John --

Welcome to our fifth weekly update from the state capitol! I hope you enjoy our updates every week as we navigate the twists and turns of the legislative session.

This week is going to be a long one, because it is the final week to hear bills in their chamber of origin. So Senate bills need to be heard in Senate committees, and House bills need to be heard in House committees. If they aren’t on an agenda, they will not advance this legislative session (there are some exceptions to this rule, mainly involving something called “strikers,” but that’s pretty rare).

The exception to the committee rule is Appropriations, which gets an extra hearing next week. I sit on the Appropriations committee, and that final hearing each session is *extremely* long.

So our committee agendas are even longer than usual this week, and with that comes longer stretches of time for committee briefings and all the meetings we take ahead of time to make sure we are prepared to vote on the dozens of bills before us. 

We are also at the point of session where bills have made their way through committee and Rules, so now they are heading to our internal caucus meetings where they need to be discussed before they can move to the floor. The caucus meetings later this morning have over *100* bills on the agenda, meaning those bills can then go to the Senate floor later this week.

So you combine all of these facts together, and you can see that these next two weeks are going to be extremely busy, full of long days and little sleep.

An update on how some of my bills are advancing through the legislative process: SB 1174, which would allocate $2 million for additional STEM internship opportunities for young people all over Arizona, will receive a hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee later today. It unanimously passed the Senate Education committee two weeks ago.

I have a bill that is on the agenda for Senate Commerce on Wednesday, SB 1715, but it will only be discussed, and not voted on. It has to do with state unemployment benefits, and allowing individuals who have lost their full-time jobs to work additional hours part-time and still be eligible for the maximum amount of unemployment benefits from the state. 

The reason it is for discussion only, and why it won’t receive a committee vote, is because there are several bills currently going through the legislative process that seek to improve our state unemployment insurance system, and many of them are gaining traction. Arizona has the second lowest unemployment benefit amount in the country ($240 a week), and there is a bipartisan bill in the House that would increase that amount to $300 per week, and also include the provision in my bill as well that would allow more part-time work and still allow individuals to qualify for the full benefit amount they qualify for.

SB 1004, a bill I introduced that would create a state finance review task force to study state expenditures, tax credits, state revenues, and recommend changes to our legislature, is scheduled for Committee of the Whole this afternoon, meaning it is one step closer to a final vote on the Senate floor, perhaps later this week. 

Another one of my mental health bills, SB 1376, which would require mental health and social emotional learning instruction in our school health curriculums, is this close to a full vote on the Senate floor. It was supposed to receive a final vote yesterday, but will instead receive a final floor vote later today. 

We also had some media attention for some of our bills in recent days. Cronkite News wrote about SB 1376 mentioned above, and interviewed both me and supporters of the bill. You can watch that video story here.

KJZZ did a story on both SB 1376 and SB 1097, our bill that passed the full Senate to clarify that mental health days count as an excused absence in our K-12 schools. You can read and listen to that story here.

Finally, I wanted to give you a brief rundown of some of the more controversial bills making their way through the legislature. I will go through each by topic below:

ESA Expansion: We voted as a full Senate yesterday on SB 1452, a massive expansion of our state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, otherwise known as vouchers. I voted NO, but the bill passed party lines by a vote of 16-14. 

I have long opposed these kinds of massive expansions to our state’s voucher system, because many of these dollars will be going to private or parochial schools that have none of the accountability and transparency measures that exist at our state’s public schools.

Voting Rights: My colleagues in the majority have introduced dozens of bills this year that would make it harder to vote, go after our state’s early voting system, and purge our state’s Permanent Early Voting List (or PEVL for short). 

We have a particularly bad bill that will be debated later this afternoon, SB 1069, which would remove voters from our state’s *permanent* early voting list if they don’t vote in successive elections. Apparently the word “permanent” means different things to different people…

More bad bills going after our voting rights should be making their way to the Senate floor in the next two weeks. I will continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stop efforts like these that make it harder to vote or remove voters from things like the Permanent Early Voting List.

Tax Cuts: I serve on the Senate Finance committee, which means any bills having to do with revenue usually make their way through that committee. We deal with tax cut bills every year, but this year in particular has brought forward an unusually high number of bills seeking to permanently eliminate state revenue sources.

We dealt with a bill last week that would gradually eliminate our state corporate income tax, which currently brings in about $500 million a year. We have a bill in committee tomorrow that would gradually eliminate our state income tax, which accounts for about 40% of our state revenue, or about $5 billion a year.

How are we going to pay for these cuts, or what state government functions would need to be eliminated? No answers on that of as yet.

I’m all for a conversation about tax reform, and have voted for bills in the past around this very same issue. But the bills I mention above and several others would make it extremely difficult for us to fund all of the programs and agencies we approve at the state level.

Stay tuned in future weekly updates for progress reports on how all of these issues are making their way through the legislature!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s update - stay tuned every Tuesday morning for the latest on what’s happening at the capitol!

Thank you,

Sean

Thank you,

Sean

http://www.seanbowieforaz.com/

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