By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Flagstaff residents have until May 19th to vote on the Flagstaff Regional Land Use Plan 2045, a mail-in only election that will determine whether this becomes the city’s guiding blueprint through 2045. The plan will shape “growth, development, conservation, housing, transportation, and other long-term community priorities.” It is a roadmap for how city leaders want Flagstaff to grow, move, build, and live for the next two decades.
The main themes of this Regional Plan are Climate Action, Housing Attainability and Equity. Climate and equity, two of the left’s favorite virtue-signaling obsessions. The plan runs roughly 250 pages and buried inside the planning jargon is a much bigger agenda: a comprehensive restructuring of everyday life in Flagstaff.
The plan repeatedly sounds the alarm over the so-called “climate emergency,” declaring that “climate change, driven by human-induced GHG emissions, is intensifying global weather disruptions.” Translation: the climate is spiraling into chaos, and it’s your fault, therefore the city government now needs to center major policy decisions around climate activism.
The plan repeatedly references Flagstaff’s Carbon Neutrality Plan (CNP) that has the goal to “achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.” What is supposed to be a land use and regional planning document instead reads like an environmental manifesto. In city government’s attempt to “save the planet,” residents should expect pressure for more mandates, regulations, and costly transitions as officials target emissions from “buildings, transportation, waste, etc.” Their call for the “displacement of fossil fuel-based generation with zero-carbon sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear energy,” will inevitably drive-up costs – even in the areas, like housing affordability, they claim to be trying to reduce.
Transportation is another major target…
