With the 2020 Census comes the decennial redrawing of congressional and legislative lines, the first use of which will be for the upcoming 2022 election cycle.
After 10 years in Legislative District 6, joined with Flagstaff and the White Mountains, now the Verde Valley has been redrawn into Legislative District 1, which includes all of Yavapai County and the addition of a small pocket that sweeps the Coconino County side of Uptown Sedona into the same district. This was due to loud local agitation by Verde Valley voters to not split Sedona, proving the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Now use that win to fight for short-term rental regulation and funding for traffic improvements.
This redrawing effectively puts all of the Verde Valley’s legislative power into a single district, which gives us relative power to sway the state legislature.
The upside is that we are no longer connected with the Snowflake, the Payson area nor Flagstaff. The former Legislative District 6 connected liberal Flagstaff with the extremely conservative White Mountains, which have little to no relationship to each other culturally nor politically — and used the Verde Valley as a linchpin between the two.
This division meant most Legislative District 6 candidates came from the more populous Flagstaff and tended to be from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or the politically united and active Snowflake area, and tended to be from either the Tea Party or later the Trumpian fringe of the Republican Party. They would battle it out for nominations, then in the general election, hope the more moderate Verde Valley would determine the winner, which went five times to the Republicans, who had 39% of the voter count compared to 29% for Democrats.
Hence, when a candidate got elected they tended to bring extremist views of their enclave to the legislature rather than the moderate views that actually reflected the district as a whole, such as a top hat-wearing fellow whom legislators from his own party called “odd”; an anti-public school education committee chairwoman or a representative censured for threatening fellow legislators during a speech to a white supremacist convention in Florida.
The county seats of Prescott and Flagstaff are the two pivot points around which the Verde Valley orbits, so connecting us to one of them means that we have cultural and existing political connections to these communities far more than we did to Snowflake, which most Verde Valley residents couldn’t place on a map — I admit that I have trouble remembering where Snowflake is too, other than somewhere in the White Mountains north of the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
While liberals wanted us connected to Flagstaff for the sake of like-mindedness, Flagstaff tends to ignore the fact that the Verde Valley exists, as evidenced by the way the Coconino County Board of Supervisors deals with Uptown Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.
By connecting us with Prescott, most of our Yavapai County concerns will overlap with concerns we have at the legislative level.
We will still have to deal with the same problem we do with most of our Yavapai County interactions being that the supervisors in Prescott dismiss us here in the Verde Valley.
We hope the representation we get from legislators between 2022 and 2032 is more akin to representation by Yavapai County Board of Supervisors, where we have some significant input, as opposed to Yavapai College Governing Board, which rejects our concerns at nearly every meeting and often openly mocks our residents and voters, treating the Verde Valley as a cash cow while simultaneously denying us facilities paid for by our tax revenues.
We hope that whoever gets elected to Legislative District 1 will keep in mind that the Verde Valley is both an economic and political powerhouse that has about a third of the district’s population.
The representatives who get elected over the next decade will most likely all be from the Prescott area, but those who ignore the concerns of the Verde Valley do so at their political peril. Our voters will control the balance of who gets elected, regardless of partisanship.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
