Two incumbents and one challenger are vying for the two seats in the Arizona House from the Tucson area’s Legislative District 17.
Republican Reps. Cory McGarr and Rachel Jones face Democrat Kevin Volk. The House holds a slight Republican majority of 31-29.
“I felt compelled to run because I think we need to do a lot better at the state legislative level,” Volk told the Arizona Daily Star in an interview. “We’ve seen the state Legislature in Phoenix start to resemble the Congress in D.C. in terms of some pretty irresponsible governance and management of our budget.”
Volk
McGarr and Jones could not be reached for interviews or to comment; they did not respond to emails to their campaign offices and calls to the phone numbers on their campaign websites.
Volk, a Tucson native and fifth-grade teacher turned businessman, was previously an intern for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He works for Volk Company, a real estate agency that focuses on small businesses. He also founded a small business that creates affordable, sustainable prefabricated housing units from a manufacturing facility in Tucson, he said.
In the July Republican primary, McGarr racked up 41% of the votes, Jones about 32%, and their intra-party challenger Anna Orth lost, taking under 30%.
Jones
McGarr, originally from New Jersey, is a freshman representative who moved to Arizona because it was a “vibrant free state with low taxes, low regulation and ... protected constitutional rights,” according to his campaign website.
Jones, also a first-term representative, has lived in Arizona for 17 years. She spent her career as a “business executive at the 3rd largest UPS facility in the country,” and also served as director of a preschool she taught at, she has said.
Volk told the Star that Arizona’s “divisive politics” have impacted all sorts of issues, including education, water and housing affordability.
McGarr
“We see that in public education, where Arizona is ranked 49th in per pupil funding for schools, where we’re in a multi-year teacher shortage crisis across the state,” he said. “We see it in water, where the can keeps on getting kicked down the road and much needed investment is delayed.”
He continued: “We see it in housing affordability, where we’ve gone from one of the most affordable markets in the country to one of the less affordable markets in the country in a very short span; and we see it in the unprecedented attacks on reproductive rights.”
Though he didn’t mention his opponents by name, Volk said those problems are not getting addressed because of the “increasing extremism and unproductive nature of more and more folks at the state legislative level.”
Jones and McGarr are members of the ultra-conservative Arizona Freedom Caucus.
Jones received scrutiny earlier this year for proposing legislation that would have awarded Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to the Republican presidential nominee in the November election if Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs refused to sign Republican-sponsored voting security measures.
McGarr co-sponsored legislation that would have prohibited voting by mail within Arizona and a bill that sought to give protections for teachers sponsoring or participating in religious student clubs, wearing religious clothing or jewelry that conformed with existing dress codes, and decorating personal spaces with items reflecting their religious beliefs.
Abortion
Both Jones and McGarr are against abortion and praised the state Supreme Court for upholding the 1864 total abortion ban last spring; the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democrat Hobbs later rescinded that law, leaving Arizona with a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Volk is in favor of restoring Roe v. Wade protections for abortion access. “I’ve got a stance that I think is shared by the broad majority of Arizonans and Americans, and that’s that the 1864 ban stance is really, really extreme,” he said.
Housing
Housing is one of Volk’s areas of expertise because of his background. He says affordability will take a “multifaceted approach.”
“It involves looking at ways to give folks access to lower interest rate loans through the public authorities in Arizona, their access to get lower interest financing, it looks at better connecting our state’s really rich agriculture more directly with the food that people need and is growing increasingly expensive at the grocery stores,” he said.
Though the Republican incumbents couldn’t be reached for interviews, McGarr’s website states he will fight to “end homelessness and crime.” Jones’ website does not appear to mention housing.
Water
Water conservation is an “opportunity” in Arizona that can be turned into a new industry, according to Volk.
“We need to reallocate the taxpayer revenue that we already receive and put it towards things that benefit the broad majority of Arizonans, like securing our water future, because that’s something that has the potential to be really harmful to everybody,” he said. “Because of the recklessness of the current state legislative leadership on the previous budget, they had to scrap a planned $333 million investment into the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority.”
Volk said it’s important to incentivize agriculture to use “the most water efficient technology but doing it in a way where there’s actually going to be widespread adoption and we’re not harming our valuable agricultural industry or our economy.”
McGarr’s website states he will fight to “protect our water rights”; Jones’ website appears to make no mention of water.
Education
After graduating from college, Volk joined Teach for America and became a fifth-grade teacher in an underserved community.
“Public education is critical,” he said. “It’s critical that we pay our teachers what they deserve, to stop the loss of people out of the profession, and make sure that our schools have the resources to serve the more than 90% of kids who are in our public education system.”
McGarr and Jones voted to block funding to schools in a way that would have “shut them down in the middle of the year and cancelled any graduations,” Volk said.
“This really isn’t the kind of standard, differing philosophies that we’re used to in politics,” he said. “I’m running against folks who have really extreme views and have really extreme votes on the record that back up those views.”
On McGarr’s website, he states he will “stop woke corporations and grooming in schools,” “defend parental rights” and “protect girls’ sports from men.” He voted to ban critical race theory and DEI programs in schools and to remove “explicit materials” from schools, according to his website.
Jones, who used to be a preschool director, wrote on her website that she fights for parental rights and against “the woke agenda in schools.”
