by AZ Free Enterprise Club | May 4, 2026 | Opinion
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…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Apr 30, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Last year, Katie Hobbs, by executive order, established a “task force” headed by her Office of “Sustainability” to develop a report on energy affordability and reliability. This month, her task force submitted their plan which would do the opposite of that: make energy more expensive and less reliable. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the “task force” called by Hobbs is made up of solar special interests, environmental activists, her own agencies, and utilities that have all committed to going Net Zero anyway.
Instead of reading 81 pages that brings nothing new to the table, the only questions that need to be asked (and answered) about the report are below.
Does it call for new natural gas generation? Not really.
Does it call on utilities to keep our coal plants open? No, they want to shut them down and “repower” them to “clean” energy.
Does it pave the way for new nuclear? Not until the mid-2040s, at the earliest.
What, then, does it advocate doing? Subsize special interests by blanketing state trust land and government buildings with even more solar, wind, and battery storage. The very thing causing utility rates to increase and leading to blackouts…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Apr 16, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Proximity to the people does not prevent abuse of power. In fact, it often does the opposite. Municipal governments enact restrictive policies just as easily as state or federal governments and often with less scrutiny.
There is a myth in America that the closer government is to the people, the more checks exist and the better the governance. By that logic, local governments, city and town councils, being closest to the people, must be the least corrupt and most responsive. Because of this, municipalities and their proponents constantly argue that they should be free to govern their communities without interference, or as it’s often framed, maintain “local control.”
The local control argument might seem intuitive, however, does shifting power from one level of government to another actually protect individual freedom? The burden on the people is the same, if not more, whether bad policy comes in the form of higher taxes, increased fees, restrictive regulations, or costly utility rate hikes from federal, state, or local government.
In Gilbert, residents have been outraged by astronomical water bills and rate increases, decisions made not in Washington, D.C. or in Phoenix, but by their own local government. Proximity did not protect them; it made the impact more immediate. Gilbert is not the only town with unceasing increased costs, municipalities across Arizona are raising taxes, fees, and rates (good thing there is a resolution moving through the legislature to alleviate this)…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Apr 11, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
For more than a decade, the teachers’ unions and their allies at Save Our Schools (SOS) have made their mission clear: stop school choice in Arizona. They fought the expansion of our state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program at every turn. And after the program was made universal in 2022, they have endlessly pushed to repeal the expansion—including a failed ballot initiative where their signature count was off by more than 50,000. (Yes. These are the people pushing public education.)
With another election around the corner, SOS and the teachers’ unions have once again launched a ballot initiative designed to cripple ESAs. But a funny thing has happened in their efforts to get on the ballot. SOS and the teachers’ unions are suddenly claiming that the initiative isn’t about “eliminating the program.” And they’re pushing a talking point that their only concern is that the program isn’t “functioning properly.”
It’s a remarkable rewrite of history—and Arizona voters shouldn’t buy it…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Apr 8, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Arizona has been working to stop noncitizens from voting in our elections for over 20 years. After years of litigation, we are near the final step in proving our model works. That’s why last month we filed a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit’s radical decision blocking our proof of citizenship laws from going into effect, and it should be an easy decision for them.
The Supreme Court told us in 2013 that we could require proof of citizenship on our own state voter registration form. They said it again in 2024, just weeks before the election. And yet, the 9th Circuit, in defiance of the Supreme Court, determined that essentially every aspect of the laws is unconstitutional, and that they were passed with “discriminatory intent.”
While we continue to wait on Congress to pass the SAVE Act, Arizona’s model is one every state can and must adopt immediately. When the Supreme Court takes the case, every obstacle will be removed for them…
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