PHOENIX — A House panel advanced Tuesday a funding bill to fix the massive budget shortfall in Arizona’s disability services despite a bipartisan push for changes to the proposal, frustrating lawmakers and caregivers alike.

The state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities runs out of money at the end of the month. If the Legislature does not pass a $122 million supplemental funding bill, the division will shut down until the state’s new budget year starts in July.

House Bill 2945 and an identical measure, Senate Bill 1734, advanced out of their respective chamber’s Appropriations committees on Tuesday. The House version won approval by only one vote – and after three additional Republicans were added to panel minutes before the hearing began.

“Stacking the deck is not right. I don’t care who you are,” said state Representative Walt Blackman, a Republican. “It’s not the right thing to do. Playing politics with this is not the right thing to do.”

Governor Katie Hobbs said Tuesday after the vote that the bill is “a work in progress.” Hobbs, who has called the Republican proposal a “non-starter,” said she did not see much improvement in the legislation Tuesday.

“It needs a lot of work to get my support, and it needs, more importantly, a lot of work to get the stakeholders’ support,” she said.

'We’re this close to cracking’

Lawmakers in the hearing heard for the first time testimony from members of the DDD community, including caregivers and Arizonans with disabilities.

“We, all of us, we don't want to admit this to you,” mother Jamie Kelley told lawmakers. ”OK, this is horribly humiliating. We're this close to cracking. I don’t want to admit that.”

Louis Fazio, a 61-year-old who was institutionalized as a child, said people with disabilities must be allowed to stay in their own communities.

“I remember being away from my family... And not knowing why I was there,” he said. “I was put in an institution at the age of 6.”

Amy Haley, whose son has what she described as a “terrifying combination of medical and behavior complexities,” said DDD’s Parents as Paid Caregivers Program is essential to families like hers.

The program trains and pays parents like Haley to be caregivers.

“I have all of that same certification and training,” she said. “I am just as valuable as they are, and I don't have any turnover. I’m not going to leave.”

The funding bill includes a cut to the parental caregiver program, limiting it to 40 hours per week and, starting in October, slashing that in half to 20 hours a week.

Haley told ABC15 after the hearing that Arizona does not have enough caregivers to make up the difference.

“And so what's going to happen is that kids are going to go without the care, acute care, that they need, and they're going to end up in very dark places,” she said.

Bipartisan amendment fails by single vote

Lawmakers on the House panel considered – and rejected – four amendments to the bill during a marathon four-hour hearing, including a bipartisan change introduced by Republican state Rep. Julie Willoughby.

Willoughby, the majority whip, said she had been asked not to put forward her amendment.

“I choose you. I choose you as my hill to die on,” she tearfully told the audience in the packed hearing room. “I’m sorry this is happening to you. With my whole heart, I’m sorry.”

Her amendment failed by just one vote. She later voted against advancing the bill, which the panel narrowly approved 11-10.

Democrats and some Republicans on the panel criticized the chair’s decision to add three additional Republican lawmakers to the committee minutes before the hearing began.

“It is shameful, and you all, our families here in the state of Arizona, deserve better,” said state Rep. Lorena Austin, a Democrat from Legislative District 8.

Blackman, a Republican from Legislative District 7, voted to advance the bill so it could be fixed on the floor but added that he was “not going to be able to support this bill in its present form.”

House Appropriations Chair David Livingston defended the move to add three more Republican votes – a change that resulted in the panel having twice as many Republican members as Democratic.

“If this bill would have failed today, we would have had to start over,” he told ABC15 after the hearing.

Livingston, a Republican who represents Legislative District 28, said during the hearing that the legislation could be amended on the House floor after negotiations with the Senate. The bill, he said, had to be identical to the version passed in the Senate.

“We have to have a bill,” he said. “You may not love this bill. But the alternative. The alternative is what?”