Can fired DES director Jeffries win Senate seat?
Tim Jeffries’ candidacy for a state Senate seat will answer questions about reinvention:
❚ Can a political appointee canned by the governor return as an elected lawmaker?
❚ Can a state agency chief known for heavy-handed executive decisions pivot to represent the interests of a larger, more diverse constituency?
❚ Will voters in the Scottsdale and Fountain Hills area of Legislative District 23 overlook controversies such as Jeffries’ questionable firings of state workers and the injection of his religious beliefs into emails to employees?
❚ And, should he win office, will Jeffries be able to work with a governor’s administration he is presently suing?
His bid, however, won’t exactly involve a complete political makeover.
In fact, Jeffries the erstwhile Department of Economic Security administrator provides a good glimpse into Jeffries the candidate and would-be senator.
The man who as DES chief answered Gov. Doug Ducey’s call to pare down the state employee workforce — aggressively and questionably so — says he would, as a lawmaker, advocate for moving money to public schools by cutting the number of state workers by 10 percent (excluding the departments of Public Safety and Corrections).
A religious conservative, Jeffries’ beliefs inform some of his key policy positions. He notes on his campaign website that he would “craft and pass a ‘Heartbeat Bill’ outlawing abortion for every fetus with a heartbeat unless a mother’s life is in danger,” and would seek to ban selective abortions based on disabilities such as Down syndrome.
He similarly appears to oppose any end-of-life options that are the subject of increasing debate, saying he’d fight efforts to “legalize the killing of our senior citizens via euthanasia.”
On one issue with which he shares common ground with Democrats, Jeffries favors full funding for DES for its care of about 34,000 individuals with special developmental disabilities.
It’s too early to determine whether his bid for public office would be as con-
tentious as his tenure at DES. And that was dramatic.
Put in charge of the second-largest state agency, Jeffries made waves by getting employees to become at-will workers, trading less job protection for more compensation, and then summarily firing them. Of the first group of workers who were dismissed, Jeffries described them as “bullies ... liars and multiyear bad actors.”
And of several hundred dismissals that followed, he said, “No one is entitled to work at DES. It is a privilege to work at DES. It is not the agency that exited them. They exited themselves.”
More than 250 of those workers filed appeals — dozens of them documented their grievances with Republic reporter Craig Harris, who wrote extensively of Jeffries’ troubled tenure.
It was Harris’ coverage of Jeffries buying alcohol for state employees on state time, on the heels of the questionable dismissals, which led Ducey in November 2016 to force Jeffries to resign.
Still murky is a state investigation that came after his dismissal, which found that DES had amassed an arsenal of guns and ammo, some of which are in apparent violation of state procurement rules, to “create its own police force.” Jeffries’ lawsuit alleges the investigation libeled him.
He has maintained that DES needed to provide protection to its employees and to Arizonans.
Jeffries, who mounted a campaign last year to decry the governor’s office and the liberal press for a “Manufactured Crisis … fueled by Machiavellian cunning,” has wisely avoided repeating that narrative in the Senate run so far.
Jeffries is challenging Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who has her own set of complications. Two other Republicans, Kristina Kelly and Gavan Searles, are vying for the party nomination in the Aug. 28 primary election.
Ugenti-Rita’s accusations of harassment opened the door to the expulsion of Rep. Don Shooter (who is also running again, this time in the Senate) in February. A related investigation implicated her significant other on sexually inappropriate actions, of which UgentiRita has been unsatisfactorily silent.
Jeffries will know, perhaps as early as Aug. 29, whether he’ll have an opportunity at a political term longer than his 633-day tenure at DES.