A bit on Scott Stewart's challenger Kevin Mattocks

It's no secret that Scott Stewart is the only member of the PCC governing board who works in the private sector or even has a strong private-sector background.

Kevin Mattocks, his opponent, also has a bit of a private sector background, but for the most part has worked as a policeman, first in Mesa, then in Oro Valley. Recently he has been head of the FOP, one of the police unions. Stewart (see below) believes him to be the government employee union candidate, and knowing Stewart (and knowing Stewart to be honest to the point where one would mistake him for a Quaker) I'd be very surprised were this were an exaggeration. Indeed, Mattocks confirms the narrative, perhaps inadvertently, on his own website:

I had many discussions with my twin brother who works as a police officer with Pima Community College. The employees of the college learned of my enthusiasm and eligibility to run for this position in district 4. They met with me and talked me into running.

(emphasis mine). Not requests from community leaders, not even faculty and students, and certainly not any intrinsic interest in the position motivated Mattocks: college employees, perhaps perturbed that Stewart backed a 40-hour work week, asked him.

Government employee union candidate or not, what has struck be about Mattocks is his vacuity. Why is he running? He doesn't say. What does he want to do differently? The best we find on his website:

I believe in personal responsibility, family first, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American and Christian values and a strong national defense. I believe the role of government should provide people the freedom necessary to pursue their own goals. I ask for your support and your financial support as I continue my election. I have never planned or run an election nor do I consider myself a politician. I appreciate your interest in my success.

How any of this translates to PCC Governing Board policy is anybody's guess. He goes on a bit:

...Issues:

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Accountability with our Tax Dollars
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Affordable and Accessible Community College Education
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Public Safety
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Improvement of Adult Education Programs
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Community Development

And the second version of the website, although more polished, also lacks concrete statements about PCC or county policy.

I do not attend PCC governing board meetings so I cannot speak to how much interest Mattocks has shown in the month-to-month concerns of that body. But his website and his non-existent statements to the press appear to indicate either that he is uninterested (i.e. he was put up to this), that he hasn't researched the issues at all, or that he hasn't a clue about the PCC governing board's concerns and the compromises they must make with each other and with reality and thus has no policy ideas at all.

It would be small of me to argue that Stewart is a better choice because he is a highly educated engineer and his opponent is a police officer whose regard for intellect may or may not be signaled by his writing on that first website. Surely an "everyman" can also act to advance higher education; in the American tradition millions of "everyman" parents, for several generations, have done so by encouraging and pushing their children to hit the books and go to college. But whereas Stewart has much to say about the value of education to the individual and the public and specifically about the role of the community college, conspicuously missing from Mattocks's (few) statements concerning his run for office are any discussion of education. Not even the vapid Congressional "I support education and the children..." Nothing.

I ask again, and will be far nastier about it than the ever-polite Stewart: Why is Mattocks running? He appears to have no interest in the position, to bring nothing to the race, and if elected it does not appear that he will bring anything to the seat except his rear end. It is not up to us to give him the benefit of the doubt. It's up to him to convince us, to share with us his ideas and the way he thinks about policy. He's not even trying to do so.

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From Stewart's website:

A short statement about my opponent

For twelve years now I've worked to take care of the Pima College staff in both good times and bad. In fact, I've almost always been the board member to publicly defend our employees’ compensation package. This year, however, I have opposition from the government employee union sector. Personally, I believe my opponent was recruited by Pima's union leadership because of the manner in which we have dealt with recent funding cuts. Let me explain why I think this.

Like everyone else, we have to do more with less. However, instead of instituting layoffs and furloughs we've expanded our workweek from 37.5 hours to 40 and cut pay 2.7% per hour (resulting in 4% more pay per week). Unfortunately, the union leadership sees only more hours for less money per hour. They have even publicly complained about the hardships of the 40-hour workweek – this at a time when many folks in the community have lost their jobs!

I have met my opponent and he's an intelligent and positive man. Nonetheless, I believe his background as a government employee and a government employee union representative could very well change the board from one that looks out for the community first to one that first looks out for college employees first. Naturally, I believe we have to take care of the employees but our primary mission is to serve this community FIRST and foremost.

Why Sun Tran management and Tucson need to stand firm in negotiations with the Teamsters.

By now, readers have likely read or heard of the ongoing Sun Tran strike that has bus service in Tucson cut back to extremely limited service leaving many who cannot afford autos nearly stranded in a city designed and built for autos.

It's a severe inconvenience, and it lays bare the often forgotten "distributional" implications of transportation policy decisions. To many of the working poor, it's more than an inconvenience; it's like a kneecapping of their livelihood.

But the Teamsters are asking far, far too much for Sun Tran management. If necessary, strikebreakers should be hired to get the buses moving and the poor to their jobs ASAP. Caving in is not an option.

This is no mere dispute over wages and benefits: the union is demanding that there be no route cutbacks, no layoffs, and that Sun Tran be transferred to the sales-tax subsidized RTA. More than retirees and xenophobia have crossed the Colorado River in recent years. The Teamsters in this dispute are, like California government-employees' unions, attempting to arrogate to themselves the ability to set policy. Not in this state, not even in left-leaning Tucson, should they be allowed to do so.

Meet and confer, promulgate and rescind.

Until the National Labor Relations act is rescinded and common-law freedom of contract restored, your narrator is an opponent of unions and unionization. Unions as we know them, under the current legal regime, are oppressive and exploitative. Nevertheless, in the week or so since news of Jan Brewer's executive order repealing Janet Napolitano's eleventh hour establishment of a "meet and confer" unionization process for State employees, I've tried to make sense of Brewer's rationale, and have concluded that her case is somewhat weak.

It'd almost have been better if Brewer had said "we're repealing this because it was an eleventh-hour regulation." That sounds a bit childish at first, but it could be made respectable were Brewer to turn it into a governing principle, i.e. to say "and I expect my successor to rescind any executive orders I make in such a fashion." Instead, Brewer claims that Executive Order 2008-30 would expose the State to legal claims by unions for "fair share" expenses from non-dues-paying members. That's not prima fascie nonsense, but the Arizona Court of Appeals (Division 1) has found, in AFSCME Local 2384 v City of Phoenix and the City of Phoenix Employment Relations Board (CV 04-0766) that Article 25 of the Arizona Constitution prohibits such a claim. It's possible that one of the public sector employees' unions could bring the case again in a different appeals court division and take it all the way to the AZ Supreme Court, but is it likely? Read the court's opinion, and consider that U.S. state courts have invariably found "agency" or "fair share" fees incompatible with right-to-work laws. Moreover, in Napolitano's scheme, the unions aren't really representing the workers in contract negotiations, anyway, so even if unions in Arizona could claim agency fees, they can make no such claim based on participation in the "meet and confer" process alone.

The bombast in the rest of Brewer's order is equally silly. Meet and confer doesn't establish a "precedent for mandatory unionization", let alone send us down a slippery slope toward "deprivation of essential public services."

That having been said, there are a few good reasons to cheer the quick rescinsion of "meet and confer". While the representation process established by Janet Napolitano doesn't require that state workers be represented by outside membership organizations (unions) it seems designed that way. Napolitano's order is poorly crafted, calling an organization the workers' "duly elected representative", without any condition on what person actually meets with the director of an agency. Nothing precludes the workers from electing themselves to be represented by the "committee of the whole" and to simply send one of their number, selected by vote or lot, to the meeting, but it's rather obvious that this was designed to give labor unions--major Napolitano contributors--a place at the table without cost to the worker. Moreover, the "meet and confer" procedure established democratic elections, winner-take-all affairs, as legitimate means for worker representation. It'd have been better simply to require agency heads to hold quarterly open meetings to hear about morale, cost-efficiency, budget strategy, and employee safety from any workers who'd care to attend.