PHOENIX (AP) - Arizona’s new Senate President Steve Yarbrough formally takes the reins when the Legislature begins its session in January. But the Chandler Republican is already settling into the office and setting his priorities.
Yarbrough sat down with The Associated Press to discuss his view of the job and the top legislative issues in the coming year. Answers have been edited for length.
Question: Is your goal to shape the chamber’s business or put your stamp on it?
Answer: I think it’s a bit of a combination. I see myself as hopefully being a highly effective administrator who’s obviously responsible for making this place work as well as he possibly can. But I also do have some philosophic goals along the way.
Q: So what are your priorities?
A: I’m not sure we’re going to get these things necessarily fixed in the first year, but the public safety pension retirement system, that decision by a quasi-version of the state Supreme Court is really, really problematic. (A panel of judges, sitting as the state Supreme Court, ruled this year that the Legislature can’t boost employee pension contributions.) If we can’t adjust the contribution rate to prevent the plan from falling into insolvency, that is a big problem.
Q: The House speaker is concerned about the increase in the minimum wage.
A: And that’s on my list as well. The unintended consequences of Prop. 206 are substantial. Setting aside the huge impact on lots of small businesses, just the impact on the government, the people, most of whom are serving our disabled community … most of those people weren’t making $10 an hour. But they were very important people, their jobs were important because they serve a community with great need. I’m now hearing from school districts who are saying we don’t pay our aides $10 and hour, and now we don’t know what we are going to do. I think we made a mistake as a people - I think passing Prop 206 was an error and now we’re going to see some consequences that we’re not going to like very much.
Q: Well, if the disabled community is so important, should the state be paying the caregivers sub-poverty level wages?
A: It’s not for me to say whether those people ought to be making $20 an hour or $8.50 an hour. But when the government puts its fingers into the process in that fashion then sometimes we end up with these sorts of frankly unproductive (outcomes). Maybe we need a do-over on this one. Maybe there’s another crack at it.
Q: What do we see this year on the abortion front? What is there left to do?
A: Right now I think we are at a somewhat unique time in the state of Arizona. I don’t think there’s a pending abortion-related case in Arizona at the moment. I think the big battleground’s going to be on the federal level. I think if we do anything in the life area it will be probably pretty modest, maybe even very modest and a bit around the edges because we’re going to be watching to see what happens in Washington.
Q: Major schools voucher expansions have failed in the past couple of years, and they failed because people in your own caucus believe public schools are underfunded. Is there’s something that can move there?
A: I don’t buy at all that you have to be one or the other in this whole process. I think you can be a strong advocate of school choice and simultaneously a strong advocate of funding for K-12 public schools, be it district schools or charter schools or online charter schools. So I think that you can do the best you can for funding our public schools while simultaneously moving the school choice needle further down the road. If we can’t do universal (vouchers) would I support another incremental step? I absolutely would.
Q: You only have about $24 million in available new cash projected to be available in a $9.6 billion budget next year. That’s a drop in the bucket in a state with lots of unfunded needs.
A: $24 million is a lot for you and me but it’s not very much, its crumbs, in a state budget. It’s really problematic in my view. But understand there’s $315 million in new money that’s going to go to K-12 education by formula. So the $24 million that we might like to use for example to move forward on all-day kindergarten or spend more money at the department of child safety … if that’s the number … that we’re working from I hope we don’t spend too much time doing it. It’s like, take one, move on.
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