Co-Chairman
Associate of AIA and Government Affairs
The 2014 regular legislative session has come to a close and The AIA Arizona Government Affairs Committee, staff and lobbyists have monitored and attempted to influence legislation with fairly good results.
We were successful in helping to derail legislation that the committee feels would have been detrimental to the industry including a bill that would have prohibited jurisdictions from adopting energy efficient building codes. Another piece of legislation that the committee worked against would have allowed limited bonding capacity of school districts and an additional bill that would limit community funding districts.
This committee feels it’s important that if Arizona is going to develop a 21st century economy, investing in infrastructure is paramount. Arizona lacks some of the development tools other states offer. At a minimum, maintaining the capacity of existing tools are important to us.
The committee is actively supporting legislation that offers alternative financing for infrastructure and sustainability improvements through property assessed clean energy, or PACE. We’re presently meeting with stakeholders to see if we can advance some sort of legislation next session. We feel it’s important to support sustainability and PACE legislation is a good alternative financing tool. The committee sees investing in this state’s infrastructure as a politically challenging issue for the foreseeable future.
Working to enact PACE districts has several hurdles that need more outreach and consensus building, including the major state’s utilities and American Bankers Association. We’re working over the summer with stakeholders to see what sort of compromise can be reached in advance of next year’s legislative session.
In the future, we’re looking into expanding alternative delivery methods and better defined prompt pay laws.
