Bipartisan Senate budget clears first hurdle, leaves both parties wanting more

Arizona senators from both parties expressed displeasure with the Senate’s budget proposal, but the chamber’s Appropriations Committee chairman told them that was a sign of a well-negotiated bipartisan plan. 

“Things that are particularly offensive to either side are not in there,” Sen. John Kavanagh said during a lengthy Senate Appropriations Committee meeting on Tuesday. “This is a bipartisan budget, and one of the characteristics of a bipartisan budget is that neither side gets everything they want.”

During the nearly three-hour-long meeting to discuss the Senate’s budget proposal, which was made public the evening prior, Kavanagh urged lawmakers, as well as representatives from local government and programs that rely on state funding, to quickly wrap up their comments. 

“To dwell on one particular topic and go on for minutes, we’ll never get out of here,” he said. 

That Appropriations Committee hearing was the only chance for members of the public to share their concerns about the budget plan directly with lawmakers before the Senate votes on it. 

Both Sen. Vince Leach, R-Saddlebrooke and Sen. Mitzi Epstein, D-Tempe, criticized the legislature’s rapid turn-around process for budget proposals, with little time for those not directly involved in budget negotiations to read through the documents and fully understand the implications. 

House Republicans, who created their own separate state budget proposal, introduced their bills three days before voting on them late Friday, and the Senate plans to follow the same timeline, with a vote expected Wednesday. 

Leach said during the committee hearing that he hoped this process didn’t turn into another “fiasco” with the 16 lengthy and complicated bills that make up the budget proposal published less than 24 hours before the meeting to discuss them. 

Epstein voted against moving forward with most of the budget bills, saying that the state budgeting process was always a fiasco and that she couldn’t support legislation when she hadn’t fully read it or heard opinions on it from experts. 

“Every year, we have to come back and fix the budget bills of the last year,” she said. 

Even with plentiful complaints about the Senate budget proposal from both sides of the aisle, the chamber’s plan has buy-in from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs — unlike the House’s proposal, which she described as “dead on arrival.” 

Senate Republicans spent weeks negotiating with Hobbs to create the spending plan. House Republicans, meanwhile, abandoned the negotiations several weeks ago to formulate their own plan — without input from Hobbs or Senate Republicans. 

Leach agreed with Barry DeFeo, leader of the Arizona Corrections Association, that the Senate plan includes inadequate funding to pay corrections officers at a time when many of the state’s prisons are sorely understaffed. 

“Our system is stretched to the breaking point,” DeFeo said. “Unless immediate action is taken, violence will continue to rise.” 

On April 4, Ricky Wassenaar, an inmate at an Arizona State Prison near Tucson, killed three other men serving time there. 

Assaults on prison staff nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025, along with an increase in assaults between inmates, DeFeo said, and across the state, there is around a 20% vacancy rate in corrections positions, with about 2,000 jobs unfilled. This has led to dangerous situations when one officer must do the job of three, leaving inmates with inadequate supervision. DeFeo requested funding for a 20% pay raise for corrections officers to improve retention and make prisons safer. 

“When we’re increasing total spending 7.9% in the State of Arizona and we can’t find money for the correctional officers, at least in my mind, something is amiss,” Leach said. 

Epstein’s concerns mostly focused on education funding and helping children and their families escape poverty. 

While Hobbs has said that the Senate plan, unlike the House’s, fully funds K-12 education, Epstein said she disagreed, claiming that the state was already starting behind where it should because it didn’t allocate additional funds to account for skyrocketing inflation in past years. Epstein said that education for Arizona’s children should be a top priority for legislators. 

“I don’t know what’s going on with the rest of these budgeteers, when we’re choosing some of these things that just don’t make any sense to me at all,” she said, singling out money to support the horseracing industry and other private businesses. 

Sen. Mark Finchem, R-Prescott, countered that Arizona doesn’t have a K-12 education funding problem but a budgeting issue, reciting a common refrain from his party that too much money is being spent outside the classroom on administration. 

The latest report from the Arizona Auditor General on public school spending found that the percentage of money going toward classroom instruction in public K-12 schools decreased in the last three years. But that analysis showed that the money wasn’t being used to pay administrators, but to fund student support services and facility operations. 

Epstein, along with Sen. Lauren Kuby, D-Tempe, also lamented the absence of the low-income housing tax credit from the Senate proposal, as well as the lack of contribution to the Housing Trust Fund, which pays for things like eviction prevention, housing development and housing assistance. 

Finchem, along with other members of the Appropriations Committee, said he was concerned about a dearth of wiggle room in the plan, with an estimated $28 million surplus in a $17.6 billion budget. He said he was voting in favor of budget proposals reluctantly, especially because of the turbulent environment in the country, and the expectation that Arizona will see deep cuts from the federal government in the fall, after Congress passes its own budget. 

The Senate is set to amend and vote on its package of budget bills Wednesday, and to transmit them to the House for consideration.