PHOENIX — The de facto directors of three state agencies are of out of their top leadership jobs because majority Republican senators signaled to Gov. Katie Hobbs that they won’t support their confirmations.
Friday’s admission from Hobbs’ spokesman Christian Slater came as he said Hobbs will send the names of agency director nominees to the Senate for confirmation when lawmakers reconvene in early 2025 and restart a process on hold for more than a year.
Just days ago, a judge formally ruled that Hobbs’ effort to bypass contentious confirmation hearings by naming her nominees as “deputy executive directors’’ was illegal. The Republican-controlled Senate had sued after the Democratic governor pulled all her nominees in 2023 after a series of confirmation hearings Slater called a “political circus.’’
Not included in the list of 19 names to be sent for Senate confirmation, however, will be David Lujan, who had led the Department of Child Safety; Dana Allmond, who oversaw the Department of Veteran Services; and Karen Peters, who before Thursday had overseen the Department of Environmental Quality.
All three have been leading those agencies since early in 2023 but will not be re-nominated because “the Senate has made clear they are not going to support them,” Slater said.
They will stay with the agencies as regular deputy directors, however. Ben Henderson, the governor’s operations director, will take over as interim director of both the child safety and environmental quality departments, while John Scott, who was the veterans affairs deputy director, is now leading that agency.
If Democrats win a Senate majority in November and control the nomination process, however, the moves could be reversed.
The Senate took an aggressive stance on agency directors as soon as Hobbs took office in January 2023, with GOP Senate President Warren Petersen scrapping the decades-old system of having hearings for a governor’s appointees held by committees with experience overseeing that area of government. Instead, he created a new committee dedicated to overseeing nominations and named an ally, Arizona Freedom Caucus founder Sen. Jake Hoffman, to lead the panel.
Hoffman sharply criticized many of Hobbs’ appointees and just six were confirmed before Hobbs pulled the rest of the nominations in September 2023 and named them as “executive deputy directors.’’ Several others were rejected, and 10 other nominees got hearings during the 2023 legislative session but no votes by the full Senate.
Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, nor did Petersen.
Petersen said earlier this week that he will hold prompt and fair hearings early in 2025 and that “good nominations will move forward and bad nominees will be rejected.’’ That came after Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney signed a formal judgment finding Hobbs’ actions illegal
But Hoffman said he would not narrow the scope of questioning, which many times in 2023 swerved from a focus on the nominee’s actual job to their political philosophy, to ensure that those who come before his committee aren’t harboring “far-Left ideologies.”
The most visible and well-known of the directors who were reassigned on Friday is Lujan, an attorney who served in the Legislature from 2004 to 2013, led a charter school and then held high-profile jobs at the nonprofit Children’s Action Alliance before being named its president and CEO in 2020. Children’s Action Alliance advocates for policies that help children by boosting access to health insurance, education and child care.
Lujan declined to comment.
The Department of Child Safety was created by former Gov. Jan Brewer in 2013 after the old Child Protective Services agency was embroiled in a scandal where CPS failed to investigate more than 6,500 reports of child abuse and neglect.
More recently, Sen. David Farnsworth said he wants more oversight of the agency, saying it is taking far too many children from their homes and then losing track of some of them.
“Children are being kidnapped, murdered and are being forced into the sex-trafficking world because of state negligence,’’ the Mesa Republican said. “If state government uses law enforcement power to forcibly remove children from their parents’ homes because of unsafe conditions, then state government must also provide those children with a safe haven, both physically and emotionally.’’
The environmental quality agency is charged with regulating sources of water and air pollution. Hoffman, who has expressed doubt about some environmental policies and the state’s role, had posed a whole set of written questions to Peters.
For example, he asked whether she would recommend that Arizona follow California’s lead by pushing to reduce carbon emissions by limiting vehicle sales. And he wanted more information about what role she believes public transit plays in improving air quality.
Peters, however, never got a hearing where she could provide answers.
The Department of Veteran Services provides benefit counseling and other services and runs four nursing homes for veterans and three cemeteries.
Hobbs’ appointment had been questioned by some in the veterans community after Hobbs fired former Director Wanda Wright, a political independent, to replace her with Allmond, who was a failed Democratic candidate for the Arizona House from the Tucson area.
Despite three directors being removed from their jobs because the Senate refused to back their nominations, the current head of the state Housing Department is retaining hers and will be among those renominated by Hobbs in January despite being rejected by Hoffman’s committee in 2023.
Joan Serviss was raked over the coals by Hoffman and Republican nominations committee members last year before being rejected on a party-line vote.
GOP members said she was guilty of plagiarism after she acknowledged that some letters she sent to federal agencies while leading the Arizona Housing Coalition contained sections lifted from other housing advocates. She called it a common practice among advocacy groups to use identical talking points and said she did so infrequently.
Democrats backed her, but Hoffman got all Republicans on the committee to reject her on a 3-2 vote.
Because the full Senate never formally voted on her nomination, she remains in her job and will go before Hoffman’s committee again next year.
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