This week at the Capitol: An empty House, taxing sunlight and nixing low-turnout Arizona elections
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As the Arizona legislative session continues, nearly a third of House members will be gone. For most of the week, 17 of them, including House Speaker Ben Toma, will be traveling to Israel on what organizers call an educational trip. The Senate however, will be doing its regular work.
In fact, that chamber denied a request from across the Capitol Mall to allow the House to adjourn for more than three days.
Every Monday during the legislative session, Howard Fisher of Capitol Media Services joins The Show to preview the Legislature for the week.
Full interview
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Howie.
HOWARD FISCHER: Good morning. I love it when lawmakers fight amongst themselves.
BRODIE: Well, so let's talk just a little bit about what happened late last week, because there's a rule that says one chamber has to ask the other for permission if they're going to adjourn like for a long holiday weekend, something like that. So the House did that for the Senate and the Senate said, yeah, no?
FISCHER: Exactly. Actually, it's more than a rule. The Arizona Constitution says that if one chamber wants to be gone for more than three days during the regular legislative session. So right now they can be gone, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, which is typical. But if they want to take Monday off also, they have to ask permission. It's fairly routine. I've seen that over the 40 years I've been here, you know, the house asked the Senate, the Senate asked the House, they tend to keep pretty much the same schedule.
All that changed last week, when the House said, look, we'd really like to be gone a week without having to, you know, worry about, you know, bringing enough people in. And Sen. [Anthony] Kern said, not just no, but, but hell no. You know, you're supposed to be here, you're supposed to be working. His argument is we should be doing the budget, never mind that there are no budget negotiations going on, because, you know, the governor is just not talking to lawmakers. And he got 24 of the 30 senators to say no. Let's just say it left the speaker very unhappy. He says that this is all about the fact that both he and Kern are running for the CD 8 seat, and that Anthony is a little unhappy, and it left [Rep.] Alma Hernandez who organized the trip, shall we say a little miffed. She, let's just say she used a word about Mr. Kern that I cannot say on radio unless we know the FCC is not listening.
BRODIE: Yeah. Thank you for keeping this a family show. So, like, how does the House get around this? Because they, they have agendas today, then they're essentially gone starting tomorrow through the end of the week.
FISCHER: Well, the workaround is sort of a wink and a nod. So let's assume that they come in and they, they go home at the end of the day, Monday. So they should be back Thursday.
What will probably happen is that [Rep.] Travis Grantham, who's the speaker pro tem, will come in with one of the lawmakers, they will gavel the session in. They will look around and say, gee, I guess there's no quorum and gavel the session out. And they will do that every three days as long as they have to until everybody comes back.
Is that, you know, legal? Again, you know, you put three attorneys in a room, I'll give you seven different as to whether they are in fact complying with the law, but that's the plan at least for now.
BRODIE: All right. So let's talk about some of the legislation that actually will be considered when lawmakers are physically in the country. There's one dealing with solar royalties. Like what, what is this about?
FISCHER: There is some concern particularly in Mojave County that private companies are coming in and they're buying or leasing up agricultural land for these large solar farms. Now, many of the farmers are quite happy to let them have the land, figuring maybe we'll get more money for that than we will for our agricultural operations. But the concern is that you're, you're taking agriculture out of production.
And so the, the proposals by Senator, I'm sorry, Sen. [Sonny] Borrelli and House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci says, tell you what we want them to pay for using our, our sun, our sunlight, so to speak. And we're gonna impose an excise tax. We're gonna require the counties to impose a tax of a certain percentage of what they are making, and then that tax will then go to reducing property taxes in the area. Now, what's interesting is that they're only doing this for solar. In other words, there's nothing for wind. If somebody wanted to build a coal-fired power plant, assuming you get that by the EPA and build in Mohave County, there wouldn't be an excise for that. So this, this is a little bit of both agriculture and a little bit of thoughts, I believe, by some folks that, why are we pushing solar energy as you, we've talked about over the, the, the months and years on this show, there is a certain hostility to what they call "the World Economic Forum agenda" of getting us out of our cars and getting us to breathe cleaner air, heaven forbid.
BRODIE: Right. Howie, let me ask you about another bill that would essentially call for a do-over on certain elections if there's not a certain turnout threshold?
FISCHER: Yes. And this specifically relates to bond elections very often what happens, some of these bond elections are held, let's say in March or in May, and the turnout can be 14%, 20% to 24%.
BRODIE: Yeah, that's pretty low.
FISCHER: Very, very low. And this proposal says if you don't get 60% turnout, the bond doesn't take effect, even if 98% of the people who turned out want that bond. That raises some interesting questions. I mean, if somebody doesn't turn out, does that not show maybe they're just not interested. Now, there's a parallel proposal also going through that will require all local governments to hold their elections in November. So the presumption is the turnout would be higher there.
The downside of course of that is that bond elections and all that city stuff goes way at the bottom of the ballot, and we know that there's a ballot fall off. That people who vote for the president and the senators and maybe the lawmakers and by the time you get to the Central Arizona Water Conservation District and the city council and the ballot measures, people tend to lose interest. But there, there's an understanding of, sure you want as many people voting as possible, but the right not to vote exists as much as the right to vote.
BRODIE: Well, that seems like it would especially be a problem quickly, Howie, when you know the, the ballot pages, we're looking at two, three pieces of paper here going out.
FISCHER: Oh, exactly. And it's getting even crazier. I mean, you know, we've got a story out this morning about the fact that there are probably 20 or 30 items that are gonna be put on the ballot by the Legislature. They're a little unhappy with the governor who says, oh, well, you see, I don't like these things. So they figured out, well, if we just said this on the ballot, maybe the voters will approve it and, you know, we could end up with taking 20 minutes just to go through your ballot if you happen to go into a voting booth, which mitigates of course, for voting early, which of course some people don't want and some lawmakers are trying to get rid of early voting. So you can see the wonderful circle being spun here.
