Education advocacy groups on Tuesday filed hundreds of thousands of signatures to block Gov. Doug Ducey’s sweeping income tax cuts, the largest in state history, from going into effect and forcing a public vote on them.
For that to actually happen, at least 118,823 of the 215,787 signatures the Invest in Arizona coalition submitted must be deemed valid by elections officials. If they are, Arizona voters will decide the fate of the tax cuts in November 2022.
Ducey’s income tax cuts, which serve as his legacy policy achievement during his two terms as governor, dramatically reform Arizona’s tax system. Instead of a progressively graduated system with a maximum rate of 4.5%, Arizona will shift to two income tax rates: 2.55% for people who earn $27,272 annually and 2.98% for those who earn more than that. Legislative budget analysts estimate those cuts will cost the state about $1 billion in revenue.
The median household income in Arizona is about $62,000, which will realize a tax savings of $42 under the new proposal. The benefit of the tax cut skyrockets as income increases: Households making at least $500,000 will save $10,000; those making at least $1 million save nearly $45,000; those making more than $5 million will save nearly $350,000 a year. (Those estimates by legislative budget analysists also include the effects of legislation capping the maximum income tax rate at 4.5%, even for those subject to the Invest in Education surcharge. That law will go into effect.)
The referendum is a reaction to the tax cuts Ducey championed, and which serve as his legacy policy achievement during his two terms as governor. The tax cuts themselves came in response to, and were designed to blunt the effect of, the Invest in Education Act on wealthy Arizonans. That measure, which voters approved in 2020, imposes a 3.5% surcharge on income greater than $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for couples, with the money directed to public schools to increase teacher pay and boost overall funding.
Initially, the Invest in Arizona campaign sought to stop three laws from taking effect later this month: Senate Bill 1827, which caps the tax rate at 4.5% for those with incomes greater than $250,000 for individuals or $500,000 for joint filers; Senate Bill 1828, which changes Arizona’s income tax system to only two brackets, and creates a single 2.5% rate as soon as 2023 if state revenues hit certain triggers; and Senate Bill 1783, which creates a new business individual income tax with a 4.5% flax rate that some taxpayers can opt into — and any taxpayers who do so would be exempt from the Invest in Education surcharge.
Rebecca Gau, executive director of Stand for Children, said the coalition submitted 215,787 signatures to stop the income tax cuts, and 123,531 to block SB1783 on Tuesday. The groups stopped pushing for blocking SB1827, the coalition announced on Tuesday.
Because the referendum to block SB1783 gathered only 5,000 more than the minimum, there is virtually no chance it will survive the signature review process.
Besides the monumental task of gathering over 118,000 signatures in just 90 days, the Invest in Arizona coalition is likely to face challenges in court.
On July 21, shortly after Invest in Arizona campaigns launched, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club filed a lawsuit seeking to make the groups’ leaders, volunteers and paid circulators time and efforts futile.
The conservative group, which supported the tax cuts, argues that the new tax laws are exempt from the ballot referral process under Arizona’s Constitution.
The coalition called the legal arguments “farfetched, unfounded, and untested, merely for the purpose of eroding the rights of Arizona citizens and voters.”
An oral argument in that case is scheduled for Nov. 5.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.
This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2021.
Parents across the country are fleeing public schools. Virginia is the latest state to promise charter and private school choices. Once the money follows the student, public schools will be forced to eliminate all the top heavy admin jobs. They outnumber teachers in most school districts. Vote no to help them make the necessary changes.
This is ridiculous. We elect public officials to do things like this. If you don’t like what elected officials did, then vote them out and choose people with a different platform – but running to the petition every time they do something you don’t like seems a colossal waste of time that could be better spent electing people of your own ilk.
Just to note a very common misconception:
Cush Administrative jobs outnumber teachers.
While technically true, most people don’t realize that
“Administrative staff” includes the cafeteria ladies,
janitors, school nurse if they still have one and bus drivers.
In other words, everyone not a teacher.
Yeah, top heavy with cush janitor jobs.
If you didn’t even know that, I’m not listening to you on this.
School nurse, librarian, and janitors have all been eliminated at my child’s school. Maybe you don’t know what you are talking about. We need audit of school district finances to find out where all the money has gone.
And I should have trusted my intuition even more. There is a bus driver shortage of unfilled positions and parents are asked to do more.
https://www.kold.com/2021/08/04/some-tucson-unified-students-qualify-bus-hub-stops/
Make schools do more with less. It really isn’t going to hurt the students.
I rest my case.
Susan, the reason you don’t have those people anymore is that we have been doing more with less, and less, and less for decades. It’s easy to use inflation to hide funding cuts.
Not true again ken. Education funding is paid per student. As students leave the school the money should logically leave. Less kids equals less financial need.
But, bloated payroll and staffing led to bloated pension plans and benefit packages unheard of in our economy.
Most buildings are now in disrepair, but admin salaries have gone through the roof. As have their pensions.
Are you a retired administrator or something?
The AZ retirement System (ARS) for 2020 shows a balance of approximately seventeen billion dollars that is being doled out to thousands of retirees at an annual payout of sixty to one hundred twenty thousand dollars.
Do you know where the billions of dollars came from? From our taxes.
We are paying out more and getting less. You just can’t un spin that.
Proposition 208 was insane, is totally insane. A 78% increase in our highest income tax rate will permanently damage our economy’s ability to create jobs for high school and college graduates.
Signature verification will be interesting. From August 1 to September 28, I made 93 trips to libraries, MVD offices, Recreation centers and bookstores looking for circulators. I encountered circulators only 11 times. Most of those in the closing two weeks. Only once did I encounter someone with more than 11 signatures on the 1828 referral.
These were places listed as signature stops by the organization backing the referendums.
Notice the difference in signatures? 215,000 versus 123,000? They didn’t stop circulating for the two losers until two weeks before September 28. That means they supposedly picked up about 92,000 signatures in two weeks. Yeah right.
A former legislator ran for the Senate after acquiring the nickname of “Mr. Initiative” after placing several initiatives on the ballot. In his Senate campaign, he was convicted of forgery on his petitions.
When was he more likely to have forged 70% of his signatures? When he needed 1,400 for a Senate race or when he needed 170,000 for an initiative?
Exactly where did they get these signatures?