Budget is on track for passage today

The bills that make up the state budget and include funding for Gov. Doug Ducey’s plan to give teachers pay raises were approved by the Appropriations Committee in the Senate and were headed for passage by the House committee this morning.

That puts the budget on track to pass both chambers today. Ducey has said he would sign the budget into law as soon as it lands on his desk.

The committees asked questions

about the details of the budget, though nothing substantial was changed over the hours of testimony.

But the hearings, laying bare the raw details of of the state’s budget, had a rapt and at times rowdy audience.

Seats in the committee rooms for the detail-laden hearings on the 10 bills that make up the budget package were at a premium for much of the day. Red-shirt wearing spectators, supporters of the #RedforEd movement, packed the audience.

The House set up an overflow room. At sunset, a line of people snaked outside the House and into the rose garden between the two chambers, as people waited to go through security. The Senate does not require visitors to go through a security screening.

The Senate crowd proved boisterous though. At one point, as the committee entered its fourth hours of debating bills, the audience began chanting.

“I hope this is not what happens in your classrooms,” Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, told the crowd. “How much longer is this interruption going to be?”

The interruption would last a few minutes longer, even after Kavanagh recessed the meeting.

“This budget leaves support staff behind!” some in the crowd shouted. “Students get less now than in 2008!” “Don’t make us choose between students and staff!”

The committee went back to work a few minutes later after officers removed some of those who were chanting.

On the House side, the cheering seemed confined to the side overflow room, lobby and hallways where teachers and education supporters watched the hearing on television screens.

After teachers testified before the committee, loud cheers from the hallways resonated in the chamber.

Zina Rhoad-Weinberger, a specialeducation teacher at Emerson Elementary in Mesa, told lawmakers that she was quitting after this school year after eight years in the district.

“I’m done,” said.

After she spoke and left the hearing room, teachers lined up to give her highfives and hugs.

The lawmakers debated the meat of the bills, which aim to provide teachers statewide an average 20 percent raise by the 2020 school year.

Ducey’s original proposal had been criticized by some lawmakers as relying too much on rosy economic projections.

The budget bills rely on less-optimistic projections of the revenue the state would receive. Instead, the teacher pay raise plan was funded by various other measures, some of which dip into the pockets of everyday Arizonans.

Nearly 20 percent of the cost of the pay raise package will be raised by a new fee paid by motorists registering their vehicles.

Another measure in the budget would potentially increase property taxes, primarily in Tucson.

The measure transfers responsibility for certain expenses, those that deal with rectifying decades-old civil rights violations, from the state to districts.