Ducey shares wish list for Arizona
Local officials: Speech optimistic, lacked details
Gov. Doug Ducey’s State of the State address was viewed by various Yuma County figures, who agreed it carried a sense of optimism throughout its 50 minutes. But some found that it lacked detail about how any of the things the Republican called for could be accomplished.
Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jonathan Lines of Yuma, who watched the speech at the Capitol Monday and accompanies the governor to many appearances, said one of the big takeaways from the speech is that jobs and an improved economy are coming to every part of the state.
“In Yuma County alone, everywhere you look you see people advertising to put people back to work, so we’ve seen a real turnaround in this economy, and I think things are going to get better. And I think this Legislature is going to provide us with more opportunities for growth,” he said.
“Education is improving, our employment numbers are improving, and we are on the road to a
recovery. And I think we will see an explosion of growth in this next year,” he added.
He lauded nearly every part of Ducey’s address, including “wanting to put more money back into schools, directly into the classrooms and for students. And he talked about Arizona having four of the five best high schools nationwide (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report), and to be able to spread that formula statewide is incredibly important.”
Lines said many of the governor’s proposals, including increasing spending on finding homes for more children in the state foster system and expanding a tax break available to military veterans, are “moving in the right direction” in improving life for Arizonans.
Another highlight for him was Ducey’s “Second Amendment story” of the incident a year ago in which a passerby stopped on Interstate 10 and used his gun to shoot dead an attacker who was savagely beating a DPS trooper, introducing the man sitting in the audience.
Ducey used that passerby’s status as an ex-felon who’d had his rights restored to segue into talking at length about the state’s “Second Chance” centers in the Phoenix and Tucson areas and other initiatives to help soon-to-be-released inmates get a foothold in society and reduce recidivism.
“I think that’s wonderful,” Lines said.
The State of the State address is delivered by the governor every year to the state Legislature at the beginning of its session, where the GOP is dominant enough to help pave the way for Ducey’s agenda.
Rep. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, has been the focus of an investigation of sexual harassment complaints since November and has stayed uncharacteristically low-profile since, but on Monday he did laud Ducey’s call for additional investment in public schools.
“I’m glad to see the governor’s devoting energy to public education, energy and resources to education. I’m always in favor of that,” he said, citing his efforts to restore funding to the state’s technical education districts and channel more into the three state universities.
“I’ve tried valiantly to get money to education my whole time up at the Capitol, and maybe I can get some more done, before I leave, hopefully,” he said.
Education funding has been one of the biggest sources of contention between Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature for years. House Minority Whip Charlene Fernandez, a Yuma Democrat, said the biggest impression the speech left on her was a dearth of specifics on major issues, which seemed more pronounced to her compared to most other State of the States by Ducey.
But he was willing to delve more into other issues, she noted: “He went into great detail about cosmetology, about deregulation of blow-drys (salons).” Sitting with the Democratic caucus after the speech, she said, “We’re thinking, is that the best you can do? Is that what we’re going to talk about, is this what we should go into the session thinking, that we’re going to deregulate blow-drys?”
She said the promises to spend more money on teacher salaries sounded empty, without any mention of where the money to bring Arizona in line with other states is going to come from.
A former teacher herself, she said if she were about to leave the profession in Arizona because of low pay and other conditions, “if I listened to that speech, I would keep going. I would leave the classroom. And this is what makes it so hard for me, because I wanted him to inspire teachers, I wanted him to inspire us. I wanted him to give us hope, and he didn’t.”
The governor did make a brief mention about water policy, expected to be a big issue this session. “He did talk about water policies, that we need to come together, and he’s right.
“That was probably the common theme that ran through his speech, that we need to start coming together. And I’m 100 percent behind that. I’d like to see bills come before us that don’t have a guaranteed 31 votes” out of 60 in the house, all Republican votes and eliminating debate.
John Courtis, executive director of the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce, was also at the Capitol for the speech, at the invitation of Sen. Lisa Otondo, D-Yuma. He said he did sense a theme of bipartisanship running through Ducey’s text.
“I think today was less about Democrats and Republicans, red and blue. I think today was about, ‘Let’s get together, let’s forget about partisanship and let’s get it done,’” he said.
The governor’s call for a special session to pass legislation dealing with how the nationwide opioid crisis is affecting the state is a good move, Courtis said, but doesn’t address what he’s been told is a in- tervention on the flow of these drugs back and forth along the Mexican border.
“We can have these headlines, and that’s nice, but there is a free flow of opioids coming across, in high school backpacks, in business briefcases,” he said. “It’s rampant in our border towns.”
The brevity of Ducey’s mention of water policy, a major topic for Yuma and its agricultural sector, may well be due to the myriad of agreements, contracts, compacts and other divisions of the state’s supply that still need to be worked out.
“It’s a complicated mess. And I don’t think the governor was really ready to lay any policy out because he needs to put some really, really, really smart people on that and say, ‘We need to come out on the end with some solid water policy for the next 25 years,’” Courtis said.