THEY’RE TASKED WITH ONE ASSIGNMENT,

Only one assignment, and yet...

Our state legislature is tasked with putting together a budget. That is the one constitutional obligation assigned to them. We passed the 100th day of session last week and yet there is no word on serious budget talk. Each session there is a selective few lawmakers involved in the secret, behind the door budget talks.  Usually, rumors escape the back room by this time in the legislative process, but thus far not much is known except the fact that Arizona has serious revenue problems.

While lawmakers have been avoiding talks on how to keep the state afloat, the GOP majority party has been exceptionally busy in trying to pass bills that are nothing more than veto bait for the governor’s stamp. To date Governor Hobbs has vetoed 52 bills, with more sure to come.

The final vote on Disability Services funding.

On April 23rd the House voted on the amended, bipartisan bill HB2945 to continue the Parents as Paid Caregivers program funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD) . The long road to the amended bill was paved with underhanded tricks by House of Representative members and a genuine effort by a few GOP members to work with Dems to find a solution to the impending doom facing parents of children with disabilities. Children needing extraordinary care were faced with seeing the funding for their care disappear on May 1. Nancy Gutierrez-D and Julie Willoughby-R worked together to put forth a bill that would continue to fund the program without reductions and not steal from the Housing trust fund in order to fund DDD. It did put a few additional guardrails in place for the program.

When the bipartisan amended bill came up for a vote in the House of Representative it received 48 yes votes and 11 no votes with one absent. Our 2 LD3 representatives both voted NO. Kolodin and Chaplik joined other Freedom Caucus members and voted to hurt families with disabled kids. There is no other way to frame their votes. The bill then quickly went to the senate where it passed 28 voting yes, Jake Hoffman voting NO and one absent.  John Kavanagh voted for the bipartisan amended bill even though his name was attached to the original senate version of the bill which was awful. (Giving credit where it is due.)

Check out The Weekly to see what floor votes will be on the calendar this week.