Yavapai College Governing Board member Connie Harris is facing challenger Paul Chevalier to be District 3 representative, covering the Sedona area.
We urge voters to elect Chevalier. He has the experience to serve and is well-aware of the college tax and educational inequity between the Verde Valley and the Prescott side of Mingus Mountain and has fought to reverse it.
Harris has been an absentee representative and failed to defend the interests of Verde Valley taxpayers since her appointment in January 2017. We have little faith this would change if she were reelected. Harris appears to be little more than a rubber stamp for whatever whims the Yavapai College president has, which more often than not, involve stealing our tax money and using it exclusively in the Prescott area while our students suffer.
Harris first spoke with us for a story in January 2017, when she was appointed to the board. She then spoke with us …
Actually, that was also the last time she communicated with us other than an email announcing her relection and for a story by reporter Corey Oldenhuis last month exposing an attempt by the Yavapai College to send out “informational mailers” about Governing Board members thinly disguised as an attempt to get the incumbents reelected to maintain the status quo.
In that story, regarding the financial imbalance between the Prescott area and the Verde Valley, Harris told Oldenhuis, “If there is some kind of inequity, well then I want to find out. I want to get to the bottom of that. I’m an educator, I like to learn, I want to know what’s going on.”
“If there is some kind of inequity … ” Seriously?
Not only have we written more than a dozen editorials criticizing the Yavapai College Governing Board’s theft of Verde Valley tax funds for the last decade, Harris’ predecessor, former Governing Board member Robert E. Oliphant, wrote a 310-page nonfiction book “Wake Up Verde Valley: You’ve Just Been Ripped Off” in 2016 illuminating exactly how Yavapai College has a 50-year history of overtaxing the Verde Valley, spending our revenue on college programs on the other side of Mingus Mountain and then only reluctantly spending money on facilities and programs in the Verde Valley when complaints from our residents reach a fever pitch.
We’ve read Oliphant’s book, even though Yavapai College Governing Board politics are only one of many beats we cover. Apparently Harris hasn’t, even though it directly relates to her obligations as our representative. We can loan her our copy.
Yavapai College President Penny Wills has repeatedly been berated in person by Sedona City Council for the way her college has unfairly treated our taxpayers. Surely Harris has seen these front page stories and photos of Wills, her employee, deflecting council’s criticisms and promising to do more.
The “inequity” is so bad, we have floated the idea that the Verde Valley secede from the Yavapai College District and form our own college district, which could be possible if one Tucson-area state lawmaker gets his bill through the Arizona State Legislature.
Among all the editorials and criticism lodged toward the tone-deaf Yavapai College board, Wills even blamed our newspaper, our political cartoonist Rob Pudim and our editorials for the reason the college lost a major Verde Valley property endowment to the University of Arizona.
“In her update to the Yavapai College board at a June 9 [2015] meeting, college President Penny Wills couldn’t help but blame Larson Newspapers for the potential loss of the $4.5 million DK Ranch land donation in the Verde Valley,” we wrote in a June 23, 2015, editorial. “Wills said [to the board], ‘Unfortunately, though, a newspaper in the Sedona area went ahead and submitted what I consider a very inappropriate cartoon and an editorial, that really I think will probably hurt our chances.’”
That editorial was a culmination of taxpayers’ anger at the board. So, yes, there’s an inequity, and as the District 3 representative on the board, Harris should be acutely aware of it. She is not.
Conversely, Chevalier is a fighter for our communities. Among all his efforts behind the scenes, he was, for several years, chairman of the Verde Valley Board Advisory Committee, which demanded accountability from the board and fair property tax collection and college program allocation.
The board listened to the VVBAC without acting, then swiftly dissolved it when the taxpayer anger that created it began to fade.
Now Chevalier wants a seat on the Governing Board to serve us. We voters should give it to him so he can continue to advocate for our taxpayers, our college students and our high school students who want college dual enrollment credits.
Elect Paul Chevalier to Yavapai College District 3.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
