The following is a report from the GOP town hall that took place this past Thurday by Todd Schwarz. Todd is a representative of SEIU Arizona.
The Republicon leadership came out of hiding yesterday and saw their shadows so it looks like we're in for two more years of darkness. What they emerged for was billed by the Maricopa County Republican Party as an Arizona Budget Town Hall. I haven't been to a lot of town hall meetings but this one was alternately surreal and dull.
The audience was required to submit questions in writing which were screened and grouped and posed to the panel which was made up of Senators Russell Pearce, Thayer Verschoor and Chuck Gray and Representative John Kavanagh. Dull.
For the first ninety minutes the panel took turns expressing their concern for children and the disabled and claiming that cuts to education and DES were so small that they could easily be covered by administrative remedies. Surreal. Kavanagh, showing his keen grasp of treatment modalities for developmentally disabled Arizonans, accused DES of mismanagement by cutting Child Protective Services instead of music therapy for the DD population. Never mind that the music therapy is a relatively small budget item mostly funded with federal matching funds for health care and the general fund share would only cover a handful of CPS positions. Never mind the significant benefits of music therapy in creating or strengthening neural pathways. Very surreal.
The only applause seemed to come from a handful of libertarians in the first two rows who were kept in a giddy mood by the constant refrain of "no tax increases" or Gray's call to repeal all state income taxes and property taxes. They must have felt rapturous at the calls for state sovereignty, the new state's rights/secessionist mantra. Very, very surreal. Do these people not know the definition of treason?
Pearce, of course, could not keep himself from delivering his standard racist vitriol that "illegal immigrants" were costing Arizona billions of dollars in crime, health care costs, and education costs. Listening to Senator Pearce I got the impression that every crime committed in Arizona is committed by an "illegal immigrant". What qualifies his ranting as racist vitriol is the fact that it just isn't true. Undocumented residents of Arizona do not qualify for most state aid - not even close. They do pay taxes and do not file for refunds. Their kids can get into school but hey, I like it when kids go to school.
With about forty minutes left the people finally had a chance to offer direct questions and comments. There was definitely more applause as parents and guardians of school aged children, disabled, the poor and the sick finally got to speak truth to power about the real-world effects of the proposed budget cuts. For some reason, as the questioning went on, the panel seemed to lose interest in answering their questions, slowly falling silent.
This is a group of men who claim to make the tough decisions when in fact they just pass the buck to the Agency Directors and then second guess the decisions they make. They probably wish they had had a whipping boy available last night.
