Dyersburg State Community College in West Tennessee has announced that in October it will change the name of the Tipton County Center, its Covington campus, to the “Jimmy Naifeh Center of Dyersburg State Community College in Tipton County.”

The announcement prompted Jeff Ward, chairman of TeamGOP, a West Tennessee based grassroots Republican coalition, to say that the timing of the name change, to fall just before the November elections, “is nothing more than a political rally paid for by Tennessee taxpayers on state property that could obviously be construed as a violation of Tennessee campaign law.”

Ward, a graduate of Dyersburg State, said as a result of the decision to rename the Tipton County Center he had resigned his status as a member of the Alumni Association and his position as an Advisory Board Member for the school.

“I am angered that a state facility and taxpayers’ money will be used in an attempt to save the dying campaign of Speaker Naifeh,” Ward said, adding that the one building currently on the Covington campus is already named after Speaker Naifeh.

Naifeh, a 30-year veteran of the state legislature and a 14-year Speaker of the House, is currently engaged in a highly publicized race for his political life against Republican Jesse Cannon, a former general practitioner from Covington. Naifeh could not immediately be reached for comment.

Approximately 900 students attend the Tipton County Center. The current Tipton County Center has one building on campus, which is named in honor of Naifeh. State appropriations for the construction of additional space at the campus were approved in 2004 and more are expected to be approved in 2005. A press release sent out by the school at the time of the announcement of the renaming of the campus states that Naifeh “has played a decisive role in gathering the state funding necessary to pay for the construction of the building…the building could not have been constructed without Mr. Naifeh’s support.”