Sylvia Allen, who has represented Legislative District 6 in the Arizona State Senate since 2015, is seeking re-election to a fourth term — the last she can serve under term limits.
She visited Camp Verde on Friday, June 12, along with some other Republicans running for seats in the state legislature, at an event at the Veterans of Foreign Wars location, where she sat down for an interview.
Unlike in her last race in 2018, Allen, a Snowflake charter school owner and real estate agent, has pulled in a primary challenge for the Republican Party nomination in the form of Wendy Rogers, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who ran for Congressional District 1 in 2018.
The winner of the Tuesday, Aug. 4, primary will face Felicia French, who is running unopposed for the Democratic Party nomination, in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
Allen cited her roots in the local community as a reason she should be re-elected, pointing to her long residency in Northern Arizona and touting her connection to rural issues such as water rights and forest preservation and accusing her opponent of not having the same connection to the area.
“I live here. I know and understand and breathe our rural issues,” Allen said. “Rural issues are different than urban issues. We don’t have as many rural legislators as we have urban, and so many times Maricopa [County] and the larger counties like Pima County — they have more representation and the issues are always driven more where the population centers are. So it’s very important that we continue to have rural representation.”
Allen chairs the education committee in the Arizona State Senate and pointed to that issue as an important part of her argument for re-election. Allen pledged in no uncertain terms that as the state budget is affected by COVID-19 and the resulting economic slump, the teacher raises passed in 2018 would not be touched in budget negotiations.
She also said that she is hoping for a special session of the legislature in order to pass a bill helping school districts in response to the crisis, but said that while she sees the issue as urgent, she does not know if a special session will happen.
Allen said that she hopes to ensure that schools have the funding and ability to change practices as necessary to deal with an uncertain future amid the pandemic.
“Whatever the situation is, what we’re going to do is make it very flexible. My bill would give local control to all of my districts in rural Arizona to have flexibility in how they deliver the education model,” Allen said.
She pointed to inevitable uncertainty about in-person learning and wants to ensure that districts are not punished for students not coming in as they would normally. “We’re going to have provisions in there to help with the funding, so if they lose 2% of their enrollment, they’re going to be held harmless, meaning that they’ll receive the same amount that they had in the spring, so that they’re held harmless as they work through this.”
Beyond education, Allen said that she is concerned by the amount of funding that is coming from the state to deal with the crisis, taking note of rural hospitals as an area that she worried about. She expressed frustration with what she saw as sluggishness from the governor’s office in distributing federal funds.
Allen has also been close to a local controversy when it comes to education. After consultation with advocates of consolidating the Mingus Union High School District with Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District, Allen introduced bills to ease the process of getting consolidation on the ballot, drawing ire from the MUHSD board, which sued the legislature over a consolidation bill in 2018.
Allen insists that she is neutral on the issue of consolidation and is only seeking to allow the question to be put to voters, as it is expected to be this November.
Allen has taken a staunch position against the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which many in the state, including recently the Camp Verde Town Council, have urged legislators to support.
Allen insists that there is no real discrimination against women in modern American society and feels that a bill like that would hurt women.
“There’s nothing you’re going to gain with that Equal Rights Amendment except hurt whatever protections women might have left,” Allen said. “Those protections will be gone.”
