Category Archives: GOVERNMENT

With all due respect to the Farmers’ Almanac, the month of April certainly didn’t produce many showers around here so we’ll all have to use our imaginations in order to see those May flowers. Unless of course you went on the UofA Garden tour last month – in which case you’ve stored away lots of mental photos of some beautiful landscapes.

But before I totally move away from this topic, I need to remind everyone that the danger from wild fires this spring and summer is very high due to the aforementioned lack of rainfall. In fact, Pinal County’s Air Quality Department has ceased issuing burn permits for the unincorporated areas of the county. The only exceptions to the ban on open burning are those farming operations that have already received a permit for agricultural burning.
Continue reading →

I just wanted to take a minute to give you an update on what is happening in the Senate and in the Legislature as a whole right now. The session is winding down and we are nearing the end of voting on bills (as a matter of fact, we just passed out some great pro-life and pro-second amendment bills last week), but the main focus as of late has been, and will continue to be, the budget.

As you may recall from last year, we (the Republicans) gave Arizona its first structurally balanced budget in years and the result is that we now are approximately $600 million in the black. That being said, we are facing a critical time in that we need to be very careful about what we do with this surplus.

As you can imagine, there are many opinions on how what to do with the surplus, but what my attitude has and will continue to be is to only fund what it critical and to save the rest in a rainy-day fund. I say this because there are potentially three major obstacles we will be facing from now through 2015.
Continue reading →

It’s already April? So soon? Yes – high school seniors, college and university seniors, and parents galore are planning their graduation festivities as I write these words (some are more enthusiastic than others as you might imagine!). And as those activities begin to come together, teachers throughout the country do their best to bring this academic year of instruction to a successful end – sending their students on to their next adventure with hopes for success – while planning to pack an enormous amount of additional training and/or additional academic achievement into the all too brief two and a half months between this school year and the next.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Last month’s frantic pace of community, social, and fund-raising events did leave room for me to travel to Washington, DC for a very brief but successful visit to the offices of Arizona’s federal delegation in early March. I was able to spend considerable time with the legislative directors for Representatives Gosar, Grijalva, and Franks reviewing the elements of our county’s federal legislative platform while receiving briefings on such critical legislation as the Resolution Copper land exchange and Senate and House efforts to agree on a reauthorization of a federal transportation act.
Continue reading →