by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 22, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
This November, Tucson voters will decide whether they would like to continue doubling down on Tucson’s failed policies that have invited rampant crime, made it impossible to navigate the city without extreme frustration, and drain its wealth and livability to pursue virtue-signaling but poverty-inducing policies. Or if they would rather get off the merry-go-round of insanity.
Prop 417 is the city’s updated 10-year general plan, and a ‘Yes’ vote continues the madness. A ‘No’ vote on Prop 417 is the only reasonable choice for anyone who wants to save Tucson from itself.
A Blueprint for Failure
“Plan Tucson” is essentially a bundle of every bad idea the city has produced over the past decade including the Housing Affordability Strategy for Tucson (HAST), People, Communities, and Homes Investment Plan (P-CHIP), Move Tucson the transportation masterplan, and the Tucson Resilient Together climate plan. Each of these plans has helped create the mess Tucson is in today. Codifying them into 14 goals and 190 policies through Prop 417 would simply lock in these failures in for another decade.
Crazy Climate Commitments
Take for example the city’s climate action plan published in 2023 which set the delusional goal of having 40% of Tucson residents to be walking, biking, taking public transit or “rolling” around the city by 2050. The plan includes a commitment to “net zero” by 2030 for government operations and by 2045 city-wide—including private residents and businesses.
To achieve this fantasy, the city plans to build out a massive transit agency that if they meet their targets of hiring 900 new people every year will eventually eclipse Raytheon as the largest employer in Tucson by more than double (despite collapsing ridership and a 100% taxpayer subsidy since fares were permanently eliminated in 2020.)
The plan requires residents to hold to a “Zero Waste” commitment to empty out the landfills, imposes new road diets, and even pays city employees to not use their cars. This list of insane ideas is also very very expensive, with a price tag of roughly $365 million…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 18, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Ever since Arizona passed universal school choice, the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program has been the target of the Red for Ed teachers’ union, Democrat lawmakers and their corporate media allies. They demand transparency and accountability for alleged abuse of ESA dollars—all while scandal after scandal continues to pop up in our state’s K-12 public schools.
We saw it at the beginning of the year when the Isaac Elementary School District (IESD) was placed under a state receivership after it was determined that it had a budget shortfall of over $12 million! And this wasn’t a surprise. The Auditor General had been sounding the alarm on IESD’s mismanagement of funds for five years!
But where was the corporate media? Where was the digging? Where was the series of articles and threads on X exposing the corruption?
We got none of it. Instead, we have certain Red For Ed reporters, like Craig Harris, attacking Arizona’s popular ESA program with liberal talking points about unspent funds and alleged waste and abuse.
But if the failures of IESD weren’t enough, now we have the sordid financial tale of Tolleson Union High School District, a story so scandalous that it should make every taxpayer’s blood boil…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 15, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
What’s most likely to get your local officials fired up to fight for you? Lower utility rates? Wrong. Removing sexually explicit material from our libraries? Nope. How about just filling potholes in our roads? You’d think so. But what really gets the local officials in Chandler going is making sure they can sit on city council or as mayor longer.
Proposition 410, a local ballot measure, seeks to amend the city charter’s term limit section to extend the term for how long councilmembers and the mayor can serve. The measure is particularly problematic because it directly benefits a sitting councilmember, Matt Orlando, allowing him to run for mayor in 2026 without interruption after finishing his second consecutive council term. This proposition is not about reigning in political power; it’s about conveniently clearing the path for one councilmember to extend his political career. If it doesn’t pass in November, Orlando will face issues being elected mayor after his stint on the council, and clearly, he can’t have that.
The current city charter provision essentially says that one person can serve no more than two consecutive terms as councilmember, mayor, or a combination of both, and must wait four years before running again for either office. Therefore, someone can only serve two consecutive terms total.
However, some argue this language is ambiguous, allowing for another interpretation, one that allows a person to serve up to sixteen consecutive years: eight as a councilmember and eight as mayor. This interpretation has been the practice in Chandler for the past three mayors. Kevin Hartke, Boyd Dunn, and Jay Tibshraeny each served eight years as councilmembers and eight years as mayor – sixteen consecutive years.
The proposed language change on the ballot effectively attempts to legitimize the last three mayors by expanding the term limits in the city’s charter. It now states that a person can serve up to two consecutive terms as councilmember and two consecutive terms as mayor, sixteen years total. After reaching either limit, or a combined sixteen consecutive years in both offices, they must wait four years before running again for either position.
Why the rush for a change?
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 9, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
How long must taxpayers be forced to throw money at a failed plan before something is done about it? For the Maricopa Association of Governments’ (MAG) regional transportation plan—which for two decades spent billions on light-rail and other wasteful “active transportation” projects and has primed the pump for another twenty years of boondoggle spending—The Club hopes the answer is not much longer.
Since 2004, local governments through MAG have siphoned more and more funding from a transportation tax to build white elephant transit projects throughout Maricopa County. Yet MAG won’t budge from its broken plan despite collapsed ridership, worsened congestion, and ballooning costs – for projects that don’t match how people actually travel.
The good news is that with the next statutory transportation audit coming due July 2026, lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Audit Committee (JLAC) will have an opportunity to weigh in on the MAG plan and provide recommendations for change.
State law requires that these five-year audits evaluate several elements of the MAG plan, including transit service, costs, ridership, congestion, and mobility. While previous audits flagged some deficiencies, they lacked any concrete performance metrics, and on a few occasions were prepared by a firm tied to MAG (a conflict of interest). So, to further bolster the JLAC process, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club brought in a nationally recognized transportation expert to conduct an audit of the plan. The result: MAG’s plan is failing and needs a major overhaul.
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 6, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
The idea to extend light rail to the State Capitol has occupied the dusty shelves of bureaucratic transit plans for ages. Phoenix first floated it in their 2000 “Transit 2000” plan, their 2015 Transportation 2050 initiative, and the concept has taken up space in every MAG and regional planning cycle since 2004. The idea’s longevity is not a testament to how good ideas endure; rather how bureaucrats remain unaffected regardless of light rail’s failure; unwilling to change course despite low ridership, high costs, high crime, or changing travel patterns. The world changes but a transit plan apparently never dies.
In fact, it turns out it can’t be stopped from destroying the Capitol corridor even when lawmakers pass a law to stop it.
In 2023, Republican legislators negotiated Proposition 479, Maricopa County’s half cent sales tax for transportation, which included a clause prohibiting the use of any public resources for light rail coming within 150 feet of the State Capitol. The goal of the provision was to insulate lawmakers from the disruption and destruction caused by light rail. This neat trick of making the “Capitol Line” someone else’s problem would likely backfire.
Well, it turns out we were right, and what Phoenix has in store for the Capitol corridor is worse than anyone could have imagined.
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