Sense of Purpose Drives Arizona State Senator Sine Kerr By Tim Linden
Editor’s Note: Sine Kerr is a member of the Arizona State Senate, representing District 13, which covers northwest Maricopa County and northern Yuma County. She assumed office on Jan. 8, 2018. Her current term ends on Jan. 9, 2023. She is running unopposed for reelection in November.
Arizona State Sen. Sine Kerr (R-13) did not grow up in a politically charged environment and did not have a burning desire to become an Arizona legislator. Instead, it was her love for agriculture and her firm belief that the political arena needed more people from ag at the table when laws and regulations are being written that was the impetus for the political career. Kerr moved to Buckeye, Ariz., when she was three years old. It is where she was raised, went to school, met her husband, started the family dairy farm, raised her children and it is also the area she has represented in the Arizona State Senate since 2018. It was 1980, she explained, when she and Bill Kerr launched Bill Kerr Dairy Farm. Bill’s father was a dairyman and he helped each of his three sons launch their own operations. “We started with 15 cows and slowly began building our farm throughout the years,” said Kerr. She noted that the couple engaged with the Farm Bureau and joined the local Dairymen’s Association as a way of keeping in touch with others in agriculture. “These groups advocated for us and kept us in business,” she said. Both she and Bill got involved in the leadership of
these groups and the advocacy work being done by these associations. “I learned to love the policy aspect of it,” she said. “I dug in, studied the issues, and focused on how these issues affected us in agriculture. I developed a passion for it.” That passion led her into the political arena to meet with elected officials and articulate the needs of the ag community. It wasn’t long before Kerr was being asked by some of her dairy colleagues to run for office. In 2018, she was appointed to complete the term of a representative who resigned to seek higher office. She then won a full term in November of that year and was reelected in 2020. Sen. Kerr is running for re-election this November with no opponent. She sees her mission as both helping the ag industry with beneficial legislation as well as stopping legislation that can do harm. “That’s just as important,” she said. Kerr is not the only legislator with an agricultural background, but she notes she is one of only three Arizona legislators from production agriculture. Recently, the water issue has been Kerr’s main focus. She was one of the champions of a recently passed bill that allocates $1 billion of state money to work on both long and short term projects to increase the arid state’s water supply. The State
Yuma area irrigation canal
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SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2022
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