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If you disagree with a Board vote, too bad – – keep your mouth shut afterwards

Reporter Zachary Jernigan wrote in the Cottonwood Journal Extra of March 15, 2017 that “President Wills [is] having trouble with board members speaking to the press.” Mr. Jernigan was referring to the March 7, 2017 board meeting during which Wills complained that it took her and her staff an inordinate amount of effort to respond to questions if a Board member spoke to the media.

There was no doubt that the comments were aimed directly at Second District representative Deb McCasland. This was confirmed by Mr. Jernigan when he interviewed McCasland following the meeting. She told him: “I am sure that [statement] was in reference to me.”

Since joining the Governing Board, McCasland has been leading the fight for more equitable treatment by the College in the Verde Valley. For the past two years she was joined in that effort by former Governing Board member Mr. Al Filardo. During that time, while making it clear that she was not speaking for the governing board, McCasland often shared crucial information with the citizens of the Valley about the direction the College was taking in the County.

President Wills wants any dialogue between the Verde Valley’s elected representatives on the Board and the citizens of the Valley stopped. The effort to restrict information coming from the elective representatives was the major topic during the Board retreat February 13, 2017. As Wills indicated during her brief outburst at the March 7 meeting, she wants nothing to be shared outside a Board meeting with the public other than what she or current Governing Board spokesperson Ray Sigafoos feeds them.

Sigafoos is the leader of the West County voting bloc that controls Governing Board decisions and is a close ally of Wills. The voting bloc has rejected a long list of recommendations coming from the Verde Valley over the past three years. Sigafoos knows little about the Verde Valley and certainly would not provide the kind of crucial information that McCasland has been sharing with Verde Valley citizens and public meetings and in the press.

The constant pressure coming from Wills and the West County voting bloc to halt McCasland from speaking to her constituents may have had an indirect impact on the third District representative Connie Harris. She seems to buy into the idea that she is not to share information with her constituents and the press in the third District. Her District runs from Jerome to Sedona and includes Cottonwood, Clarkdale, and the Verde villages. Harris, in her third month as a replacement for Filardo, has yet to utter a single sentence in support of a Verde Valley project.

Overall, the effort to suppress the First Amendment right of an elected representative to fully inform his or her constituency is under a full-court attack from the West County voting bloc and Wills. You may view the one-minute statement at the March 7 meeting by Wills below.