This AZ senator voted for state funding for his employer. He says it's not a conflict of interest

Beyond his position at the Legislature, Democratic state Sen. Brian Fernandez holds a senior leadership role at Onvida Health, formerly called the Yuma Regional Medical Center. Last year, he abstained from voting on a bill that would have sent money to his employer — but, then just months later, he voted for the funding anyway in the state budget.

It’s all raising questions about Arizona’s conflict of interest laws for state lawmakers — and Nicole Ludden with The Arizona Agenda has been covering it all. She joined The Show discuss more.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: So what does Sen. Fernandez say about this vote funding his employer?

NICOLE LUDDEN: Yeah, so Sen. Fernandez told us that he is the director of or vice president of external relations at Onvida Health. He has a community-facing position instead of a lobbying one, and that there's not a conflict there because the money itself is funding a wide swath of his constituents.

So it's not personally benefiting him financially. So it doesn't raise a financial concern for him. And that's, that's based on the state's conflict of interest laws that generally tend to rule out legal conflicts if a specific action as an elected official benefits more than 10 people.

GILGER: More than 10 people. So we have a pretty narrow conflict of interest law here in Arizona it sounds like.

LUDDEN: Yeah, Arizona has pretty lax conflict of interest laws. We have a citizens Legislature, part time citizens Legislature. So lawmakers are expected to have outside jobs. Teachers are many times voting on education bills, lawyers voting on judiciary-related bills. And they're often valued for their expertise in those areas. But that, that's obviously not a conflict of interest legally.

A legal conflict of interest usually exists if a lawmaker has a direct personal financial stake in the outcome of the bill, if they can prove that they specifically would benefit more than the wider class of people here. And so since Onvida Health has more than 10 employees, you know, there's no indication here that the Sen. Brian Fernandez would benefit more than his co-workers at Onvida Health.

GILGER: Now you said that he told you that he is has an external affairs position at Onvida Health, but his LinkedIn page says something a little different and raises some other questions about lobbying here, right?

LUDDEN: Correct. His LinkedIn page actually lists him as the vice president of government relations at Onvida Health, which is a very different situation than sort of doing community-facing work. And that's a whole different ethical concern. And one of the reasons why this case stands out more than a typical conflict of interest case with the state lawmaker, it's very specifically influencing which he works for, which raises more sort of ethical issues.

GILGER: Tell us more about this bill that Fernandez sponsored pretty early on here. It was to fund a collaboration basically between his Yuma Medical Center and the University of Arizona to construct a regional medical center, right?

LUDDEN: Right. So the, the basis of this whole thing, what this, all this funding is for, is a medical school to try to get more primary doctors in rural Arizona where there really is a huge need for health care there and a shortage that they're contending with.

So basically this funding, you know, it's only $3 million in state funds for now with other private buy-in. But it'll be a collaboration between Onvida Health and Yuma and the UA's College of Medicine in Phoenix, where potential future primary care doctors will do a three-year program and spend half of it in Phoenix and the other half in Yuma actually doing in person clinical work.

GILGER: Right. So that was the initial proposal. It didn't pass the House, but it did end up getting kind of wrapped into the larger state budget at a lesser amount, right?

LUDDEN: Correct. The bill was originally set at $7 million in ongoing funding sent to this program, to the UA- and Onvida-run program. It ended up in the state budget, which a lot of those conversations happen behind closed doors. We don't get to see it play out through negotiations or committee hearings where we get to see what lawmakers and other general members of the public think about these bills.

It's sort of, especially last year, lawmakers get specific projects to get them to vote for a larger spending plan, especially in a divided Legislature. So this was one of those earmarked appropriations in the budget.

GILGER: And it did pass at $3 million, is that right?

LUDDEN: Yep. $3 million, yeah.

GILGER: OK, so initially Sen. Fernandez had sponsored this bill. He later abstained from voting on it and then in the end voted for this other funding within the state budget. When he abstained, what did he say about why?

LUDDEN: Yeah, so when he was voting on this in the floor, he decided, I'm taking a Rule 30 on this. You know, technically his vote doesn't count in the, in the larger vote totals there. He didn't give any specifics on that at the time, but we found his, the form that lawmakers have to fill out when they're take a Rule 30, or disclose a potential conflict of interest.

He cites the hospital system in Yuma where he works and says he might have some overlap. He told us he made that decision after consulting with the Senate's legal counsel just to avoid the appearance of impropriety in general, but that he didn't feel like it was really a necessary action, just sort of a to address the optics there after speaking to legal counsel, but ultimately did not feel like that transferred or also applied to the state budget, which is massive billion dollars of spending that largely benefits the whole state.

GILGER: OK. So, Nicole, before I let you go, tell us more about some of the other ways that lawmakers tend to benefit from this relatively narrow conflict of interest law here in Arizona. Like we see, right? In different ways.

LUDDEN: Right. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of interesting cases. I mean, this year alone we saw Sen. Jake Hoffman sponsored a bill for a license plate honoring Charlie Kirk, and some of those funds would be directed to Turning Point USA Program, which his marketing firms are sort of financially entangled with.

We see Sen. Shawnna Bolick, whose husband, Clint Bolick, is on the state Supreme Court continuously voting on bills that affect the judiciary and term limits and bills like that.

The case here for Brian Fernandez is a little different because of the orchestration behind it. But there's, there's many ways in which lawmakers can directly benefit the industries they work for in more, in more specific ways than a general industry, which the law was originally intended to cover.

GILGER: What do lawmakers think about this, Nicole? Like, do they think that there's an issue here, that this may be too lax, that lawmakers are too often benefiting from the legislation that they can sponsor, or is this kind of accepted and seen as okay since, as you said, we do have a citizen Legislature?

LUDDEN: Yeah. In general, the response I hear from lawmakers is, yes, this is a citizens Legislature. The system is working as it is intended to. I've only really seen calls for conflict of interest reform when it's politically beneficial to the lawmakers in charge to actually enact change. And, you know, there's been calls for this throughout the years as to different lawmakers have found themselves embroiled in different controversies.

But ultimately, the state lawmakers aren't inclined to police themselves. And that's the avenue this would take.