June 25, 2022
Hi everyone! Here is an update from Sandy at the Sierra Club.
The Arizona Legislature finally adjourned Sine Die this morning at 12:25AM. This past week legislators passed a bi-partisan budget and a bi-partisan water bill. The budget was nothing to write home about relative to environmental protection, but it was better than the bare bones budget they had originally proposed. The Arizona State Parks Heritage Fund received $2.5 million not the $10 million that it should have received, the Arizona Trail received $250,000, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality received additional funding for the Water Quality Fee Fund to help, in theory, with its backlog of work on water quality as outlined in its performance audit. We shall see. Sadly, the budget was loaded up with border dollars including for a Border Strike Task Force and other funds.
SB1740 water infrastructure financing; supply; augmentation (Kerr) passed last night 48-1-11 in the House and 25-1-4 in the Senate. There is no doubt that it is a much better bill than when they started and it does not create a new totally unaccountable bureaucracy. The Democrats negotiated a conservation grant fund with a $200 million appropriation that can fund conservation programs and projects in cities, towns, and counties or some kind of partnership with those entities. The dollars can only be used for voluntary water conservation projects that include long-term reductions in water use, improvements in efficiency and reliability. The grants can fund education and research on reducing water consumption and improving efficiency, turf removal, rainwater harvesting, watershed protection and restoration, etc. Again, this is positive, but not enough and is overshadowed to some degree by the more than a billion dollars over three years for augmentation to bring water in from other states or countries to support business as usual -- unfettered growth, growing alfalfa and other thirsty crops in the desert, and continued invitations to data centers and other water-intensive industries to locate in our communities. SB1740 does not do anything to limit groundwater pumping or even measure it. There is no requirement for considering the environmental impacts of these water augmentation projects either. We badly need a stronger regulatory structure for water, but we just did not get it with this bill, so the Sierra Club could not support it.
SB1322 NOW: TPT; use tax; hydrogen; exemption (Shope) failed on Third Read 14-11-5. It would have provided a sales tax exemption for hydrogen used as a fuel despite the fact that 99% of all hydrogen is derived from fossil fuels. Shope had changed his vote to ask for reconsideration, but they did not get back to it, so the bill died. Yay!
There were a plethora of bad democracy, bad voting bills, that did not advance, but quite sadly there were several that did.
HCR2015 initiatives; supermajority vote; requirement (Dunn; Biasiucci, Bolick) was amended in the Senate, but it is still bad and will be on the ballot this fall. If approved by the voters, the constitution would be amended to require a 60 percent approval by the voters for any ballot measure, including any constitutional amendment, that includes a tax.
HB2243 voter registration; state residency; cancellation (also passed and is on Governor Ducey's desk. Please contact him and ask him to veto it. You can reach him at (602) 542-4331. The bill requires voter registration forms to include a statement that if the registrant permanently moves to another state after registering to vote in Arizona, the registration will be cancelled. It also provides another mechanism for county recorders to cancel registrations, possibly disqualifying voters inappropriately.
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