FOR SALE: ONE TRAILER

PHOENIX, March 10 – One senator told our reporter that the Legislature is going to need a fix-all trailer bill for the budget, and estimates there’s roughly a dozen errors that have already been found in the bills approved early Saturday morning. And the errors aren’t a part of the “normal process,” the senator said:” It’s because we’re rushing through it.” The legislator said the errors were discovered Friday night, but a decision was made to press ahead with the floor action and fix them in follow-up legislation. One budget item that requires a fix is the cut to the Supreme Court, which, unless it gets the necessary changes, will have no money to support its juvenile tracking system and felony tracking systems, known respectively as JOLTS and APETS. Lobbyists for the Supreme Court testified in appro committees on Thursday that, unless an adjustment was made to the $3.6 million in IT cuts proposed by the Legislature, or they were given statutory authority to increase court fees for inflation, they’d be forced to shut down the systems that track juvenile offenders and children in the DCS system. The JOLTS system basically runs juvenile courts, according to the senator. It’s unclear where the cuts will be made if not from the Supreme Court’s IT budget, however, as the Legislature has not seemed keen on allowing the court to increase fees to cover the cost.