You can’t sugarcoat what happened to our Southern Arizona House speaker in the early hours of Good Friday.
David Gowan got played.
And when he adjourned the House at 3:30 in the morning, there was little for our region to smile about. Budget cuts and cost shifts are what we got for having the Sierra Vista man and University of Arizona alumnus leading the Legislature’s lower chamber.
The full effect of the session is yet to be sorted out, but suffice it to say you can’t compare Gowan’s impact to that of Southern Arizona legislators of yore like Tom Goodwin. A Tucson Republican, Goodwin was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee for a decade in the 1970s and early 1980s. He was known for gumming up the works till he could bring home funding for the University of Arizona and other regional priorities.
Literally locking the budget in his car’s trunk to prevent others from being able to change it was one trick Goodwin employed.
Compare that to Thursday, when one of the priorities Gowan was spending his precious time and influence on was a bill that would eliminate a fee charged to pawnbrokers in Tucson and Phoenix who buy gold.
Not a top Southern Arizona priority, or a priority for anyone in Arizona except a few pawnbrokers.
I sent word to Gowan on Monday night that I was planning to write about his session but did not hear from him on Tuesday.
Three Tucson-area legislators I spoke with gave Gowan middling marks overall for the session. Republicans Chris Ackerley and Mark Finchem, both freshmen, told me they thought he managed a chaotic situation well overall.
But Finchem, of Oro Valley, added that he and others were disappointed in the rush to conclude business before the holiday weekend began.
“We would have preferred to adjourn at about 10 o’clock (on Thursday) and come back after Easter,” Finchem said. “When people get impatient, that’s when people make mistakes. We’re talking about policy matters here; we’re not talking about shopping for groceries.”
The pressure to end the session in near-record time came most strongly from the Senate side, where Andy Biggs is president. And he’s the one who ultimately called the shots Thursday night and early Friday morning, leaving Gowan a spectator.
Frustrated with delays in the House, Biggs called for a vote on adjourning at 1:30 in the morning. It was unusual that one chamber would end its session before the other had agreed that business was done.
And it came as a surprise to members of the House. They were debating a bill that would have made it illegal for get-out-the-vote groups to go door-to-door and collect early ballots for voters — a Republican priority — when word came that the Senate had adjourned.
“Everything was in disarray and confusion,” said Tucson Democratic Rep. Bruce Wheeler, who is assistant minority leader. “Not only did we not know what was going on, the Republicans didn’t know what was going on.”
“There was no excuse for us not to come back this week and even the next week if necessary,” Wheeler added. “The person pushing the session ending on Good Friday was Biggs.”
Why Biggs pulled a fast one on his fellow conservative Republican Gowan is anybody’s guess, Wheeler said. The two have been working together this session, but they are members of different legislative factions.
Ackerley noted that, even after the Senate adjourned, Gowan was able to continue work for a couple more hours on legislation that could be completed. Among the bills was one that put $500,000 toward a kindergarten-through-third-grade reading program handled by the Arizona Department of Education.
“When the Senate adjourned and it threw everything up in the air, the speaker handled it well,” Ackerley said.
But the sudden end of the session left some top Republican priorities undone and left some Republican members dissatisfied that their bills weren’t considered.
Add to that the facts that the budget of the University of Arizona, Gowan’s alma mater, is being cut by about $30 million and around $18 million in property tax costs are being shifted to Pima County taxpayers, thousands of whom are Gowan’s constituents.
It sounded nice to have a speaker from Southern Arizona. And it was fascinating for me to watch him work when I was at the Capitol for a day in February and wrote a column about Gowan.
But if we can’t count on him even to get our legislators’ bills heard, let alone bring some benefits home, what’s the point? We might as well have another speaker from the Phoenix area.
