Our choice for tackling Arizona’s issues
We vote that Doug Ducey deserves a second term
In the right moment and in the right conditions, a serious challenge like the one career educator David Garcia now poses to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey would have a powerful logic.
Not so long ago, Arizona schools were in dire straits. Arizona had to drastically carve back its budget during the 2009 Great Recession and its jobless aftermath, seriously reducing the largest piece of the spending pie — public education.
For nearly a decade, our schools languished. Teachers wary of low pay were exiting the state. The ensuing shortage could not be solved. And remaining teachers were left to cope with deteriorating facilities and dwindling resources. Many paid from their own pockets to provide students the most basic classroom supplies.
By 2018, the frustration felt on campus eventually boiled up into one of the largest public employee strikes in American his-
tory. A sea of 50,000 #RedforEd protesters marched on the state Capitol and demanded a pay increase.
Joining them was Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Garcia, championing the public schools and decrying the sitting governor.
By then, for Garcia, it was already too late.
A crisis averted
Doug Ducey will get no points for charisma. He is often characterized, and accurately so, as a humdrum technocrat who reacts to crises rather than anticipating them.
But Ducey did get in front of the teacher-pay crisis two years before the #RedforEd march when his administration creatively found a way to plow $3.5 billion into the public schools over the next 10 years.
Ducey’s Proposition 123, which resolved a longstanding lawsuit on ed funding, won the support of virtually all the public-school leadership in the state and ultimately won at the ballot box. By the time the sea of red showed up on West Washington Street two years later, teachers had already enjoyed roughly a 5 percent pay hike.
Ducey was criticized for it, but days before the strike began, he proposed a 20 percent pay hike for teachers by the year 2020. To many it was the prototypical, reactive Ducey, suddenly finding money he couldn’t find in the months before to pay teachers what they deserve.
The #RedforEd leadership rejected Ducey’s plan and so did David Garcia.
But Ducey soldiered on, getting his 20-by-2020 budget through the Republican Legislature and boasting he had raised teacher pay without raising taxes. It was a brilliant political stroke that, while raising hackles on the left and right, effectively defused the publicschool crisis.
Had #RedforEd and David Garcia gotten their way and killed the Ducey 20by-2020 proposal, the teachers would have gotten nothing from their red rebellion. #RedforEd’s solution to teacher pay was Invest in Ed, a soak-the-rich ballot proposition that could not survive a courtroom challenge.
The logic is gone
No Arizonan is under the illusion we have repaired our public-school system, but we are on the road to recovery. Had Garcia’s candidacy emerged when the public schools were hemorrhaging and the economy listing, his argument would have resonated loudly: A good education contributes to a good economy.
Instead he faces the most daunting task, unseating an incumbent who is enjoying good times.
The Arizona economy is booming. New projections show Arizona’s job growth will outpace the nation over the next several years, according to reporting by The Republic’s Russ Wiles.
Arizona’s job picture is so positive the state is once again a magnet for people. It is expected to gain a million new residents by 2026, according to an August report by the state Office of Economic Opportunity.
The state’s annual job growth is projected to hit 1.7 percent compared to national job growth of 0.7 percent. Maricopa County is expected to see increases of 2.1 percent annually.
Doug Ducey argues that his job as governor was to pilot Arizona out of the economic crisis of the decade past. He approached it by keeping government out of the way of the free market so it could recover and prosper.
He refused to raise taxes. But he also understood that a cash-poor state like Arizona could not afford drastic cuts in revenues. While he promised to cut taxes every year, he did so in nominal and responsible ways so that he did not bleed state coffers.
A full-spectrum governor
Ducey came to state government from the private sector. He was an icecream impresario who eventually brought his spreadsheet mentality to the Ninth Floor.
It served him well post-recession as he faced a financial crisis his first year and worked to put Arizona on more stable footing with a budget plan that erased a $1.5 billion deficit covering two budget cycles.
The office of governor is a supermagnet for grievance and criticism, but Ducey stayed focused on putting Arizona’s fiscal house in order.
Today the state budget stands on solid footing. Business is strong. Tax revenues are growing. And Arizonans are feeling it.
In a new Suffolk University/Arizona Republic poll, nearly 55 percent of registered voters polled regarded Arizona’s economy as good or excellent. Less than 8 percent rated it poor.
About 44 percent said Arizona is headed in the right direction, as opposed to 37 percent who said it was not. Twenty percent were undecided.
Pushing back the unhinged
Ducey inherited a state government that too often wandered into the LaLaLand of extreme politics. His predecessor Jan Brewer hobbled herself by signing the 2010 immigration bill SB 1070.
When religious conservatives pushed SB 1062, a measure that would have allowed businesses to deny service based on religious grounds, the gay community erupted along with corporate heavyweights in the Fortune 500, pressuring Brewer to veto the bill.
To Doug Ducey’s credit, his administration has managed a much tighter ship. The Legislature hasn’t gone crazy on his watch, a great relief to the business community that was often tagged to mop up the mess.
Further, Ducey has done a great deal more to improve relations with Mexico after SB 1070 blew up the relationship. He has cultivated a strong friendship with Sonora, Mexico Gov. Claudia Pavlovich and other Mexican leaders, putting a spotlight on Arizona and Mexico’s combined $15.7 billion in trade.
He has turned the spotlight on the enormous economic benefits we enjoy as Mexico’s neighbor, rather than focusing exclusively on the difficulties at the border.
The challenges ahead
While Ducey has been a good steward of state finances and the ArizonaMexico relationship, he faces daunting challenges in the future.
Arizona is suffering from extreme drought that threatens our Colorado River water supply and demands we cooperate more strategically with other Western states.
While the governor has pushed for greater agreement to complete the drought contingency plan that goes into operation when Lake Mead hits critical levels, Arizona was slow to get its act together and earned the justified wrath of other states and their water leaders. Ducey needs to more affirmatively bring Arizona parties together along with other Colorado River basin states to get this done.
Also, as a supporter of Arizona’s charter schools, he has been slow to address the abuses of some charter operators. This quasi-privatization model for K-12 education is working. Virtually all growth in Arizona public schools is happening in charter, not district, schools. But there are flaws. Unscrupulous charter operators have misused the system and violated its intent. Ducey needs to help reform charter schools so the scandals don’t define them and so that this largely successful enterprise is not undermined by flimflam operators.
Finally, Ducey needs to equip his state to handle the next economic downturn better than the last. As we all know, economies are cyclical and this one has been riding high for some time. A downturn is inevitable. Arizona needs to build the reserves to withstand what may lay ahead.
Our choice
The challenger in this race, David Garcia, is a gifted, charismatic leader who inspires voters and brings with him real education chops. He is a professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.
But he made a huge mistake in the Democratic Primary. He swung wide left by picking up the same clarion call to replace ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that carried Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her New York congressional district.
What works in Queens doesn’t work in Phoenix. And the pity is that Garcia had already proven his appeal to a wider electorate when he ran four years ago for state schools chief and won Republican-dominated Maricopa County.
His task this time around may have been impossible. It’s unlikely any candidate this year could beat Doug Ducey, who in his own unspectacular way has managed the state with competence and now rides a wave of positive economic news.
He has earned the confidence of the people. And so, in this general election for governor, The Arizona Republic recommends voters re-elect Doug Ducey.
Doug Ducey, in his own unspectacular way, has managed with competence and rides a wave of positive economic news.