Dems host state budget meeting in Yuma

Democratic state legislators are holding a series of town hall meetings on the state budget, with a session set for Saturday in Yuma.

District 13 Reps. Charlene Fernandez, D-Yuma and House minority whip, Jesus Rubalcava, DGila Bend, and Sen. Lisa Otondo, D-Yuma, are expected to attend, along with District 29 Sen. Martin Quezada, D-Phoenix and Senate minority leader, and District 19 Sen. Lupe Contreras, D-Cashion and Senate minority whip.

The meeting is scheduled for 12:30 to 3 p.m. in the council chambers at Yuma City Hall, 1 City Plaza. Fernandez said a similar, but bipartisan event held last year drew about 20 members of the public, and Dems are hoping for at least 60 attendees this time.

She said the politicians don’t intend to do most of the talking aside from a slide presentation in the beginning. At the first meeting last weekend in Flagstaff, she said, “we took no more than about 20 minutes, because we really wanted to get the input of the participants that were there. That was the impetus for starting the town halls, to get citizen input.”

Fernandez said that based on the constituent feedback she’s gotten so far and the priorities of the party’s minority report, most of the discussion will concern education funding. The top priority in the minority report is a 4 percent salary increase for teachers, she said.

“We’re at a crisis mode right now. We’ve never had so many certificated teachers in Arizona. But they’re not going into their field of study, they’re going to work at places where they get paid more, where they go and the resources are there. It’s a big issue, and so we have class sizes that are 31 when they should only be 22 or 23 or 24, and they have resources for that many in a classroom.”

Rubalcava, a special education teacher, said he’s getting the same outpouring of support from the public for school spending. “They’re being very, very clear that they want us to invest in our education system,” he said.

Other spending priorities in the minority report include a one-time infusion of an additional $30 million in Highway User Revenue Funds to counties and additional funding to Department of Economic Security programs including child care subsidies, TANF (restoring lifetime limit to two years) and Adult Protective Services.

Even though the state budget process is well underway at this point, Fernandez said the input received at the town halls will be useful to the party.

“It will help us, because even though we have our priorities in to the speaker’s office, we’re going to be having small group meetings, and if somebody has some great idea, we can present that during our small-group meetings on the budget. What we learned is while the Republican leadership is very interested in our priorities, they’re not very interested in our ideas for generating more revenue,” she said.

These include freezing tax credits for donations to school tuition organizations for two years, devoting a portion of lottery revenue for teacher salaries and filling 10 Department of Revenue positions involved with auditing and revenue collection, she said.

The Legislature also held townhall budget meetings last year, with GOP leaders participating, but Fernandez and Rubalcava said the majority party is not taking part this year.

“We are getting priorities of a different constituency and making sure that their voices are being heard,” Rubalcava said.

Republican Sen. Don Shooter of Yuma, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he hadn’t even heard the Democrats were holding the town hall meetings anywhere this year, let along in Yuma. He said GOP leaders simply don’t have time right now to hold these kind of statewide sessions.

“I do believe these things are very healthy, but they have the luxury to do it because they don’t have to govern, they don’t have that time constraint. Once we’re out of session, then maybe we can do something,” he said.

Budget talks between Republican leaders are continuing as they weigh Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget agenda versus the legislators’. There are differences between the two sides on K-12 teacher pay and allocating $30 million in sales tax funding to the three state universities, he said.

The gubernatorial plan includes a 2 percent increase for teacher salaries spread over five years. “The Legislature’s going to try to up that, we’re going to try to do it a different way. But it’s still in negotiations, so there’s nothing official,” Shooter said.

He said he could not give an estimate for when the budget will be finalized and sent to Ducey for his signature.