Arizona Treasurer DeWit: Ducey won't be in same room as me

The feud between state Treasurer Jeff DeWit and Gov. Doug Ducey over the governor's proposal to increase K-12 funding by tapping the state land trust amped up last week and spilled onto Twitter, with DeWit saying Ducey was refusing to be in the same room as him.

DeWit went public in his opposition to the governor's plan weeks ago, which, in his view, will harm education funding in the long run. Ducey disagrees. Since, the pair and their representatives have pushed their positions on the funding plans in various ways. We'll spare you the details, but at a recent forum, DeWit told a crowd that cleaning up misinformation that Ducey's office said about DeWit's criticism was like cleaning up dog crap.

On Thursday night, as he was leaving an Arizona Federation of Republican Women event, DeWit tweeted he wanted to stay to mingle with attendees but the governor wouldn't enter the event until DeWit departed.

"We would've stayed for entire @AzFRW reception, but pressured to leave by @dougducey staffers, #AZ Gov Ducey refused to enter until we left," DeWit wrote on his official account.

Within moments, the group retorted: "AzFRW@JeffDeWitAZ@AzFRW@dougducey Absolutely false! Our plan all along was to rotate elected officials to give our members more 1on1 time."

Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told The Republic neither Ducey nor his staffers requested DeWit be removed or asked to leave to prevent the two elected officials from coming face-to-face with each other.

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But even before the event, the Treasurer's Office told the newspaper that an event organizer told treasury officials she had been asked to ensure DeWit and Ducey weren't at the event at the same time.

In an e-mail to the newspaper, DeWit spokesman Sean Dollman described the lengths the group took to prevent such an encounter. Dollman wrote he asked an organizer why DeWit was being asked to change his attendance time and was told "... the Governors office requested that the treasurer not be there when the Governor planned to attend between 7-730. When I asked who requested this I was told the Governor's staff."

Dollman wrote in his e-mail to the newspaper the organizer didn't know why the request was made, "...but she was just told the governor did not want to be there when the treasurer was there."

DeWit said he's surprised the disagreement has devolved into such a feud.

"I don’t get it to a whole lot of degrees," he said. "To him, I’ve never been anything but professional."