Questions Cloud Future for Arizona’s Governor

Gov. Fife Symington, who promised voters he would restore Arizona’s respectability, is facing personal and political problems after eight months in office. He calls it his “dark period.”

The state has struggled through a dark period of its own, including the 1988 impeachment of Gov. Evan Mecham, years of controversy over the Legislature’s refusal to enact a paid state holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the collapse of Charles Keating Jr.’s Phoenix-based financial empire and a political-corruption scandal in which eight current and former state legislators were indicted.

Symington, 46, a great-grandson of U.S. Steel founder Henry Clay Frick and nephew of former U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington, is a millionaire developer. He defeated Mecham in the Republican primary and took office last March, after beating Democrat Terry Goddard in a runoff.

Mecham, who was impeached on charges of misusing money from supporters, opposed the King holiday and made public remarks considered offensive to women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals and Japanese. Symington accused Mecham of making Arizona “the object of national derision” and promised to restore the state’s image.

At first, he seemed to be on the right track.

He helped negotiate the adoption of a state budget with a built-in, $50-million surplus and no new taxes and got high marks for engineering the state buyout of a controversial toxic-waste disposal site.

Symington began to get the favorable national press rare since the Mecham administration. He was elected vice chairman of the Western Governors Assn.

Things began to change in mid-September, when allegations contained in a leaked government memo showed up on the front page of the Washington Post.

The memo, written by a Resolution Trust Corp. lawyer, accused Symington of taking advantage of his position on the board of directors of an Arizona thrift in the early 1980s and contributing to the thrift’s eventual collapse through “blatant self-dealing.” Similar charges were made in February during a Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

Symington denounced the memo as “a blatant attempt to smear” him and said it was just a rehash of allegations he had answered during the campaign.

But floodgates had been opened.

In rapid succession, published reports questioned the financial condition of Symington’s building projects, the legality of $1.3 million in campaign loans from his wife and mother and his role in stopping a criminal investigation of a former state real estate commissioner.

Eyebrows were raised when he abruptly suspended the state’s top two law-enforcement officers, saying there had been criminal allegations against the state Department of Public Safety, and reinstated them just a week later.