Democrat Stefanie Mach is running for a third term, and fellow party member Kirsten Engel is new to politics. Republican Todd Clodfelter, a clean elections candidate, is making a third effort to win a seat in the state house.
Meet the candidate
He has owned and operated Ace Graphics and 3D Teez, a graphics design, consulting and printing business, since it opened in 1983.
He's a gradate of Sahuaro High School and earned a bachelor's degree in speech communication from the University of Arizona.
He completed two terms as chairman of the LD10 Republicans.
Meet the candidate
She earned a bachelor's degree from Brown University and went on to graduate from the Northwestern University School of Law.
Before moving to Tucson in 2005, Engel worked for the EPA and was an assistant attorney general in the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office.
She established the University of Arizona's Environmental Law Certificate Program in 2011, and works as co-director.
She grew up in a military family. After 9/11, she spent a year serving in the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.
Prior to her 2012 election to the State House, Macht spent a decade working in the nonprofit sector.
She earned a bachelor's degree in international relations and affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a master's degree in public policy from Brown University.
One incumbent and two challengers are vying for two seats in the Arizona House of Representatives for Legislative District 10.
Democrat Stefanie Mach is running for a third term, and fellow party member Kirsten Engel is new to politics, after deciding to enter the race last fall when she learned that Democrat Bruce Wheeler would be stepping down at the end of the term.
Republican Todd Clodfelter, a clean elections candidate, is making a third effort to win a seat in the state house, having lost in two previous attempts.
Even though Clodfelter is running under the clean elections system, he raised the most money during the June 1 to Aug. 18 campaign finance period, with nearly $18,000 coming in. Engel raised $15,000, and Mach brought in $14,000.
All the candidates say they are prepared to work with members outside of their party to accomplish what’s best for the state and that ultimately each party wants to achieve the same goals.
“What we all want is very similar, it’s just the means to get there that are different,” Mach said.
She talked about the issue of Medicaid expansion, which came before the legislature during her first year in office, citing her experience navigating the lengthy process, which she referred to as a delicate situation.
“No one knew internally if it was going to work out until it did, and we all worked together to make sure that the 300,000 people who were vulnerable had access,” Mach said.
Clodfelter said he has belonged to organizations his whole life, all of which have been nonpartisan. He cited Boy Scouts, Rotary Club and his church as a few examples.
“We accomplished a lot with those organizations, because of all of the different ideas people had,” he said. “It’s just a matter of working together.”
Engel cited her experience as an attorney, saying that when she worked as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, she successfully negotiated an agreement with a large paint manufacturer to warn consumers about the hazards of lead-based paint exposure.
“We were the first state to do that, and we became a model for states across the country,” she said, adding that at times the negotiations were tense.
All of the candidates agree education is the most pressing issue facing the state, and Proposition 123 was not the right solution.
“I don’t believe it was the only choice, but it was the only choice we had before us at the time,” Mach said, adding that she voted against it when it passed through the legislature.
Each of the candidates also mentioned the state’s infrastructure as a priority. They differed on what additional problems Arizona needs to “fix,” although each agreed that both a short- and long-term plan would be necessary to achieve those goals financially.
Mach wants to take on prison reform, saying the largest housing unit in the state for mentally ill people is the state prison system. She said it would cost less for the state to treat substance abuse and mental health issues than to put people in prison.
A former attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency, Engel has included the environment on her list of priorities.
“People are concerned about the water issue,” she said. “They feel like Tucson has been a leader in efforts to protect the environment, but now the state needs to follow its lead.”
Clodfelter talked about mending the economy and the need for more jobs, but said it wouldn’t be easy to repair any of the problems the state currently has.
“You can’t fix just one aspect of these issues,” he said. “If you change one piece of the design, you have to plan for the rest.”
Campaign season is filled with big promises of sweeping change and lofty but generic goals — the kind of rhetoric that gets supporters energized.
So it’s particularly refreshing to hear candidates speak in specifics about how to be effective in meaningful, doable ways.
This is the mind frame of the candidates the Star endorses in Legislative District 10: David Bradley for Senate; and Stefanie Mach and Kirsten Engel for the House.
Bradley and Mach are incumbent Democrats and Engel, also a Democrat, is running for the first time.
Republican Randall Phelps is challenging Bradley, and Republican Todd Clodfelter is making his third run for the Legislature.
Bradley is running for his second term in the state Senate, and served from 2003 to 2011 in the state House.
His professional experience leading child welfare and family agencies makes him a knowledgeable and much-needed voice for the most vulnerable. He brings real-world practical experience to policy and operational discussions that make him a valuable asset for not only his district, but for children across Arizona.
That work informs his legislative approach. He told the Star he’s learned to focus on “things that chip away around the edges” instead of waiting for massive changes to happen.
Bradley is pragmatic, a desirable quality in an elected official, especially one who is in the minority in the Maricopa County-focused and Republican-dominated Legislature.
He’s worked to expand community schools, a program that brings social services and sometimes health care into schools. Reinforcing schools’ importance in neighborhoods and residents’ lives helps strengthen bonds between campuses and families, which is to the good.
Mach, who describes her achievements in the Legislature as being “more behind the scenes,” puts public education and sentencing reform as her top priorities.
We appreciate Mach’s ability to frame big issues, such as public education, in a compassionate way that also conveys urgency and knowledge. Relying on crushing loads of homework and teaching to the standardized test doesn’t help students, she said.
“We need to change our attitude about what is education,” Mach said. “For example, things like learning how baking cookies is science.”
Mach’s focus on criminal justice and prison conditions and sentences makes sense. She wants to address the roots of some criminal behavior, rather than only deal with the results after a person has been arrested, convicted and sentenced. Better and more drug treatment programs, could help people stay out of the court and corrections system in the first place, she said.
“Prison reform is needed not only to save money, but to have a safe system,” Mach said. “Everything is connected.”
All three candidates make the connection between Arizona’s paltry investment in public education and the state’s economic health and the number of people living in poverty.
Engel, who is a professor of environmental law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, said she was moved to advocate for public education from early childhood programs through the university level.
Her expertise in environmental and water law will also serve Southern Arizona well because she isn’t motivated by ideology, but by facts and laws.
The conversation about improving education, and the funding for it, often centers around K-12 schools. Engel, however, expanded her target to community colleges and Arizona’s three state universities. She makes a convincing argument about the necessity of a strong education system.
Engel cited the Legislature’s decision to end all state funding to Pima and Maricopa community colleges as a particularly harmful decision. Making it more difficult for people, particularly adults, to go back to school for re-training or an associate’s degree damages the economy.
The same is true at the university level, she said. Employers have a hard time finding qualified local employees, companies don’t want to relocate to a state with an anemic education system and recent college graduates have a hard time finding a good-paying job, so they leave Arizona.
Engel said she would close corporate tax loopholes, because “we’re not getting the benefit” as a lure to companies.
“The money in the budget is there, it’s a matter of priorities,” she said.
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