John --

Welcome to our twelfth weekly update from the state capitol! I hope you enjoy these updates each week as we navigate the 2021 legislative session.

Well, we did it: we survived the Senate Appropriations hearing last week. We started at around 9am and finished around 10:20pm, with two meal breaks and a quick Senate floor session in between. All in all, we heard and voted on 29 bills, many of them strikers.

Why did the hearing take so long? We heard a couple of controversial bills, with two taking up most of the discussion time. The first was HB 2140, an unconstitutional abortion bill that would ban any procedures after 4-6 weeks of pregnancy (before many women know they are even pregnant in the first place). I don’t think the bill will even come up for a vote on the Senate floor, but we spent several hours diving into the policy and asking questions on both sides.

The second was HB 2190, which would prevent governments or businesses from requiring employees to be vaccinated, no matter what their field is or the vaccine in question is. So a hospital, for example, would not be allowed to require that doctors, nurses, physician assistants, etc, be vaccinated before working with patients. Or, for example, a city fire department could not require that firefighters or first responders receive vaccines as a part of their work.

While COVID-19 vaccines take up most of the attention, HB 2190 would also apply to flu vaccines, hepatitis B, and so on.

I voted no on both bills, because I had concerns with the language of both. 

So now that committee hearings have ended for the session, what’s taking up our time these days? This week, for example, instead of going to the Senate floor at 1:30pm every day, we are now going at 10am. We are still doing floor sessions where bills can be debated and voted on, but I would expect us to get out early each day. This leaves more time for other pressing matters, like figuring out our state budget (which I will get to in a moment).

This next week or two will likely involve debates and votes on some of the more controversial bills we have left to consider before sending them to the governor, so floor sessions will likely run longer than normal. We expect to debate bills centered around voting rights, tax cuts, and social issues.

One of the most common questions I hear from friends, colleagues, or constituents is the following: so, what’s going on with the budget? As we approach the 100th day of the legislative session (in two weeks!), all eyes turn to when we will complete the largest responsibility we have as a state legislature, which is passing the budget for the 2021-22 fiscal year that starts July 1st.

As you may know, I have voted for at least one section of the budget for three of the four years I’ve served at the capitol. So I have always been willing to work with both parties to pass a state budget, and am often in the room for conversations about what components and provisions should be included. This was particularly true last year, when our Senate Democratic caucus negotiated a “skinny budget” agreement with the Senate president and we passed a budget with strong bipartisan margins.

I don’t expect that same level of bipartisan agreement this year, but I think there is a path. So far I have engaged in hours of discussions with my colleagues in the majority on the budget, and have expressed what I consider to be my top priorities to be included this year. Those include:

-The state’s New Economy Initiative, which would fund specific, targeted research projects at our three state universities;

-STEM funding for our community colleges in Maricopa and Pima counties;

-Restoring our state’s Housing Trust Fund, to assist with affordable housing projects, and the expansion of affordable housing tax credits to incentivize more affordable housing construction throughout the state;

-Stronger support for our state’s developmentally disabled (DD) providers;

-An expansion of our state’s grant funding for additional school counselors and school social workers;

-Targeted infrastructure projects across the state, in particular the widening of the I-10 that connects Ahwatukee and Casa Grande 

A big focus of debate around the budget this year is around tax cuts, and which taxes should be cut and by how much. One of the proposals floating around the capitol would dramatically reduce our state income tax by changing our income tax code and having only one tax bracket, meaning you would pay the same rate no matter how high your income. This would make the state income tax much more regressive, and result in a very large tax cut for high income earners. 

I have my own tax cut bill that passed out of the Senate by a 26-3 vote. SB 1040, which would create a state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to pair with the federal credit, would be a good addition to the budget. And the cost (at about $70 million a year), would be a small fraction of the proposed income tax cut above, which would cost many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. 

One of the reasons why the budget may take longer than normal this year is because there is still some uncertainty around the federal dollars coming our way, and what those dollars can be used for. The language in the American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed last month, says that states cannot use the federal dollars to cut taxes. Our state’s Attorney General is suing over that, and there is no word yet what the courts will decide.

There has been some talk at the capitol of even recessing for a couple of weeks, and coming back to do the budget once we have more information. 

Based on the information that I have, I think it’s going to be difficult for a budget to pass with 16 votes in the Senate and 31 votes in the House anytime soon. We went through this dance back in 2019, when the state had dollars that could be used for investments or tax cuts, and the budget took until the very end of May to finish. Should we expect something similar this year?

I think so. June is the most common answer you will hear if you ask folks at the capitol when we will adjourn for the session.

As always, I will be hard at work, talking and working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to see if we can come up with a deal. The longer the budget takes, the more updates I will send your way! Stay tuned. :) 

That’s it for this week’s update! I hope you enjoyed. Always remember you can follow my social media pages on Facebook and Twitter for more up to the date information on the legislative session!

Thank you,

Sean

http://www.seanbowieforaz.com/

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