets through the Senate. Or the governor could ultimately veto it as well.

For next week’s update, I’ll know more about where some of these bad bills are in the legislative process, and update you on the latest!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s update - stay tuned every Tuesday morning for the latest from the state capitol!

Thank you,

Sean

http://www.seanbowieforaz.com/

Paid for by Sean Bowie for State Senate. Authorized by Sean Bowie.