PHOENIX — With time running out to pass a budget, Republicans in the Arizona Senate and House agree on a number of spending priorities, but their budget proposals remain far apart.
The Senate’s Republican leaders introduced on Monday night a $17.6 billion budget deal negotiated with Gov. Katie Hobbs. That’s about $300 million more than the budget package the House passed late Friday night.
State Sen. John Kavanagh, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the budget does include a number of asks from House Republicans – but not ones that attract the governor’s veto stamp.
“Some of the ones that the governor found toxic, of course, were not included because we don't want the budget vetoed,” he told ABC15 on Monday.
This would a much different budget, Kavanagh told reporters, if Arizona had a Republican governor instead of a divided government.
"You have to compromise and respect each other's wishes, including not to do anything to the extreme,” he said.
The Senate does not plan to consider the House’s budget bills. Instead, Kavanagh urged House Republicans to “come home” and sign onto the Senate plan.
“We've set aside money for their members so we can add their request to the budget,” he told ABC15.
In a break from the usual budget-making process, House Republicans did not hash out an agreement with their counterparts in the Senate before talks with the governor began.
What's in the Arizona Senate budget deal
Most of the budget is made up of ongoing spending from year to year, known as the baseline. The two groups of Republicans are at odds over how to divide the rest of the money.
“They had different ideas and wanted to spend some of the Senate money on their own perceived requests,” Kavanagh said.
State Rep. David Livingston, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told ABC15 last week that the Senate’s approach “doesn't take care of the basic needs of the state.”
“Instead, it does all these little, tiny projects all over,” he said.
Lawmakers must pass a new budget before July 1, the start of the next fiscal year, to prevent a state government shutdown.
The Senate plan includes more money for K-12 education, including increased basic aid for schools and more funding for maintenance and instruction, Kavanagh said.
“We don't have a tremendous amount of extra cash, but education got its fair share, and maybe a little bit more,” he said.
Kavanagh, a Republican who represents Legislative District 3, said the proposed budget includes more of the governor’s requests, including funding for child care, education and initiatives to address homelessness.
The Senate and House budget proposals both provide money for road projects, such as a Riggs Road overpass for State Route 347 and for a legal defense fund to defend Arizona's rights to Colorado River water.
Kavanagh told reporters Monday that the actual spending is not too different, simply because “there’s not that much money.”
Senate Democrats back budget deal
That’s something Senate Minority Leader Priya Sundareshan agrees with – and criticizes.
“Senate Democrats will find things lacking in this budget, and that goes to the fact that we know that Republicans are unwilling to talk about revenues,” she said Monday, pointing to less revenue due to the state’s flat tax and spending for school vouchers.
Sundareshan, a Democrat from District 18, said there’s no money to address issues such as affordable housing.
“At a time when we know a recession is coming and people will be facing eviction and homelessness and heat ... there will not be enough, nearly enough, to support people who are finding themselves on the streets or in the tough situation of being evicted or moving out of their housing,” she told reporters.
But Democrats are supporting the Senate budget deal.
"We have been fighting to get what narrow gains we can and support communities in the way that we are able to,” she said.
What’s not in the Senate budget deal
The budget the Senate’s Republican leaders negotiated with the governor doesn’t include what Kavanagh described as “really toxic red meat for the base.”
The House plan, for example, proposed a 2.5% tuition cut for students are Arizona’s public universities that Hobbs opposed.
"And because the governor can veto the budget, and because it takes two-thirds votes in both chambers to override the veto – and we do not have that many Republicans – that did not go anywhere,” he told ABC15.
Other items in the House budget proposal that do not appear in the Senate budget plan include:
- A yearlong, $100 million extension of a hospital tax.
- An attempt to prohibit in-state tuition for Dreamers and other students without legal status, which voters passed in Proposition 308 in 2022.
- Money to address a backlog of purchase approvals for families in the state’s
- Empowerment Scholarship Account school voucher program
- Salary freezes for family court judges and employees.
- A $400 million ending balance, or money left unspent.
Work requirements and monthly eligibility checks for federal food assistance and Medicaid.
Senators will discuss and hear public testimony on the 16-bill budget package on Tuesday. The Senate could vote on the bills as early as Wednesday.
