Here's the latest dispatch from the Arizona Legislature, courtesy of Sierra Club lobbyist Sandy Bahr:

Q: How many economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. If the light bulb really needed changing, market forces would have already caused it to happen.

March 5, 2010

Hi everyone! Apparently, there is little motivation by legislators to stop most of the ridiculous, unconstitutional, and certainly not the generally bad legislation. This week, the House passed HB2337 Arizona manufactured incandescent light bulbs; regulation (Antenori, Biggs, Gowan, et al) 33-27. It says that incandescent light bulbs that are manufactured and sold in Arizona are not subject to federal law. This is an anti-energy efficiency bill that is probably unconstitutional and is reminiscent of the bill passed by the legislature that made it okay to manufacture and chlorofluorocarbons despite federal law and international treaties. Federal law requires that more efficient light bulbs be manufactured over time. The bill is intended to promote a lawsuit, but I do not believe there is a constitutional right to inefficient light bulbs.

They also passed HB2290 waste tires in abandoned mines (Jones, Kavanagh, Mason, et al) 34-26. This bill allows waste tires to be used to fill abandoned mines. It is a recycled bad idea from last year and

The latest report from state Rep. Steve Farley:

Howdy, Friends O'Farley…

Let's start with a few stats.

The House has finished hearing House bills and the Senate has finished hearing Senate bills. So this is a good time to look at what bills went where, and whether certain bills from members of a certain political party were treated fairly.

In the House, Democrats introduced 233 bills, while Republicans introduced 638 bills.

Out of those lovely bundles of legalese, Republicans had 70%, and Democrats had only 16% of their bills heard in committees.

To put it another way, 448 House bills were heard

Rather than finding a way out of the budget crisis, the Arizona Legislature is busy tackling a far more immediate threat to the state: human-animal hybrids.

A couple of weeks ago, lawmakers debated the merits of SB 1307, which would ban the creation of hybrids (so those hoping for new blue-skinned Avatar bodies will have to go elsewhere).

The bill moved through the Committee on Public Safety and Human Services for further consideration in a 4-3 vote on Feb. 17.

Here’s our favorite human-hybrid definition (italics ours):

"A nonhuman life form engineered so that it contains a human brain or a brain derived wholly or predominantly from human neural tissues."

The bottom appears within sight. The latest state financial report notes that we had our first single-digit drop in year-to-year revenues since September 2008. This is good news, in the I've-been-down-so-long-that-it-looks-like-up-to-me sense.

A few highlights noted by the JLBC staff:

The January revenue results broke several long term trends. General Fund revenue collections were $1.44 billion. Excluding one-time proceeds, collections were (2)% less than last January. This was the first single digit year-over- year loss since September 2008.

In addition, January General Fund revenues were $14.2 million above the forecast, which marks the first time since March 2007 that revenue collections exceeded

Sandy Bahr, legislative lobbyist for the Sierra Club, has sent out her weekly bulletin:

Hi everyone! This week was a dreadful week at the Arizona Capitol, but there was some end-of-the-week redemption. First of all, after passing HB2701 electric utilities; renewable energy standards (Lesko, Antenori, Barnes, et al) in the Government Committee on Tuesday evening with a 5-2-0-2 vote, on Thursday, Representative Lesko announced that she was withdrawing the bill. This is the bill that would have established a renewable energy standard of 15 percent renewable by 2025, but define renewable as including nuclear power as well as large hydro power, creating a conflicting standard with

Last year, Senate President Bob Burns, who will be our guest on Arizona Illustrated's Friday Roundtable on March 12, allowed few non-budget bills to be heard for the first half of the session. It was meant to make lawmakers focus on the budget, although that remains out of balance even today. It did, however, slow down a lot of nonsense, although much got passed anyway.

Burns has just sent out a release saying he's suspending committee work next week to make his caucus focus on the budget:

Consistent with his commitment to focus on the state budget crisis, Senate President Bob Burns has suspended all Standing Committee hearings for the week of March 1. The postponement allows members to give full attention to the issue Arizonans want addressed: completing budgets for FY 2010 and FY 2011.

President Burns and Senate leadership have been working on the budgets since the beginning of this current Legislative session. At the same time, the Senate has been hearing hundreds of bills. Next week, the Senate will continue to hold caucuses and have votes on many bills, so those that pass can move to the House. But committee hearings will not happen, so Senators will have extra time to help solve this budget crisis.

The release came the day after Burns sent out a bulletin expressing his concern with the debt lawmakers were racking up:

As our state suffers through this current budget crisis, much of the attention has been focused on shrinking revenues and program and agency cuts. What people don’t seem to be talking about is

Remember how we mentioned that the Arizona Chamber of Commerce didn't like the notion being floated by Gov. Jan Brewer and state lawmakers about cutting more than 300,000 people below the federal poverty line from state health insurance?

Turns out that somebody crunched some numbers. Casey Newton of the Arizona Republic reports:

An estimated $2.7 billion and 42,000 jobs will leave the state if the Legislature approves proposed cuts to health care, according to an analysis by economists at Arizona State University.

The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association hired the economists to evaluate Gov. Jan Brewer's budget proposal. The proposal, which could be voted on as early as next week, includes deep cuts for AHCCCS, reduced support for rural hospitals, the elimination of KidsCare and cuts to a program that brings new doctors to the state.

The governor's proposal would result in $1.15 billion in cuts directly to hospitals, according to John Rivers, president of the hospital association. Combined with a loss in federal matching funds, the loss to Arizona is an estimated $2.7 billion.

But just keep telling yourself that the health-care system is fine and doesn't need reform.

Howie Fischer reports:

Ignoring threats by a company to pack up and leave, a House panel voted late Tuesday to overturn the renewable energy mandate on utilities by the Arizona Corporation Commission.

HB2701 strips utility regulators of their authority to impose such requirements. In its place, it puts in a different mandate, this one crafted by Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale.

But the mandate is full of loopholes that, in essence, would undo the commission order requiring utilities to generate at least 15 percent of their power by 2025 from solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources.

The 5-2 vote by the House Government Committee came even after Polly Shaw, lobbyist for Suntech Power Holdings, said her firm is likely to reconsider its decision announced just last month to build a solar panel manufacturing plant in Goodyear.

She told lawmakers that the decision to locate in Arizona was based in large part on the renewable energy requirements in the commission’s directive. Shaw said HB2701 effectively makes them meaningless.

“Voluntary goals don’t build solar projects,” Shaw said, saying investors want “concrete market certainty” that the products will sell. That mandate includes not only a requirement that some of the renewable energy come from solar, but that part of that come from “distributed generation,” which essentially means individual homes and businesses installing photovoltaic solar panels on their roofs.

“Broadening the definition of renewable to include nuclear and hydro power will gut the renewable standard,” Shaw testified.

“It will obliterate demand for solar,” she continued. “And it will eliminate the reason we selected Arizona.”

Presenting a brand new argument against those pesky, energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs: They make it hard to apply makeup. At least that’s what state Rep. Olivia Cajero Bedford thinks.

As Jim Nintzel discusses this week in the Currents section: During a recent House Commerce Committee Rep. Frank Antenori explained the merits of his bill, HB 2337, which would (and we’re not making this up) assert state rights over the federal government through the protection of incandescent light bulbs.

When Antenori was referring to some restaurants preferring the spherical shape of the old incandescent bulbs to the squiggly shape of most fluorescent bulbs, Cajero Bedford chimed in: “And Mr. Chairman, another good point is it really disturbs the ambiance of putting on makeup.”

This also formed the basis of Cajero-Bradford yea vote on the bulb bill (which only got one “no” vote in the committee):

“It comes down to aesthetics verses environment. Speaking for women, I think there are going to be a lot of unhappy women with these light bulbs and with that I vote yes,” she said.

Check out the Daily Show-ready clip below:

Glenn Hamer of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry says Gov. Jan Brewer’s plan to save hundreds of millions of dollars by cutting health-care insurance coverage hundreds of thousands of Arizona workers is the wrong way to go.

Brewer wants to ask voters to rescind the Healthy Arizona proposition they passed in 2000. That prop required the state to give health-care coverage to anyone under the federal poverty line, which is now $18,310 for a family of three. Before that passed, Arizona residents who earned more than one-third of the federal poverty level were ineligible for state coverage.

Hamer warns that reducing that coverage would have dire consequences for the state’s health-care industry.

“If you’re taking 300,000 people off of health insurance, it doesn’t mean they won’t receive care,” Hamer says. “Federal law requires that care be provided in the emergency room for people who go there for health-care needs. It’s going to be covered one way or another. That’s a highly inefficient, extremely expensive way to provide care.”

Hamer says that ends up increasing costs for hospitals, which leads to a “hidden health-care tax.”

“What winds up happening is those costs are passed on to private insurance, private insurance passes those costs on to the private sector and the cost of insurance goes up, which means fewer businesses can afford to provide coverage, which means that fewer Arizonans will have coverage,” he says.