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What is in the State Budget Proposal?

Senate Bill (SB) 1012, and its companion House Bill (HB) 2012, contain provisions that remove critical funds that cities depend on to provide services and programs.

One of the provisions in the state budget package is to permanently eliminate the Local Transportation Assistance Funds (LTAF and LTAFII). These LTAF funds were established as a commitment to the voters when the voters approved the State Lottery. The funding was designed to provide federally mandated Dial-A-Ride and other transit service to state residents.

In the current budget year, Glendale received $1.3 M in LTAF funding. This amount of funding represents over 49,000 Dial-A-Ride trips for elderly and disabled riders. Since the Federal Government mandated that Dial-A-Ride services be provided, diverting funding will mean the cities will be required to make up the difference and keep the service running.

Glendale also received $344,765 in LTAF II funding. This funding is used for bus services in Glendale and represents 52,100 miles of service annually, which equates to nearly 2 full fixed transit routes that serve Glendale and other West Valley cities. These are bus routes that may be the only means of transportation for people to get to work, medical appointments, and so forth.

Another state budget provision that has been “on and off the table and back on again” is to redirect $20 million in State Shared Revenues from cities and towns to the 15 counties in our state. This is being done because the Legislature wants to transfer the responsibility of juvenile corrections and sexually violent predators to the counties. The legislators’ intent is to take cities’ money to help the counties pay for those programs. This transfer would be accomplished by reducing the cities’ shares of the state sales tax revenue from 25% to 23.65%. The impact to the City of Glendale would be an immediate direct general fund reduction of $1 million.

Many legislators seem to have heard and are acknowledging that there is absolutely no fairness at all in shifting a state responsibility to the counties and having cities and towns pay for it. While Cities and Towns have been told that the $20 million shift will be removed from the budget when it goes to the Floor of each Chamber, there was not enough support for the budget as a whole to even allow it to get to the floor yesterday. We will keep you posted on this.