And while all this wrangling is going on, the law will be saving county businesses millions that should have been spent in environmental controls.
In the end, Barron says, the law could end up costing Arizonans "untold amounts" in future cleanup costs, not to mention degrading the quality of life in the Tucson area, where voters made a conscious decision to take extra steps to protect it.
That, really, is the central question raised by the law: Who should be making the decision about what kind of standards are enforced in a community--the state or the people who have a stake in the standard of living there?
State officials are oddly schizophrenic on the issue. On one hand, the legislature, in an action aimed directly at the Brady Bill, approved spending $1 million to establish a legal fund to battle the federal government over what many conservatives--including Governor Fife Symington--view as unwarranted intrusions by Washington, D.C., on the states. The idea is that, when it comes to government, small is beautiful--state residents should choose their own laws and regulations: i.e., federalism.
But on the other hand, legislators feel no compunction about dictating to county governments, an even closer-to-the-bone division of democracy, to the effect that they can't make their air and water cleaner than the state at large.
Have legislators missed this comparison simply because they lack a sense of irony? Probably not. It's more likely they recognize a higher power than their professed adherence to the principles of small government.
"Big money, like the kind Hughes has, talks," Barron says.
The verdict: Do as I say, not as I do.
@rule:
@body:What is the total price of all this legislative largess? There is no easy way to affix a cost on environmental degradation, and according to Kevin McCarthy, director of the Arizona Tax Research Association, trying to account for the straightforward tax breaks and regulatory relief is equally futile.
But if you could gather all the relevant numbers and extrapolate their effect over the next decade, you would probably end up with one of those numbers where the pocket calculator blinks all nines and an "E."
"Clearly," says McCarthy, a supporter of several of the tax-cut and deregulation bills, "there are hundreds of millions of dollars involved."
The only thing one can definitely conclude by analyzing the record of the corporate victories won by the free-giving 41st is that it could have been a lot worse.
A quick check of the bills that didn't pass into law reveals even more blatant giveaways and onerous subversions of the supposedly democratic process:
There was a bill, financed by the liquor industry, that would have taken zoning control of bars and nightclubs away from cities and neighborhoods and given it to the rubber-stamp state liquor board. Another would have done away with the requirement that corporations file a list of directors with the secretary of state--a state of affairs that, in the bad old days of the 1970s, helped make Arizona the land-fraud capital of the country.
Still another would have granted the right for landowners to issue private hunting licenses for game animals that wander onto their property--a measure that would have raised extra income for northern Arizona ranchers but thrown Arizona's wildlife management system into disarray.
And another, perhaps the most subversive of all from a constitutional perspective, would have made it almost impossible for the public or press to access state, county or city records--from police reports to official audits of agencies.
As incredible as these pieces of legislation may seem, it is even more incredible that those who introduced and supported them had plausible reasons to believe they would become law.
The reason that was so, says Jeffries of Common Cause, is because of the way the lawmaking system is structured.
"The whole process is citizen-unfriendly," she says. "It's a Byzantine process that defies logic. Many times, legislators themselves couldn't find out where their own bills were in the system, so how can citizens be expected to find out what is going on and put a stop to the really wild things?
"They would have to quit their day jobs and come to the legislature full-time."
Amid more than 1,200 different proposed laws and a crazy patchwork of committee hearings and circuitous procedures--a system that in turn encourages last-minute bargaining sessions, where the most undemocratic elements come to the fore--the legislative process more closely resembles an elaborate game of hide-the-ball than an open forum for the forging of laws.
The growing obsession with limiting the session to a 100-day sprint--a length of time often insufficient for the proper consideration of the towering pile of complicated legislation--adds to the confusion, as well.
It is little wonder that legislators feel confident in packing pork or rolling logs without fear of being discovered or chastised.
Perhaps this legislature's biggest sin was its failure to pass a law that could have changed all that.
The bill, sponsored by Chris Cummiskey, would have forced the legislature to conform to the state open-meeting law--from which it exempted itself several years ago--and actually hold public hearings on important issues. It would have limited the number of bills each legislator could introduce to five (plus a few additional appropriation bills), thus narrowing the field, making bill tracking easier and opening the system to public scrutiny.
Unfortunately, reform wasn't a popular issue under the copper dome.
"There wasn't a tremendous amount of interest," says Cummiskey. "A lot of people said they were too busy to talk about it. I guess they had other things on their minds.
