Ne’lexia Galloway|| Maricopa County
Mary Jo Pitzl
Arizona Republic
The executive director of the Maricopa County Democratic Party resigned Monday as controversy grew over a $24,000 business deal that the director appeared to direct to her fiancé.
Ne’lexia Galloway’s resignation was announced by county Democratic Party chair Nancy Schriber in an email to party officials. She did not give a reason for Galloway’s departure.
Galloway did not return a text message inquiring about her reasons for leaving.
Axios Phoenix first reported the concerns about the party’s spending.
A mailer that never was mailed
The announcement came as tensions heightened among the party’s activists over a planned campaign mailer featuring the party’s slate of Democratic candidates in November’s general election. It was intended to hit the mailboxes of 118,000 county Democrats ahead of the election.
Although the party was billed $24,480 for the work, the mailer never went out.
Heather Mrowiec, who recently
resigned as the party’s treasurer, tracked what happened with that transaction and said she discovered U.S. postal records appeared to be falsified to give the impression the mailer was distributed.
She reached that conclusion when she obtained postal receipts, after multiple efforts, from the vendor, the political consulting firm Agave Strategy.
Mrowiec shared her findings late last month in a statement sent to party board members. The Arizona Republic obtained a copy of her statement.
“We suspected the documents provided were not legitimate; this suspicion was confirmed by USPS (the U.S. Postal Service) who told us that no jobs were processed with the quantities/ prices on the documents, and that the documents contained inaccuracies indicating they were not authentic,” she wrote.
The receipts showed that a California printing company called 4Over.com provided the mailing permit. But, Mroweic wrote, 4Over.com told her they had no jobs that matched the information on the documents provided by Agave Strategy.
4Over.com is the same company used by Blaque Printing, a company owned by Galloway’s fiancé, Bruce Franks Jr., Mrowiec noted.
