2 men, 1 woman vie for Ariz. House seat
Panel nominates Brierley, Dunn and Schingnitz
The precinct committeemen of Legislative District 13 chose three nominees Thursday for filling the legislative seat emptied by the expulsion of Rep. Don Shooter, R-Yuma.
The two men who went public with their run for the appointment before the meeting, Paul Brierley and Tim Dunn, were selected in the first and second rounds of voting, and Cora Lee Schingnitz was chosen as the third option. All three live in Yuma.
The Yuma County Board of Supervisors will select one appointee to serve in the state House the remainder of the current session during a special meeting Monday. Shooter was removed from his seat Feb. 2 by a vote of 53-3 after an investigation found he had violated the Legislature’s sexual harassment policy in at least 10 incidents.
Dunn, a prominent local grain and vegetable grower, and Brierley, executive director of the Yuma Center for Excellence in Desert Agriculture, have known each other through advocating for farming-related issues through the Arizona Farm Bureau for about 20 years, Brierley said.
“It’s a little weird” for them to be competing for the same appointment, Brierley said, “but I think we’re both happy that someone who knows agriculture is going to be going up there,” he said.
Dunn said the candidates were each given three minutes to speak to the committeemen about why they should be the appointee for the seat, both speaking about their experience dealing with water rights and other topics of concern to Yuma, particularly those in the agriculture industry.
“I’m very honored to have been selected by the Yuma County precinct committeemen to be considered for
this job by the Board of Supervisors,” he said.
Schingnitz is a longtime stalwart of the local Republican Party and a precinct committeeman, Brierley said: “She’s a real trooper for us.”
The meeting was led by former Yuma County GOP Chairman Jonathan Lines, who is in the middle of a two-year term as chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. He said the proceedings “went very smoothly, as it should.”
All but one of the 36 eligible elected precinct committeemen participated in the vote either in person or by proxy, he said.
The state Legislature has been in session since Jan. 8, and is expected to continue into March.
Under state law Shooter’s successor must be from the same district, party and county, so it fell to the elected GOP precinct committeemen to submit three names for the five members of the Board of Supervisors to choose from.
The board’s special meeting will begin 9 a.m. Monday in the board’s auditorium at 198 S. Main, Yuma. The session will be televised on the county’s cable channel, Yuma77, and webcast and available for later viewing at www.yumacountyaz.gov and the Yuma County Government Facebook page. Spanish subtitles are shown on rebroadcasts.
The two legislative districts which cover Yuma County, 4 and 13, each had one legislator step down in the year before Shooter’s removal, but in both cases they were from the Maricopa County part of the district, so the appointment of a successor was handled by that county’s board of supervisors.
Brierley said the process of replacing someone in the House or Senate has been a rare occasion up to this point. “I’ve been a precinct committeeman for 20 years and I’ve never gone through something like this before,” he said. “So we’re all kind of figuring this out as we go along.”