Sen. Steve Smith: Update from the Senate

I just wanted to take a minute to give you an update on what is happening in the Senate and in the Legislature as a whole right now.

The session is winding down and we are nearing the end of voting on bills (as a matter of fact, we just passed out some great pro-life and pro-second amendment bills last week), but the main focus of late has been, and will continue to be, the budget.

As you may recall from last year, we (the Republicans) gave Arizona its first structurally balanced budget in years and the result is we now are approximately $600 million in the black. That being said, we are facing a critical time in that we need to be very careful about what we do with this surplus.

As you can imagine, there are many opinions on what to do with the surplus, but what my attitude has and will continue to be is to only fund what it critical and to save the rest in a rainy-day fund. I say this because there are potentially three major obstacles we will be facing through 2015.

The first is that the 1-cent sales tax will expire next year, which means a reduction in approximately $1 billion in revenue, so we must immediately prepare for that (for the record, I do not support the 1-cent sales tax, as I do not support new taxes of any kind).

Second, Arizona is involved in many lawsuits that, if hypothetically we were to lose all, could result in several hundred millions of dollars we would have to pay out. While it is unlikely we would lose them all, we have to be ready for whatever may happen.