opinion

Arizona budget gets thumbs up from dark-money group

High praise this morning for Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Legislature for their visionary budget.

"Every election, it seems, politicians give lip service to the need for fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. But once in office, they lack the courage and resolve to actually achieve one."

"It's always politically more convenient to spend more than we take in, hide growing debt and liabilities through clever accounting tricks, and leave the consequences for someone else to clean up down the road.

"But not this time.

"In November, voters sent a clear mandate that they wanted to restore fiscal sanity to Arizona government. They demanded our leaders take on the looming budget crisis, show some accountability and get Arizona's fiscal house in order. Last week, Gov. Doug Ducey and the Legislature accomplished just that."

So who, you might ask, is heaping on the praise on this budget, propelled on a rocket through the Legislature in the wee hours, with no public input?

Clearly, it's not college students. Our universities got shanked in this budget – so much so that even the chairman of the Board of Regents thinks Ducey and the Legislature are violating the state constitutional requirement to keep a college education "as nearly free as possible."

Clearly, it's not teachers or parents. The K-12 budget didn't even comply with a court order, requiring Arizona to add $300-plus million in base funding of schools, to correct years of illegal budget cuts to schools that were already funded at bottom-of-the-barrel levels, compared to other states.

I don't imagine charter schools are too thrilled with the budget. Though they've gotten a commitment from Ducey to help them build more privately-run publicly-financed schools, they, too, are feeling the financial screws of this budget.

Private prison operators might be a little happy but even their 3,000-bed prison was scaled back for the time being.

So who is singing the praises of our governor and our Legislature?

Why, it's Scot Mussi chairman of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, one of the state's premier dark-money operations.

You may recall that the Arizona Free Enterprise Club spent heavily to install a couple of pro-utility candidates to the Arizona Corporation Commission. And that it spent heavily to try to install the son of a corporation commissioner as secretary of state.

But did you know that the Arizona Free Enterprise Club spent nearly $300,000 to ensure a certain sort of Legislature?

More precisely, its donors, cloaked in a shroud of secrecy, spent $292,291.59 in dark-money campaigns aimed at electing the most conservative Republicans and defeating their more moderate counterparts.

Is it any surprise then that Mussi is gushing now at the return on his..or someone's…investment? (Of course, I can't say whose investment that would be, because the source of the money isn't disclosed.)

"In just his third month in office, Gov. Ducey was able to produce a balanced budget that protected taxpayers, put more money into the classroom and shrunk the size of government," Mussi wrote, in an op-ed piece published Thursday. "By any measure, this was a great start to his administration and a great week for Arizona."

A great week for somebody….