On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, the resigned Legislative District 3 Secretary spoke at the Maricopa County GOP Executive Guidance Committee and emailed all members the below written statement calling for the censure and removal of tyrannical LD3 Chair Stuart Scurti:
“I resigned on Tuesday, August 26 after Chair Stuart Scurti completely disregarded a valid Board motion and vote to cancel the September LD meeting due to unresolved safety concerns.
When Stuart Scurti initially called me earlier this year and asked if I wanted to be the interim Secretary, I was flattered and honored. But, as soon as I started to attend the Board meetings, I saw a different side of him. It was quickly evident that Chairman Scurti was not the leader that we all thought he was. Here are some examples of his behavior that led to my resignation:
He referred to a recent death threat made by one PC to another PC in our LD as a “verbal conflict” and refused to notify the Board about who he specifically spoke to at the church venue to assure us that the matter had been dealt with. A leader would have followed up with an email copying the Board members to include us in an email with whom he spoke to, but instead he did not do that and was completely secretive and unforthcoming with information which purposefully kept the other Board members in the dark. He never actually gave us the person’s name, even though we kept asking, merely because we wanted to make sure that the church venue knew about the threat and what our response was.
He created two committees that were in clear violation of the current bylaws, one that is a Discovery Committee to look at why there is division in the LD, even though we have a Membership Committee that is already granted with the authority to do that and that he hand-selected non-partisan members to be on. The second one is a Meeting Minutes Committee, which I believe he coerced a member to bring forth the motion, though he already had the motion language in his notes, proving that he created the motion and then got a member to bring it to the Body. This committee usurps the existing responsibilities and duties of the Secretary, and it circumvents the existing process we have in place to revise meeting minutes, as needed, during the LD meetings. He disregarded the existing processes that we have in place, just because he wanted it, and created a committee where he would be appointing the members and of which he would sit on. In a meeting with 1st Vice Chair of MCRC, Shelby Busch, to again discuss issues that the LD Board was having, Shelby mentioned that creating a committee to review the Secretary’s minutes and create a new version that people would approve was “unprecedented”. The motion for the Membership Committee was clearly pre-meditated as he had his response in his Call Letter notes, so it was not an organic motion but rather, he and the member had worked closely together to draft the motion. When said member got up to present the motion, Stuart basically read it for her. He then used the excuse of “the Body wanted it” but based on what transpired during the meeting, it was clear that Stuart wanted the committee and he had found an unsuspecting member to deliver the motion to the Body.
He single-handedly decided to overrule the will and overwhelming majority vote of the Body on a motion that was to table all bylaw changes until next year. Instead of communicating his actions to the Board so that we could be in the loop, he secretly went and spoke with different parliamentarians about the issue, and he had a coordinated effort with another member in the June meeting to overrule the originally passed motion. The motion the member delivered and Stuart’s response were clearly orchestrated. Once again, he had his statement already prepared, showing that the motion and his response were premeditated, and that he had worked closely with the member to create it. The Board had no idea that he was going to do this, as he went rogue again for his own agenda, and it went completely against the will of the Body that had previously voted for the motion.
He threatened to throw out the 1st Vice Chair, Dee Miller because, since we were blind-sided by the above decision in Point #3, she had questions when Stuart made his unilateral decision to cancel the Body’s vote, and she was trying to appeal the Chair’s decision. In that meeting, in June, he also said that the decision was not appealable, but then in a later Board meeting in July, he said that she could appeal the decision. So, which one was it? Simply because the motion went against his agenda and was not what he wanted, the Chair thought he knew best and overruled the will of the Body, the same Body that he is supposed to be fair and balanced for.
Right after the August LD meeting, anonymous and erroneous petitions were sent out to try and remove the 1st and 2nd Chairs to the entire LD3 Body (Dee Miller and Brian Ference). This was clearly a coup attempt. During several Board meetings after the fact where several of us pressed for details about what happened, since all of our logins were reset for the email system, and only Stuart had access to the system, the only answer we could get was “someone was in there that shouldn’t have been” but when asked whether or not this was a hack of the system, the Chair replied “No”. We repeatedly asked for a support ticket but Stuart said that since it was a phone conversation, there was no ticket created. Since this could have been a hack of the system, which Stuart continuously downplayed, and supposedly no support ticket was created, though with any IT issue, especially one where sensitive data was compromised, it was extremely suspicious to several of the Board members and we still don’t know who sent out the anonymous petitions.
Due to the existing issues with Candance Czarny and her illegitimate LD3 group, the Board encouraged Stuart to publicly state that he is not associated with her group in any way, since there continues to be a lot of issues and information being spread to the contrary. We had passed a motion in one of the Board meetings that 3 members needed to approve any message sent out to the Body. Stuart drafted a message that clearly attacked Brian Ference, who was the 2nd Vice Chair, without any facts to back up the claims and it was frankly inappropriate. Stuart did not get the approvals he needed for his version. His wife, Colleen Rose-Scurti, however, decided to get involved by claiming that the Board was “censuring Stuart from communicating with the Body”, which was an absolute lie. She sent out Stuart’s version in the Signal messaging platform to their group of supporters, even though she knew that 3 Board members had to approve any message to the Body. It was completely unethical for her to get involved and to circumvent the Board’s decision about how items were communicated to the Body, and clearly, Stuart encouraged her to send out the message, trying to perpetuate the false narrative that the Board was censuring Stuart.
He hired an out-of-state parliamentarian for $2500 but he did not notify the Board that he was doing this, and we did not know until she was at the meeting, sitting on the stage with us. After much prodding, Stuart finally admitted that she was from New Mexico and that he paid for her services. It wasn’t until after a lengthy discussion did Stuart finally revealed the amount that he paid for her services and why she was hired. He was anything but forthcoming with the information, especially knowing that the Board would have to approve any amount over $200. Several of us on the Board wanted him to send out a notice to the Body, for full transparency’s sake about who she was, why she was hired, etc., and it was not until a lot of prodding that he finally did draft a message. His original notice was extremely lengthy and had a lot of superfluous information in it, and so we asked him to update it to keep it brief and more focused. However, low and behold, his original version was passed out at the August 7 meeting by one of his supporters.
Meeting minutes – he would often contact me separately with his feedback/comments on the minutes, rather than sharing his feedback with the entire Board. Why be so secretive?? He would also ask me to add in his opinions into the minutes, after the minutes were already drafted, so that he could, in my opinion, make himself look better. This resulted in several Addendums to the minutes being created, so that his opinion could be mentioned. Originally, however, he wanted the information to be in the minutes themselves, but thankfully, the 1st and 2nd Vice Chairs pushed back, saying that they needed to be Addendums since they were opinions and did not happen in the meetings themselves. This happened on two occasions.
His treatment of the 1st Vice Chair, Dee Miller, was abhorrent. I saw it from the very first Board meeting that I attended. Back in January, he had texted Dee that “he could not work with her”. I thought he ran on the slate of unity and bringing everyone together?? Stuart would constantly shut Dee down in both the Board meetings and publicly in front of the Body at the LD meetings, especially when she challenged him on his decisions and his faulty knowledge of Roberts’ Rules of Order and the bylaws. It was painfully clear to everyone that Stuart was not willing to listen to any dissenting voices that might disagree with his agenda.
Dee Miller and Brian Ference know the Bylaws and Roberts’ Rules of Order extremely well. Stuart does not. When Dee and Brian would challenge Stuart on his actions and express concern, with supporting facts, when he would openly violate the Bylaws or RONRs, Stuart would get extremely defensive and would constantly interrupt people in our Board meetings. *Note: We had several meetings with the MCRC 1st Vice Chair, Shelby Busch, to raise the concerns that we had with Stuart with the hopes of working through and resolving the severe communication issues and clear lack of respect for the Board members that Stuart was exhibiting, but to no avail. His rogue and clear quest for singular power and control of the LD continued.
Due to the death threat that occurred at the August 7 LD meeting, and rising concerns from many PCs about their safety and the fact that the legal matter had not yet been resolved by the time the Call Letter for September was supposed to go out, Brian Ference called for an emergency meeting on Monday, August 25. Four (4) Board members were able to attend and we discussed the upcoming meeting in September. Stuart, only then, decided to mention how he was “looking into” getting off-duty sheriffs to come to the meeting. Once again, he failed to even mention to the Board that he was looking into this option and decided to do his own thing. Since no proper measures were in place at the time of our emergency Board meeting, we voted to cancel the September meeting, in a 3-1 vote. However, Stuart decided to send out the Call Letter anyway, saying that the Secretary, which was me, had failed in their duties. He completely disregarded the valid motion and vote that the Board members had done because it was not what HE wanted. He clearly had his own agenda and did not care what the vote outcome was. He circumvented the valid process and legitimate vote to cancel the meeting. He did not have any intention of adhering to the decision that the Board members had voted for.
On Monday, August 25, after we had our emergency Board meeting, not even 30 minutes after we had closed the meeting, there were already messages on the Signal chat with Scurti’s supporters denouncing the Board’s decision to cancel the meeting. We hadn’t even sent out a notice yet, because we needed 3 Board members to approve the message and we were still drafting the communication. My question is, how did people know so quickly? My only guess is that Colleen, Stuart’s wife, told this group of people, once again circumventing the Board’s communication process, which only caused strife and confusion. And then, Stuart decided to send out the Call Letter anyway, completely discounting and disregarding the Board’s decision.
I respectively ask that you censure Stuart Scurti and remove him from his position of LD3 Chair due to his clear lack of transparency, respect, and his failure to effectively serve as the Chair in an unbiased fashion. He has single-handedly destroyed the once cohesive group of grassroots supporters by his clear lack of leadership and in his unrelenting quest for gaining complete control over every aspect of the LD. It is unbelievably clear that his agenda takes precedence, that he will not tolerate any dissenting voices or questioning of his methods, and he has a complete disregard for the existing Bylaws and following Roberts’ Rules of Order.”