PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer said Monday she isn’t making contingency plans for operating the state without a budget even though there are only five weeks left before the fiscal year ends.
 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said she is not making contingency plans in caste a new budget is not in place by the end of the fiscal year. |
Brewer, who has been governor now for only four months, said it’s going to require some compromise between her and the member of her own Republican Party who control both the House and Senate.
But Brewer said she remains convinced that the only way to responsibly balance next year’s budget is to bring in some additional revenues.
Yet the draft budget approved last week by the Senate Appropriations Committee has no hint of higher taxes. And Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, who chairs the panel, said Monday that, at least on this issue, Brewer is not going to get her way.
Complicating matters is that GOP legislative leaders are, at least in part, working in a vacuum.
Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, points out that last year — and the years prior to that — the governor put out her own budget proposal, as required at the beginning of every legislative session by the state constitution.
“So you had something to compare against,’’ said Burns, who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee during some of the years that Democrat Janet Napolitano was governor.
“We don’t really have that this time around,’’ Burns said, with Brewer, who was sworn in Jan. 21, more than a week after the legislative session started, never having provided lawmakers with an agency-by-agency list of what she wants.
“We’re working towards getting there,’’ Burns said of a new budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Brewer said she recognizes that gap.
“We have been working all along,’’ she said. “There’s been a lot of communications, a lot of different information being provided back and forth.’’
But Brewer said there also has been “a little bit of rhetoric going back and forth.’’ And the governor said, the way she sees it, all that is coming from the Republican-controlled Legislature — and she is blameless.
“I’ve tried to be realistic and put out a broad plan to get it narrowed down to certain things that we know have to be taken care of, and taken care of quickly,’’ she said.
All that, Brewer said, will require compromise.
“They’re going to have to agree some with me,’’ the governor explained. “And I suppose I’m going to have to agree some with them.’’
What will finally break the impasse, Brewer said, will be when she and GOP lawmakers “agree on certain factors.’’
From Brewer’s perspective, though, that means an understanding that it is not fiscally responsible to try to balance the budget without some temporary infusion of new dollars. And that, she said, means higher taxes, at least in the short term.
Brewer even made that one of the elements of her five-point plan for both balancing the budget and restoring Arizona to economic health.
“She’s not going to get a five-point plan,’’ Pearce said, calling any tax increase “immoral.’’ And he said he isn’t buying Brewer’s argument that the levy would be only temporary.
Pearce said, though, he agrees with Brewer that compromise is possible.
But Pearce’s idea of compromise is that lawmakers plan to cut funding for public education, a Brewer priority, by only about 4 percent.
Efforts to negotiate a budget also are going to be complicated this week by the fact that lawmakers are in a special session designed to enact a new tax credit to replace the vouchers for students with special needs that the Arizona Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. Burns said work on that measure could slow negotiations.
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