Pork not necessarily something that's bad

Arizona legislators are successful when they satisfy the numbers 31, 16 and 1. The sequence tells the number of votes necessary to convert legislative bills into Arizona laws.

The initial digits, 31, refer to the number of House of Representative members that must support a measure for passage. Thirty-one is the House majority - one more than half the body's 60 members. The middle number, 16, is a majority of the 30 state senators needed to enact a bill. The last number, 1, is the required signature of the governor.

Those numbers tell why it is so difficult to get legislation passed as originally written. To get the minimum votes in each house, words in a proposal's first draft are often changed (for example, definitions revised) or whole new sections are added/deleted. In both cases, and many others, these changes are made to satisfy colleagues whose aye votes are needed. Sometimes the changes make for ugly bills.

Most Arizona legislative bills are sponsored by legislators from either the Valley of the Sun or metropolitan Tucson or the legislative majority leadership. Consequently, Yuma-area representatives long ago discovered that for Yuma County to get its due they must be patient and wait until sponsors need their votes to pass bills. Yuma County legislators then agree to support such bills only after the measures are modified or provisions inserted to benefit us locally.

This smacks of legislative pork barrel politics. The concept is defined as funding government programs to benefit a particular area or interest group while spreading the costs more broadly. Yuma County representatives are forced to embrace this procedure to get our fair share in the give and take of Arizona politics.

Meanwhile, I hear my colleagues screaming pork about the economic stimulus package that recently passed Congress. Crying pork has become a common political ploy. It suggests something despicable. It is presently proclaimed by those who see no value in items included in the legislation signed by the president.

Let's look at the realities of why pork is not necessarily bad and was required to get that measure passed. In contrast to the 31-16-1 numbers for Arizona's legislature, corresponding federal requirements are 218, 51, and 1. With many counties like our own across this nation, we'd expect to find clauses inserted here and specific sections there that must be included to satisfy our area's legislative clones nationwide. Success here is a numbers game.

Over 300 members of the House and Senate voted in support of the economic stimulus package. Not one, it's fair to say, favored every part. Each item in the legislation was important, however, to get enough support for passage. Colleagues agreed, therefore, to support each others' priorities to round up sufficient yes votes.

Passage was critically important. The severity of the current economic crisis is beyond the capability of most of us to fully appreciate. If we did, we'd probably panic. While fuzzy for me, I see the collapse of the dollar, and thus capitalism and our way of life, as a possibility.

To avoid this dreadful prospect we are told that two other congressional actions must also be enacted. One is to thaw out the credit market (the bailout) so we and our employers can get loans to buy goods and services that ultimately keep us employed. A second must dissolve the home mortgage crisis.

The third is required to put American workers back to work. Something as dramatic as the stimulus package was needed to slow down rising job losses nationwide. Month after month more than 500,000 gainfully employed folks are thrust on to the unemployment rolls. If not stopped we'll all end up out of work; the unemployed simply can't buy goods and services from those still working. So the latter are soon laid off and the downward economic spiral accelerates.

I am relatively unconcerned that items in the economic stimulus package might be pork. (The escalating national debt is troublesome, but first things first.) At least in the short run I'm satisfied that this pork means many more Americans will either retain their jobs or go back to work very soon. We need people working if we are to recover from this serious economic turmoil.

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Gary Knox is a retired Yuma area school superintendent and guest columnist for The Sun.