Ducey sends warning to CEOs pondering a school tax

Gov. Doug Ducey has a message for the state's business leaders should they dare to exercise their constitutional right to try to cross him and boost funding for public education.

I'm paraphrasing here, but his warning went something like this: oppose me at your peril.

"There were some raised eyebrows," one Valley business leader told me. "Some people felt bullied. I felt bullied."

Ducey was speaking last week to the joint leadership of three of the state's most prominent business groups: Greater Phoenix Leadership, the Flagstaff Forty and the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.

The groups, I'm told, are considering an initiative in 2016, asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax to boost funding for public education.

These are people who understand that a well-educated workforce is key to boosting Arizona's economy, people who see current lack of commitment to public education as a drag on Arizona's image and its future prosperity.

Ducey, meanwhile, led the drive in 2012 to kill Proposition 204, aimed at establishing a permanent sales tax for public education and has made it clear that he has no interest in boosting state funding for public education.

Fast forward to last week, when Ducey was speaking to the state's business leaders. Several who attended the luncheon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me they were taken aback when Ducey warned them not to do an end run around him by putting an initiative on the ballot, though he didn't specify any particular sort of initiative.

"What I basically heard was 'Don't be thinking of putting any initiative up for consideration if it goes against the wishes or the desires of the Legislature and leadership because if you do, it'll be strongly opposed by the state," one attendee told me.

"The point was don't even think about it," said another, paraphrasing Ducey. "If anybody attempts to do an end run around my budget for their special interests, I will fight that rigorously."

Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said the governor was simply asking business leaders to work with him, rather than against him.

"He told the group that … we don't have the monopoly on good ideas, meaning governor's office, so if someone has a good idea that fits in to a larger strategy that's good for the state and he's brought into the process then he wants to be supportive," Scarpinato said. "If he's not part of the process and it's a bad idea then he's probably not likely to support it."

Therein, I'm guessing, lies the threat. This is a governor who seems to have a sizable – perhaps even inexhaustible -- amount of dark-money muscle behind him.

His defeat of the 2012 sales-tax initiative came with the help of Americans for Responsible Leadership, a dark-money group that sunk $925,000 into Ducey's $1.8 million campaign to kill Prop. 204. According to Internal Revenue Service records, ARL was funded almost wholly by the Koch brothers conservative network.

Earlier this year, when Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan spoke out about the damage being done by this administration to K-12 schools, he encountered the wrath of American Encore, a dark-money group that invested $1.5 million into getting Ducey elected and now is enforcing Ducey's agenda.

American Encore -- run by Ducey pal Sean Noble, who also has ties to the Koch network – attacked Cowan and claimed that two-thirds of his district's money is spent outside the classroom. According to the state auditor general, Mesa spends 56.3 percent of its budget in the classroom, compared to 53.8 percent statewide.

Noble, at the time, said his group will "both watch and engage on issues of importance to our state."

In other words, the dark-money forces have no problem using their seemingly unlimited and unknown sources of cash to go after anyone who disagrees with this governor.

And apparently, neither does the governor since he has surrounded himself with people who have dark-money connections and has done nothing to reform the system so we can see who is trying to call the shots in our state.

So now comes Ducey, warning Arizona's business leaders not to defy him by exercising their constitutional right to run an initiative.

"I was sort of taking aback by it," one person told me. "It seemed to be a warning not to do anything that the leadership didn't like and not seeming to recognize that in Arizona we've always assumed, and correctly so, that the initiative and referendum process is part of government."

Indeed, the right to make laws via voter initiative is right there in the Arizona Constitution.

You know, the constitution that says a college education "shall be as nearly free as possible." This, in a state that has made the deepest cuts in state funding for higher education and the steepest tuition hikes in the nation since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The constitution that says, "The Legislature shall make such appropriations, to be met by taxation, as shall insure the proper maintenance of all state educational institutions, and shall make such special appropriations as shall provide for their development and improvement." This, in a state where our leaders are fighting a judge's rullng that they've must fully fund Arizona's public schools.

Well?

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