Rep. Kavanagh was trying his hand at standup comedy, evidently, at the last Fountain Hills Republican Club meeting stating, “The council is supposed to be non-partisan, but it isn’t,” then enflaming partisanism in the same breath with, “we live in a conservative state in a liberal town.”
Not known for being a funny guy, he had me rolling in the aisle. He, who made Ginny Dickey’s first mayoral run the first and most flagrantly partisan race in the town’s history with defamatory ads that looked like they were modeled after B horror movie posters, stoking unfounded fear that she was a dangerous liberal or some sort, using standard Republican talking point tropes.
He led the effort to pollute our environment with partisan poison in this town, in places where it shouldn’t be, as he correctly stated, such as the Town Council. His hypocrisy is laughable. The two terms of his wife as mayor did not exactly have a warm and fuzzy bi-partisan feeling either, with documented exclusionary behavior toward the Democrats on the council.
The Town Council and the mayoral race should most certainly be non-partisan, as it deals with mostly day-to-day infrastructure efficiency and development directions, and other common priorities to all of us. Efforts to raise the partisan specter is a desperate attempt to retain control at every level of government when that control is being challenged as the state grows more purple each day. It is therefore also misleading and overly simplistic to state that, “we live in a conservative state.” We live in a very mixed state and that should be recognized and embraced, not feared.
