John --

Welcome to our latest weekly update from the state capitol!

My apologies for the last two weeks and not sending out updates. This legislative session has been busier than most, and coupled with my second job and graduate school, I have very little free time these days to do much of anything outside work.

This week is one of the busiest of the entire legislative session. Why, you ask? It’s Crossover Week!

What’s Crossover Week? Well, it’s the week where we try to vote out as many bills as possible and send them over to the entire chamber. In essence the meaning behind the saying is that the bills are “crossing over” from the Senate to the House.

This means that outside of Appropriations (which we will get to in a second), there are no committee hearings this week. Wednesday and Thursday of this week will consist of both morning and afternoon floor sessions, where we will likely vote out many dozens of bills and send them over to the House.

Tomorrow is going to be an epic day thanks to our Senate Appropriations committee meeting. Keep in mind that in a normal Appropriations hearing we hear about 10-12 bills. Tomorrow’s meeting? We will be hearing *37* bills. Thirty-seven!

Many of these bills are what we call “strikers,” where bills are replaced with entirely new language from either other bills or feature language from other bills that died somewhere in the legislative process. For example, two bills that failed to advance out of our Senate Finance committee last week are being revived as strikers this week.

Some strikers are fine, but others seek to resurrect bad ideas around elections bills, tax credits, or new appropriations for controversial items.

Say a prayer for me tomorrow, because the hearing will last the entire day and will go well into the evening. They are providing us lunch and dinner, at least!

Another significant item on our to-do list? Addressing the Aggregate Expenditure Limit (AEL) issue and ensuring that our Arizona public schools do not lose $1.1 billion on March 1^st. That’s next week!

Raising the expenditure limit requires a 2/3 vote from each chamber. Thankfully, the House voted to approve this last week by a comfortable margin of 45-14. With thirty senators, that means at least twenty senators must vote yes.

I’ve been working hard over the last two weeks to convince my Republican colleagues to raise the cap, and I expect us to have good news this week, possibly as early as today.

You may have seen my op-ed in the Arizona Capitol Times last week that I wrote about the importance of raising the AEL cap and protecting our local public schools. I had four of my colleagues join me on the letter, two Democrats and two Republicans.

This should not be a partisan issue! The impact to the five public school districts in LD18 (Chandler Unified, Mesa Public Schools, Tempe Elementary, Tempe Union, and Kyrene) adds up to over $154 million.

You can of course expect me to vote YES on raising the cap once it comes up for a vote. In voting yes, I am supporting some of the public schools that I attended growing up and have committed to supporting since I was first elected to the state senate in 2016.

And if this week could not get busy enough, some personal news: my little sister is getting married later this afternoon. I’m walking her down the aisle! Here’s hoping we end floor session in time so I’m not late to the ceremony!

In other news, my three bills that have made their way through the legislative process should receive floor votes very soon. These include:

SB 1017, which would create a state finance review task force to review and go over tax credits and our overall state budget and identify needed reforms and strategies moving forward;

SB 1018, which would create a state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that would cost about $75 million per year and help aid hundreds of thousands of working Arizona families;

SB 1222, which would protect Arizona taxpayers in the bankruptcy process from losing federal benefits like the Child Tax Credit and the federal Earned Income Tax Credit

Stay tuned for future updates as these bills make their way to the Senate floor!

That’s it for today’s update, thank you as always for reading. Make sure you follow my social media feeds for more regular updates as we make our way through this very busy week!

Sean

http://www.seanbowieforaz.com/

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