by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 19, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Last year, residents of Page, a small town in northern Arizona, fought back against plans to reduce vehicle lanes on Lake Powell Boulevard, one of the town’s most important roads. This November, they have the opportunity to protect it by voting YES on Proposition 406. A Yes vote on this measure would prevent the City from reducing the road’s vehicle lanes without further voter approval, pumping the brakes on a proposed road diet.
At the center of the controversy is the Page Downtown Streetscape Master Plan, approved by the City Council in 2022. Among the plan’s proposals is a “road diet,” the quippy name for stripping perfectly good roads of their vehicle lanes, and narrowing streets to accommodate bikes, buses and other barely used transportation methods. In Page’s case, that means cutting two of the four travel lanes on Lake Powell Boulevard through the downtown business district, a stretch of about 1.4 miles.
Despite years of resident opposition, the idea remained on the table. So, residents took action, gathering around 1,000 signatures to put the issue before the voters. The City challenged the initiative, and the fight went all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court. In July 2025, the justices unanimously ruled that the initiative was legislative in nature and could proceed. In other words, the people of Page are allowed to vote on their own main street…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 15, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Arizona’s future belongs to its citizens. Only their votes should decide it, foreign money should not influence it, and they should not be left waiting weeks for answers after every election.
Proposition 144 puts those principles into Arizona’s Constitution.
You can read it for yourself. It is short, fits on one page, and in less than 200 words, it ensures that only US Citizens can register and vote, requires that every voter must show government issued ID before casting their ballot, bans foreign money in any of our elections, and allows all voters to tabulate their ballots on election day at their polling place and have their votes posted election night.
Together, these reforms will result in more secure elections and faster and more accurate election results.
Prop 144 Will Speed Up Results with On-Site Tabulation
Rarely do Republicans and Democrats find common ground on election policy. But in this year’s Maricopa County primary, officials from both parties recognized the benefit of an option Prop 144 would guarantee statewide: on-site tabulation…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 9, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
There are some principles we like to think America settled a long time ago. Racial discrimination is wrong. Government should not treat people differently because of the color of their skin. And our public institutions should judge individuals based on their merit and character – not their race. Unfortunately, those previously settled principles have been completely undermined by the radical “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) program.
This November, Arizona voters will have an opportunity to reaffirm that principle by voting YES on Proposition 142. The measure would strengthen Arizona’s constitutional protections against race-based discrimination and preferential treatment, close an existing loophole tied to federal funding, and prohibit some of the craftier ways public institutions have used to preserve race-based DEI policies and practices.
Isn’t Racial Discrimination Already Illegal?
Most people already believe it is unlawful for the government to discriminate based on race – and didn’t Arizona already prohibit it anyway?
Arizonans certainly thought they had.
In 2010, voters passed Proposition 107 by an almost 20-point margin, amending the state constitution to prohibit the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any person based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
This should have closed the door on government-sanctioned racial preferences in Arizona.
Unfortunately, it didn’t…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 6, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother needed telescreens, microphones, and cameras to watch citizens, extinguish the idea of a private life, and to tightly control their “decisions”.
Today, technology makes that job considerably easier. And some policies kick the door wide open to this kind of government invasion of privacy and manipulation.
Programs to tax, track, and limit citizens’ vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are exactly that kind of threat, and many states are experimenting with them to their own detriment. California, as per usual, is the cautionary tale to our West, perfectly demonstrating the extreme costs and loss of freedom that could come with importing these VMT ideas into Arizona.
Arizonans have a chance to stop this kind of government overreach before it takes hold here…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 1, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Over the last four years Governor Katie Hobbs, the teachers’ unions, and their allies in the corporate media have been relentlessly attacking Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) program, the most popular and successful school choice program in the country. Over 106,000 kids are currently using an ESA scholarship, with thousands more signing up each year.
Their most recent assault began last March, when the unions filed their ballot initiative in an attempt to gut ESAs. If passed, over 30,000 kids would have immediately lost their ESA scholarship or had their scholarship funds revoked because of the new restrictions. Another 400,000 children would have been permanently barred from participation in the program. The National Education Association (NEA) poured $7 million into this fight, hiring an army of paid circulators that were willing to say, and sometimes do, just about anything for a paycheck.
Interestingly, there were two different responses to this most recent threat. The response from most of Arizona’s school choice organizations and ESA families was a full-throated defense of the program. Within days, the AZ school choice coalition launched a countercampaign and made clear that ESAs would not go undefended. They fundraised, developed messaging, deployed grassroots “decline to sign” efforts, and crafted legislative countermeasures to put the unions on their heels.
And after the initiative was filed with the Secretary of State in July, a petition review was launched by the Goldwater Institute, which our organization helped support. That petition review revealed that thousands of signatures were either invalid or unlawfully collected by convicted felons. The result was that we proved in court that the NEA and Save our Schools was short of qualifying by nearly 15,000 signatures, and we knocked them off the ballot.
It was a pivotal victory in a long line of big wins for school choice in Arizona.
However, during this battle against the radical left, an alternative response to this attack emerged from the shadows: a belief that the only way to save the ESA program was to enact punitive regulations on the families that use the program. Rather than fighting back against the false attacks being levied against ESAs by the unions and the media, they preferred to make concessions that would make the program politically “attack-proof” in the future.
Sadly, this strategy has been tried in the past when dealing with the unions, and it almost resulted in irreversible disaster for our state.
Conceding the Issue to the Left Is the Quickest Way to Defeat
Our organization has seen this coordinated attack from the left before. Different issues, different talking points, but the same trajectory that involves goading us into accepting the other side’s terms of surrender…
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