Legislative Leadership

April 14, 2009

Transcript:

Ted Simons:
Rumors down at the state capitol are that lawmakers are close to a budget deal. Here to tell us if that's true is Senate President Bob Burns, a Republican from Peoria. And speaker of the house Kirk Adams, a Republican from Mesa. Good to have you back on "Horizon." Thanks for joining us.

Kirk Adams:
Thank you.

Ted Simons:
President Burns, is it true?

Bob Burns:
Well, I guess it depends on how you define close. I think we've got a little work to do. We've worked our way through the spreadsheet that came out of the appropriations committee. Briefed our members on that. We have the so-called BRB list. The budget reconciliation bills. We've worked our way through that and now we've got a $500 million nut to crack and so we're starting to work on that right now at the joint leadership level.

Ted Simons:
Speaker, is that how you're seeing it? Are things moving along more quickly?

Kirk Adams:
Yes, I think things are continuing to progress. As everyone knows this is a huge budget crisis and there's a lot of information to gather and facts to check. And we've been going through this process for a long period of time. But we're ramping up the feedback that we're beginning to get from the membership as to their tolerance level for certain things or relative intolerance level. So things are ramping up and we are making progress.

Ted Simons:
You mentioned feedback. We're hearing again and hear on this program, as well, concern that the process isn't as open as you promised it would be when you took over as speaker. Respond, if you would.

Kirk Adams:
I think there's some misconceptions about this process. And some rank hypocrisy. When you look at what we've done, we've had over 28 open meetings in the house. Many held jointly with the joint appropriations of the house and senate. And also did an unprecedented first week of session where we opened up the floor of the house and revealed all of the budget options available to balance this hole. We did that, I would add, to our own political peril, because it's been used by political enemies to bludgeon the house for the past few months, but we felt it was important that everyone know the options. And Bob has been all over the state. Tombstone, several places in Maricopa County, speaking in public forums and taking questions about the budget. Just last week on Thursday, we spoke in front of 800 people, at the -- 800 people at the Tempe center for the arts. We've been out there and active and the membership is more involved than ever before.

Ted Simons:
Do you agree with that, because we keep hearing about secret meetings and so much of the membership showing up with nothing to do and not knowing what's going on?

Bob Burns:
The meetings are basically informational, it's a process of, like I said, the worksheet as I refer to it that came out of the appropriations committee is a public document. It's out there -- the appropriations committee. Everybody's got it. What we did is sit down with members and discuss the items in there to get a basic read on the members' tolerance, as was stated to what they can and cannot accept. There's no decisions made at this particular point in time. Now, there may be some decisions made in a closed meeting between leadership. Typically, we will evaluate the feedback we got from our members and then we will decide what we believe will fly or not fly and then go back to our members with that, with that information and see where we're at. You know, once we get to that point, then we're in the process of counting votes and so that, I think, has to be relatively close to the vest. If you start asking members to publicly state their position on a vote, they very well could put themselves in a position where they could not in effect, reverse themselves with additional information. One of the problems is a constant -- conditions change and so people have to be able -- members have to be able to be flexible enough to make changes in their position.

Kirk Adams:
And if I might add to that. As a comparison to what? To our own high ideals we've set in terms of transparency. Are we all the way there yet? No, we've made considerable progress. But if you compare to the democratic budget literally by a handful, no one was complaining about the lack of transparency and the fact that we've having this conversation about transparency is huge progress.

Ted Simons:
We did hear complaints and why everybody thought it was going to change. When you were saying this process will open up this time around, perhaps expectations were higher but we were hearing this the last time around. It sounded like a lot of folks didn't know what was going on down there.

Bob Burns:
I think that there's a -- there's a model when you have money and there's a model when you don't have money. These decisions are much more difficult now to make, and so there are a number of members who may be, in fact, complaining that it's not open enough, but others who say, wait a minute, I want to be able to make up my mind without being in front of the camera so I can be sure that the information I'm getting and the decision I make is solid and will hold through the entire process. One of the problems we had when we were in the open subcommittee model, if you will, when we were short on money, members went in and we said, look, you're going to have to make reductions and they did it at the subcommittee level. It went back to the committee level and they got reversed so these members in an open meeting voted to do what was considered by many of us the right thing, making those reductions and then the reductions were reversed and they were basically hung out to dry. They took the heat for voting the way they should have voted but then got reversed and so, you know, that puts a lot of pressure on members when that kind of thing starts to happen.

Ted Simons:
When you were on last time, president Burns, I remember you said you took it as a challenge to see if you can get the budget in without raising taxes. How is the challenge going?

Bob Burns:
I think we're making good progress. I'm encouraged. There's still work to do, obviously. That last vote, when it's 31 and 16, those are the tough ones, but we're making significant progress. The risk that would be created to the economy by raising taxes I think is extreme and we have got to do everything we can to prevent that from happening.

Ted Simons:
Speaker, it sounds like leadership and the governor are at odds and the chasm is widening.

Kirk Adams:
It's important not to overstate the differences. The governor laid out five bullet points. The first four are widespread opportunity for agreement and we're optimistic in those areas. The primary difference would be whether you pass a temporary garden variety tax increase or send one to the ballot for the voters. There are practical and economic implications. We believe you can't fix the budget unless you also fix the economy and imposing a tax increase at this time does just the opposite. It will hurt the economy, not help it.

Ted Simons:
The governor said, I guess expressed shock at some of the things that the leadership was throwing out there. Which she called funny math, rollovers and these sorts of things. Your response.

Kirk Adams:
I understand -- I think there's legitimate criticisms and concerns about going in that direction, but relative to what? Many, many states across the country are utilizing these measures. Our position is that you have to identify the risk and downside with each option on the table and if you're going to propose a temporary tax increase, you have to acknowledge the risk to the economy along with that. We believe a preferable option would be to use the debt financing techniques that spread out the cost, if you will, of this deficit over multiple periods of time rather than concentrating that pain in -- concentrating it in a two or three period of time.

Ted Simons:
Debt financing techniques. This sounds a lot like the outgoing governor was saying.

Bob Burns:
It may sound the same, but I think there's a considerable difference. We're considering a borrowing to basically bridge us through to improving economy. Her borrowing plans were to increase state spending at accelerating rates above a sustainable level and that's what brought us to the problem we're in now. You know, when we were in a high growth spike as many people said it was, the 19% and 20% growth rate, when we came out of that and then continued to maintain spending levels that were created in that spike, it's unsustainable and that's why we're where we're at now.

Ted Simons:
Tax credits seem like it's becoming a talking point at the capitol. Is it sustainable to keep these tax credits going under the current situation?

Bob Burns:
I guess it depends on -- there's a number of tax credits out there and some are in place to stimulate activity, economic activity. If you want to get into the school voucher tax credit issue, I think what we do there is end up saving money by providing a partial payment to attract people out of the public school system into the private system. There's a debate about how many have to be attracted out in order to realize that savings, but the numbers, in my opinion, are the proof in the pudding.

Ted Simons:
We've got a taskforce -- a couple minutes left. A.S.U. people and economists and business -- people that there might be a way to get a tax increase out there, after three or four years, you would actually lower taxes in the long run and just need a simple majority as opposed to a two-thirds supermajority.

Kirk Adams:
You're referring to the prop 108 opinion contained in the F.A.C.T. report. And I think if you have lined up attorneys you would get at least two different answers split 50/50 whether that passes constitutional muster. It's an intriguing concept but if that were true, prop 108 would be meaningless for all intents and purposes. So we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to put the budget at risk to an adverse court decision if we went that direction.

Ted Simons:
All right. Thanks for joining us tonight on "Horizon."

Bob Burns:
Thank you.