Legislative District 12 stretches from Surprise in the north to Rainbow Valley in the south, and from Glendale in the east to Buckeye in the west. In terms of square miles, it is one of the largest urban districts in the state. It’s somehow fitting, then, that its newest lawmaker, second-term Republican Rep. Jerry Weiers, has a sense of duty as large as the district, with an inversely proportional ego to match.
“I take my job seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously,” he says.
Weiers says his goal at the Legislature, beyond crafting policy to guide the state into the future, is to make everyone’s day a little better by getting them to laugh. Always quick with a quip, he also has a penchant for what he calls “common-sense thinking.”
He spoke with Arizona Capitol Times about growth and hunting issues Feb. 25, after a 90-minute airplane flight around his district.
When you’re up in your plane and you look at District 12, what do you see≠
Unbelievable growth. Sometimes it feels like undisciplined growth. And I see Phoenix changing dramatically from when I was a kid. I don’t necessarily like the changes, but we have what we have, and so we need to try to make them better.
What can the state do about that growth≠
Sometimes it seems like we can’t do very much. We have to be in the middle and make certain that we have adequate water. Transportation, as everyone knows, is something I’ve been fighting for.
We have some huge, huge problems, and it’s one of those situations where I think everybody knows what we need to do on transportation, but nobody wants to do it. I don’t know how to go about doing it. The bottom line is our taxes don’t cover our necessities. And I’m not going to be the guy standing out there saying we have to have tax increases, because that’s certainly a way that you get thrown out of office. But unless somebody can show me another way on how we’re going to solve this problem [if we] continue the growth that we’re having…
I think it needs to be a user fee; the people that actually drive vehicles should be the ones paying for it. You know, our tax structure is so screwed up, the way the money gets split up and divided and shared through HURF [Highway User Revenue Fund] and everything else, it’s just a total mess. It needs to be revamped.
Are you in favor of toll roads, as a way to make those who use the roads pay for them≠
No, I’m not. I think, personally, I don’t like toll roads. I’ve been back East, I drove a semi for years and I just hated the idea of toll roads. I distinctly hate the idea of paying somebody in a little cubicle to take my money so I can pay them to sit in a little cubicle.
I’m just not a big fan of toll roads. I think it should be paid for at the pump, but I think we should redo our tax structure so that it actually covers it, instead of being split up 50 different directions.
You have a focus, with your background as a sportsman, of making sure the environment is protected and handling encroachment issues in a way that harms the environment as little as possible. One of your bills, H2443, deals with off-road vehicles. What’s the problem and what does it do≠
The problem is that we went from a few thousand off-road vehicles 10 years ago to, I think, about three- or four hundred thousand now. We have people that believe that, if it’s an off-road vehicle, you can take it off-road anytime you want to anywhere you want to. That would be nice, but that’s not the way it’s set up. We have federal land and state land and people where people would like to ride. Some places are being closed down dramatically because they’re destroying the environment.
Up north, for example, a guy goes through the forest and he runs through the meadows, and 9,000 people behind him do the same thing. The next thing you know, we don’t have any meadows. Then the snow melts and, instead of soaking into the ground to keep the grass green during the summer, the grass dies early and you get a lightning storm or some idiot throws a cigarette out, and the next thing you know, our pine trees are on fire, and we’re trying to figure out why. This isn’t the only problem, it’s one of the problems.
We need a way that we can solve that situation, which is by coming up with dedicated trails that people can ride — I don’t even want anybody to even remotely think I’m trying to stop [off-roading], because I’m not — signage where they actually know where they can legally ride and law enforcement that, if the guy is a hot-dogger and starts tearing things up, can take care of that.
We have to come up with a dedicated revenue source. I think my bill covers that. It lowers the [fee] dramatically — the difference on mine is it makes everyone participate where, in the past, only a few people that cared participated while everyone else didn’t.
There’s some people that are upset that everyone’s going to have to register their quads and pay a small fee. The fee, ideally, on an annual basis is going to be about $20 or $25. But the fee will provide the funds for the trails, for the marking, the law enforcement, and education.
The Motor Vehicle Divison’s not real happy with me, because they feel that it’s going to be too many license plates they’re going to have to issue. State Parks is not real happy, Game and Fish isn’t real happy — nobody’s real happy. But everybody understands that if all of us are a little bit unhappy, we’re probably going to end up with something that’s doable for the entire state, and that’s what’s most important.
You’ve taken the role of the Game and Fish Department’s resident lawmaker. How did that happen≠
My freshman year, I hadn’t been in office two weeks, and I walked into my office and there was this huge stack of papers on my desk and a note from Sen. [Bob] Cannell. The note said, “I understand that you’re an outdoors guy and you’re the one who can do this, so here you go.” And that was a fee bill — one of the largest things I could have gotten involved in as a freshman.
I think I established myself early on with other members that it’s not something I talk about — it’s something I actively do. It’s people I associate with, it’s organizations I belong to and have for years. I don’t claim to know everything there is — in fact, I’ve stated to hundreds of people for several years that I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer — but that’s OK, because I don’t have to be. There are plenty of people around me who are sharp, and as long as I know who they are, I can always use their services and their help.
I care dramatically about what happens with our environment and our game species and our animals. I want to make certain that those opportunities are there for our kids and our grandkids. I see that, if I’m not actively doing this, I don’t see anybody else stepping up and doing it, and it’s too important to the state.
You had a pair of bills (H2116 and H2117) that allow big game hunting licenses to be transferred to grandchildren and to disabled kids. Why≠
One of the things that we’re experiencing across the nation is that we have fewer and fewer youth getting involved in hunting, particularly because it’s expensive. A lot of their parents weren’t involved because they either didn’t have time or didn’t care. We’re losing the very people that put in the hours and the time and the money to make certain we have habitat and the game for the habitat — the sheep and deer and elk and everything else. If the hunters aren’t participating in that, we don’t have other people that will do it. The hunters, the people that hunt the animals, are the very people who put the most money and the most effort into preserving the fact that we keep them.
The reason for the grandkids is I see a disconnect between people older than myself, who didn’t take their kids hunting but would like to hunt now, but their kids don’t want to. This is a way to jump over that so a grandparent can actually take his grandchild hunting and get them back into the sport.
I haven’t had anybody that has had a problem with a grandparent, if he draws a big game tag, allowing his grandchild to use that tag. The Game and Fish Department doesn’t have a problem with it.
It’s a way for a grandparent to be involved in their grandkids. The parents are working and maybe don’t have enough time, but granddad can come in and bring in granddaughter and get her involved and, maybe when she becomes an adult, she’ll keep that tradition going on.
The other bill doesn’t seem to be understood very well, and for the life of me I don’t know why. The other one is anybody that draws a big game tag can give it to a 501(c)3 organization. In turn, that organization can give it to a physically disabled child. When I say child, they have to be under the age of 17 and at least 10, and have successfully completed the hunter’s safety course.
One of the things that was brought up on the floor by one of the Democrats was that she didn’t feel this handicapped child would have enough sense to know whether they should shoot a human or a deer. And what she doesn’t understand — and I explained this to her in the hallway, and she understood it, she just flat doesn’t like the idea — our law says that a handicapped child can hunt right now. They can put in for their own tag and be drawn. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to have the opportunity. Maybe they don’t have the money. This gives the opportunity where anybody can donate the tag if they choose.
But more importantly, the 501(c)3s — the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society, the Antelope Foundation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Society, all of these places — have thousands of people that would love the opportunity to take a handicapped child hunting. It doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny. It simply allows that child that’s physically disabled the opportunity to do something that, maybe when they get older, they won’t be able to. It’s a good faith, goodwill thing I feel very strongly about.
A lot of people probably aren’t aware of it, but it was your suggestion that’s kept the lights on during all the committee hearing this year. Explain that a little bit.
Well, I was quoted by The Arizona Republic the first time I ran that I was a “well-grounded” guy and had “simplistic ideas,” and that’s why people shouldn’t vote for me. And I couldn’t understand that — to me, that’s the best endorsement in the world! Why would you not vote for somebody that has pretty simple ideas≠ It doesn’t have to be a complex idea — if there’s a way to fix the system, and it’s simple, why not do that≠ So, I try to go off of that as much as possible.
I feel very strongly that if somebody’s at a committee meeting and they have a bill and they’re testifying, either for it or against it, I think that we owe them 100 percent of our attention. At the time, that might be the most important thing to that person ever.
I noticed things like cell phones going off. I noticed people leaning against the walls and we had three-way light switches down there, so one switch might be up and the one next to it might be down and the next one up and so on. If they’d lean against it and the lights would go off, the first thing they do is they start popping all the switches, trying to figure out which one it is. They just made it worse than what it was.
My recommendation was, this is ridiculous, why don’t we just simply put guards over them — a simple, 99-cent guard so people can’t do that. I talked with the speaker, I talked with maintenance. Maintenance said, well, we can do the guards or we can just go ahead and blank them off and have the one set of switches in the back, where nobody leans against the wall.
That makes a whole lot of sense to me: it’s simple, it’s cost-effective, and it solves a problem. There hasn’t been an incident yet where someone’s been disrupted. The bill that might mean everything in the world to them, might be the most important thing in the world, hasn’t been interrupted or disturbed because of that.
The same thing with the flags in Hearing Room 1. They had these big pedestals and were wonderful flags, but people were walking between whoever was sitting in that chair and the flag were knocking the flags over. It’s another disruption that didn’t make sense to me.
In Hearing Room 1 again, the door on the east side of the building didn’t have a self-closer on it. I’m sitting there, and I’m half-deaf in one ear and can’t hear out of the other, and the lobby is full of people and I’m trying desperately to listen to the conversation, because it’s my duty to understand what’s going on, and I can’t hear what’s going on. So, I asked maintenance, what would be the chances of putting a door-closer on there, like all the other ones have, and they said, “We never thought of that.”
So, we have one now, and the room’s quieter and the lights don’t get turned off and no one’s tripping over the flags, and I’m thinking, why did it take 40 years for someone to think of this≠
What are the challenges of having your brother as the House speaker≠
He put me on a lot of committees. Someone said, “Don’t you know anybody, can’t you talk to anybody≠” and I said, “I don’t want to end up on seven.” Sub-approps Health is done now, so I’m down to five committees. I look at it this way: there’s enough confidence in me that I’ll show up, because quite a few people don’t even bother in showing up for committees. I’ll show up and I’ll vote my conscience, what I think the district wants me to do. I may not always be right, but I feel as though I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
As far as challenges with him, probably the biggest challenge is making people understand when they send e-mails and letters that they need to figure out which is “JP Weiers” and which is “J Weiers.” Quite often, we trade e-mails and phone calls. [Editor’s note: In the House, Jerry Weiers is referred to as “JP Weiers,” while House Speaker Jim Weiers is denoted as “J Weiers.”]
But, overall, everybody understands that I’m the better looking brother, so it’s not a huge problem.
Are there any benefits to having your brother as speaker≠
The biggest benefit is, if I have a problem, I know I can call him at home. Although, I probably get less time to talk to him down at the Capitol than any other member, because that’s the brother thing. He takes care of other people before he does me, and I don’t expect him to do any different.
He and I worked together for years, and it was the same situation. I worked for him when I was 16 years old, and it was the same situation. That’s family. You don’t always get what you want because you’re family, but I know that I can go to him at late hours and he’ll talk to me. I have access to him at home — I can go to his house, where other people can’t do that. I typically don’t, but it hasn’t been a big thing.
Truly, the biggest challenge I had was the first couple of years, making other members understand I’m my own person. I don’t lock-step with him. There’s been several times that we’ve voted differently. I think a lot of people figured that I was going to be his yes-man, and they found out that I’m my own person.
And I think people respect me for that. At least I think they do — when people are waving at me, they’re using five fingers, so I think that’s pretty good.
Thank you.
You bet.
Up Closer
What was the first car you ever owned≠ 1963 Oldsmobile F85 station wagon. It was a two-speed Hydroglide transmission.