By Luige del Puerto | Arizona Capitol Times
It’s looking less like a great comeback and more like an arduous climb out of Dante’s purgatory.
While Gov. Jan Brewer often talks about Arizona’s “success story” and how the state is now among the best places in the nation to do business, the truth is that Arizona is once more in deep fiscal trouble.
Analysts from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee said Arizona faces a $520 million deficit this year, $1 billion in fiscal 2016, $928 million in the year after, and $787 million in 2018.
That means the next governor will have to plug a roughly $3.2 billion budget hole during his first term. That doesn’t even count other obligations that may also be forced on policymakers. If the court orders the state to pay back the schools for the years it withheld full inflationary funding, that would add a $1.3 billion headache within the next five years.
Unless revenue trends are quickly reversed, it would be as if lawmakers woke up from the nightmare of the Great Recession — when they were forced to temporarily raise taxes, mortgage state assets, move funds from one pot to another, freeze programs or eliminate others, and cut deep into agencies’ bones — only to find themselves in the same situation.
