Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Legislative Republicans - "Ooopsie."

From AZCentral.com -
A new element of Republican legislative leaders' developing proposal to help balance the state budget appeared in limbo Tuesday, with the House's budget-writer saying the idea needs more study because it's not clear it would work.

The $2.7 billion budget-balancing proposal released late Monday would get $210 million of its savings and other changes by indirectly tapping money that cities collect from impact fees paid on development, including construction of new homes.

"We don't know if this is viable at all," said Appropriations Chairman John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills. "We're not going to present this as an option in the budget at this point."
Let me translate for everybody - "We're not sure it's legal, we are sure that we don't have the votes to pass the budget with the municipal fund swipe, and we're *really* sure that we just pissed off every municipal official in the state. Many of whom whose help we'll need to get re-elected next year."

David Safier at Blog for Arizona offers his take here.

Later!

2 comments:

Thane Eichenauer said...

As I've pointed out elsewhere, municipal corporations (e.g. cities) don't vote, people do

Craig said...

Municipal corporations don't endorse candidates either. They are just expected to provide the services that people pay for (emergency services, roads, etc.)

But elected municipal officials do both - endorse candidates and vote.

You can bet that many of them will remember which legislators went out of their way to make life tougher for municipal officials.