Info: SCR 1028 Prohibiting Public Gifts

The following letter from Ginny Hildebrand of the Association of Arizona Food Banks provides detail about a Senate Resolution that will prevent or limit public/private partnerships. We will provide more information when available.

Dear friends,
Last Wednesday, after receiving information from Community Food Bank of Tucson, written by Mark Clark a longtime advocate in Pima County, we became aware of a little known Senate Resolution to put a ballot initiative forward in AZ to amend the AZ Constitution to prohibit "public gifts, loans, donations or grants for ANY PUBLIC OR PRIVATE PURPOSE." This is SCR1028 (copy attached), sponsored by Senators Johnson, Cheuvront, Blendu and Gould. While we are told that the intention is to prevent public entities from giving away resources to private companies as means of incentives for them to do business in their communities or subdivisions, here at AAFB the language used in the bill put our red flags up immediately because we have very extensive public/private partnerships to deliver emergency and supplemental food services statewide. Without these partnerships – that include building, land, trucks, labor by prison and jail inmates, we would be hard-pressed to provide the level of services to needy Arizonans.
Today Mark Barnes, Laurie Foran and I met with Senator Debbie McCune-Davis, a member of the Senate Financial Institutions, Insurance, and Retirement Committee who heard this resolution a few weeks ago. While the Committee passed it on a 3-2 vote it has now gone to Senate Rules and is awaiting action there. Sen. McCune Davis at that hearing questioned the language of the bill as "being excessively broad." In speaking with her today, I brought up points such as:
* AZ has chosen to provide health and human services through a public/private partnership model. Excluding options to share space and resources could severely damage this type of service delivery.
* Many non-profits have benefitted from gifts of land, buildings, shared office space with any number of city, county, state or other subdivision of the state thereby enabling them to provide human and health service in a cost effective manner.
She is willing to go to Senate Leadership to ask that SCR1028 not be allowed to be put on the ballot due to the impact the wording could have on non-profit organizations in AZ. However, she would like a list of the relationships that are currently in place by organization or service sectors to show as an example of what could be impacted in the future, if a constitutional amendment such as this were approved.
Can you please help by providing information of this type to me to provide to Sen. McCune-Davis at your earliest possible convenience, but not later than next Friday 3/28/08, so that she can assist us in defeating SCR1028?
The types of examples we’re looking for are (this is just the beginning, not an exhaustive list):
A city or county that provides office space to a non-profit to provide some type of service for the public good
A city or county that gives land to a non-profit so that a building can be constructed to provide a service to the public
A city or county that provides the work of County Jail inmates to clean facilities or prepare facilities to be suitable for delivery of services to the public
State departments who are in partnership with non-profits to deliver public services (i.e. homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, etc.)
Sen. McCune-Davis says we have a little time because Resolutions are not subject to the same time limitations as other bills in the Legislature. In fact, usually all the resolutions are gathered at one time and decided upon by the House & Senate Leadership, regarding which ones will move past the Rules Committee and to the next House of consideration and onto the ballot in November.
There may be other examples that will come to you, once you read the language of the resolution. Give me a call if you have any questions, but please send me any and all information you can by 3/28/08, close of business.
If we are not successful with this strategy, we may need to do some massive calling – phone & in person – to defeat this resolution BEFORE it gets on the ballot. You can just imagine the difficulty we’d have defeating this in a general election.
Thank you for your help, and I look forward to hearing from you.
P. S. If you know of others in the community you could pass this along to in order to get more input, please feel free to do so. Thank you.
Ginny
Ginny Hildebrand
Executive Director
Association of Arizona Food Banks