Budget Hotwash: Modest Lump Sum Agency Cuts; New Money to Handle Complaints about the AZ State Hospital; & Dollars to Improve the Clunky AzCareCheck System; Unused Old Money Protected from Lapsing
The Arizona Legislature is required by the state constitution to adopt a balanced budget for each fiscal year (Article IV, Section 20, Part 2). That provision says the legislature needs to pass a General Appropriations Act (called informally a feed bill) which has appropriations for the different state departments, state institutions, public schools and interest on public debt.
This year’s “feed bill” is HB2897 and includes the primary budget provisions for state departments and agencies and focuses just on appropriations without including substantive law changes.
Statutory changes needed to reconcile the appropriations made in the feed bill and other changes are put into separate budget bills, called Budget Reconciliation Bills. Most years have a “Health BRB”, but this year there was just a Health Care BRB and a Human Services BRB, as there weren’t any changes needed in state law for ADHS to implement the budget (except for the provisions relating to the Arizona State Hospital in the Health BRB (see HB2903 below).
You can click on the links below for those BRBs to do a deeper dive.
The main ‘feed bill’ gave the ADHS a ‘lump sum’ reduction in their budget of about $719K. Interim Director Cunico has the discretion about what state fund to tap to cut. She has many options… let’s hope she’s thoughtful and doesn’t pull those funds from a critically important service.
Any of you with ADHS special line-item funding should be asking the Director what she intends to cut and explain why it shouldn’t be your program and why before it’s too late. Here is that Feed Bill: HB2897
There were a few other details in the feed bill as well including:
- A new $100K for a new ADOA ombudsman to handle all the Arizona State Hospital complaints (a good thing).
- $500K in ongoing funds & an additional $900K one-time funds for ADHS to improve their clunky Az Care Check IT system which is supposed to provide transparent information about the compliance of hundreds of care facilities – but by all accounts, is currently wholly insufficient.
A few funds were exempted from reverting to the general fund including:
- The $1.2M FY2025 appropriation to support more licensing compliance staff won’t lapse until June 30, 2026.
- The unused $1M in behavioral health care provider loan repayment program won’t lapse until June 30, 2025.
- Old unused FY2023 nursing program funds won’t lapse until June 30, 2025.
- The unused FY2024 appropriation for nurse-family partnership programs won’t lapse until June 30, 2027.
- The $1M FY2025 appropriation for combating fentanyl won’t lapse until June 30, 2026.