http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/guest/taxpayers-should-stop-baili…

In the late 1970s a property-tax revolt broke out in California with the famous Prop. 13. By 1980 the revolt had spread to Arizona, and voters approved a constitutional amendment capping homeowner primary property taxes at 1 percent.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/robertrobb/2015/06/29/bad-stats-about-mo…

As is often the case, the Arizona Tax Research Association offers some useful perspective with a special report on school spending.

A recent Census Bureau study that had Arizona ranked 48th among the states in K-12 per-pupil spending had the tongues a-clucking.

Everyone gets excited when Arizona is ranked last in something.

Those fixated on the recent Census Bureau education report should have found it curious that it shows a decrease in Arizona students between 2012 and 2013. The reason? The Census Bureau only tracks charter schools whose charter holder is a government entity.

Roughly 80 percent of Arizona's charter school students — 112,000 of them and the corresponding funding — are not captured by the report. At least $1.3 billion in total revenue for Arizona K-12 schools is missing from the Census report.

How are tax dollars being spent?

For the residents of Winslow, the answer should be on an aging levee on the muddy banks of the Little Colorado River.

Brian Cook, who works for Navajo County, stands on top of the wall of earth and concrete that buffers the town from flooding during the monsoon season.

“There’s a bunch of ways that the levee can fail, and I would just hate to see the dwellings underwater,” said Cook. “E911 services, the phones, the hospital, the senior centers.”

Pima County sued the state of Arizona Monday to block a new budget provision the county says shifts tax burdens away from the state and on to county taxpayers.
In a petition for special action filed with the Arizona Supreme Court, Pima County officials say a provision in the budget adopted in March by Arizona lawmakers will require the county to raise property taxes in order to properly fund the Tucson Unified School District.

Pima County is asking the Arizona Supreme Court to excuse it from a new state law that would cost it millions of dollars.

In 1980, Arizona limited how much residential property owners could pay in primary property taxes to no more than 1 percent of the cash value. The reason was to protect people who live in multiple taxing districts from paying too much. Until now, the state would cover that amount over 1 percent of the limit.

But this year, the Legislature decided no more and began asking the counties to pay.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/southwest-valley/2015/05/06/s…

After years of absorbing funding cuts from the state, teachers and parents at one West Valley elementary school are taking an extraordinary step to save their librarian's job — a crowdsourcing campaign.

Over the past five years, Summit Fire District has slashed its employees from 48 to 37, temporarily closed one of its stations and bought decades-old fire engines rather than new ones, all in an effort to adapt to property tax declines still rippling out from the Great Recession.

A hospital district has spent $570,000 on an ad campaign launched two weeks after its board called for a nearly $1 billion bond election.

The taxpayer-funded advertising campaign is running at the same time a separate, political group pushing for passage of the bond proposal launches a nearly $800,000 television ad campaign.

http://tucson.com/news/local/education/bill-slashing-desegregation-fund…

February 04, 2015 7:36 pm • By Alexis Huicochea
A state lawmaker’s bid to reduce desegregation spending may cost TUSD as much as $8 million next year and far more in the ensuing years — funds that are earmarked to help bring racial balance to district campuses.