Navajo County Supervisor David Tenney says another round of sate legislative cost shifts to counties could be "catastrophic."Arizona's 15 counties are laboring to absorb a fourth year of cost shifting by the state Legislature, and county officials are none too happy about it.
"It's the state's budget problem. It's not the counties that are having these budget problems," Navajo County Board of Supervisors Chairman David Tenney said in an interview for Friday's Arizona Week. "The counties have been balancing their budgets all through this financial downturn. It's the state that hasn't been."
Tenney is president of the County Supervisors Association of Arizona, and in that capacity lobbied hard this spring to reduce what the Legislature wanted to take from the counties. The $93 million in cuts, pass-alongs and takeaways--one of the tools the Legislature used to balance the state budget--brings the total burden to the counties by the Legislature in the last four years to $286 million, he said.
"The counties are going to be OK, but only because of the cuts the counties are willing to make at this point in time that have been necessitated by the money that has been taken from counties over the last four years by the state Legislature," Tenney said. "There aren't any counties that are insolvent or are going to be bankrupt, but there are counties that are dealing with some serious financial issues."
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Andy Kunasek, in a separate interview for Arizona Week, agreed with Tenney's assessment.
"We're actually able to sustain a very large shift from the state," Kunasek said of the $2.3 billion budget his board passed tentatively this week. "We've done a good job, I think, getting through a very bad period in our history."
That includes the economic decline, for which he said his county and most others in the state were prudent.
"In 2007, 2008, most of the counties that I'm aware of recognized the declining economy and started making cuts then," Kunasek said. "The state continued to ramp up spending for the next couple of years, just ignoring the reality of the faltering economy."
"The reward for all of the counties' good fiscal behavior and prudence was the shifts. The state still fails to take full responsibility for their own actions and place it on to the taxpayers of the cities and counties."
For Maricopa County, the shift for the coming fiscal year will be "just shy of $60 million," Kunasek said. "About 26 and a half (million dollars) is just get out the checkbook and write a check."
That was a reference to the Legislature's order that Arizona's five most populous counties send a portion of their revenues to the state. Maricopa is the biggest at $26.4 million, followed by Pima at $6.8 million, Pinal at $2.6 million, Yavapai at $1.4 million and Mohave at $1.4 million.
Tenney said in Navajo County, road maintenance has been deferred, county employees have been laid off, departments are being consolidated and other cuts are being put in place to accommodate.
He and other county officials fear that the Legislature will impose even more cuts and shifts, Tenney said. He mentioned talk at the state level of requiring counties to keep some state prisoners at the counties' expense. Such a move would be financially devastating, he said.
"That's something that would be catastrophic to Navajo County," he said, explaining that the county now houses 90 federal prisoners and receives $2 million a year in revenue from the federal government for it, using the money to pay down the jail construction debt. If required to take state prisoners, Navajo would have to stop housing the federal prisoners, lose the revenue from it and bear the added expense of housing the state prisoners.
Reporter Michael Chihak further explores Arizona counties' budgeting and financial issues on the May 27 episode of Arizona Week. Watch here:
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