by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Dec 5, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Despite the noble work of Republican lawmakers over the past five years to reduce the state’s burden on taxpayers (lowering and flattening the income tax, eliminating tax on renters, and addressing taxes on food,) cities and towns are constantly undermining this progress through rampant tax, fee, and utility rate increases.
Arizona’s affordability is being eroded through the insatiable tax-hungry decisions of city and town councils and their year-over-year spending sprees. If taxpayers have not noticed already, surely, they are feeling the pinch as these tax and fee hikes continue to stack one on top another. Red or blue, no city is immune, most likely your costs are going up…
>>> CONTINUE READING >>>
by Tiffany Benson | Oct 29, 2025 | Opinion
By Tiffany Benson |
The report on Average ACT Test Scores By State Graduating Class of 2025 shows that Arizona public schools are still failing our students. A Legal Process highlighted the results, stating:
“From the data on the class of 2025, college admissions officers and future employers can reasonably conclude that if the applicant is a graduate of Arizona schools, more likely than not, they cannot proficiently read, write, perform math, or understand science in comparison to their peers.”
A Legal Process also noted that a majority of Arizona’s 2025 graduates failed to meet one core academic benchmark. “55% of Arizona’s students can graduate high school and still not demonstrate college-ready level competency in a single core academic subject matter,” the publication said.
World Population Review published Public School Rankings by State 2025, which shows Arizona dead last overall in four categories: K-12 performance, school funding and resources, higher education quality, and safety. This is corroborated by Consumer Affairs, which rated Arizona number one on its list entitled, “Which states rank poorly for education?”
Arizona wastes between $10,000 and $14,000 per student, depending on the source. Meanwhile, the average ESA is estimated between $6,000 and $9,000 for students in 1st through 12th grade. Current trends also reveal that K-12 families are ditching government education at an impressive rate. Even if these calculations are off by 10 decimal points, my conclusion remains the same: The A-F School Letter Grade classification system is a complete joke, and school choice is the one good thing happening in Arizona education.
On September 21, 2025, the Goldwater Institute published a report titled, “The Hidden Ways Arizona School Superintendents Are Paid.” In the opening paragraph, it states:
“Arizona school district superintendents receive high salaries. Yet, the true scale of that pay is often obscured by a triangle of complex contract provisions that school boards, and the superintendents themselves, deliberately design to mask the full measure of compensation from taxpayers…
These same school districts go to great lengths to block access to superintendent contracts—in some cases even from their own board members—shielding from the public how tax dollars enrich those who often are their community’s highest-paid public employees.”
Goldwater requested more than 40 superintendent contracts—official records that should be accessible to the general public—only to receive the documents after four months of repeated requests and warnings of potential litigation. The following information is also sourced from their report:
- Not including health insurance or pension costs, Arizona superintendents’ base salaries average $215,000 a year, while taxpayers are charged up to $490,000 per superintendent after accounting for “lucrative perks.”
- In addition to pension benefits, several school districts are double-charging taxpayers for superintendents’ retirement packages.
- Taxpayers are funding superintendents’ personal and vacation leave to the tune of 15 weeks off, when combined with school holidays. When vacation days are unused, superintendents receive a payout in the form of additional compensation.
Goldwater rightly called attention to Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles, who makes off with roughly $500,000 a year. Although Tolleson ranks as the 16th largest district in the state, Calles earns at least $100,000 more than any other Arizona Superintendent. Not surprisingly, he was accused of financial misconduct and, according to ABC 15, the auditor general’s investigation into Calles is expected to be completed by January 2027.
Notably, Calles also stands accused of inflating enrollment numbers, loaning $25 million to the Isaac School District, and allowing one teacher to resign with full benefits after complaints that the former employee had an inappropriate relationship with a student. Regardless, Calles appears to have an explanation for everything. And, despite the embarrassing controversy, he still finds half a million reasons to show up for work.
In his October 2025 superintendent message, Calles declared:
“There are so many good things happening [in] our district right now that it is difficult to put them all into one newsletter…Our letter grades continue to rise…Success is not without consequence. If we are going to be the best district in the state, then we cannot get there by trying to do what everyone else is doing; we have to innovate.”
He signed off by stating that how Tolleson residents respond to a bond and override this November will “reveal how the community feels about the direction of the district.” I know how I would vote if I lived in Tolleson—it’s the same way I’m voting in Peoria.
If you’re anything like me, you’re a fish out of water when it comes to district finance. Simple is the only way I know how to be. Thus, maintenance and overrides (M&O) allow school districts to exceed their budget for salaries and daily operations by 15% in most cases. M&Os are marketed to the public as a means to “enhance student safety and special education programs.” Districts sell educators on increased pay, so (radical) teachers’ unions generally support overrides as well.
Tax increases are presented to homeowners in fractions and decimals and crumbs, rather than the sum total. Consequently, landowners must research their property value before they can know the full size of their “fraction.” Note that since overrides have literally been in place for decades, district representatives automatically expect taxpayers to honor the tradition of compliance as they’ve done in previous elections.
In August 2025, AZ Free News reported:
“Despite a 5% drop in district school enrollment since 2019, Arizona’s public-school districts have continued to expand facilities, increase capital spending by 67% to $8.9 billion, and boost transportation costs by 11.3% to $561.2 million, even as eligible bus riders plummeted by 45%…The fastest-shrinking districts have increased capital spending the most, with 20% of districts (serving 73% of students) receiving 81% of capital funding.”
Let’s be real. Taxpayers are not investing in gifted programs or sponsoring all-day kindergarten. This, my fellow proletariats, is what you call a bailout.
Rather than telling Arizonans how to vote in this election, I will instead refer you back to the information covered in this post. I encourage parents, property owners, and slighted educators to use sound judgment at the ballot box. Remember, the most basic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Again, I’m no mathematician. But I’m willing to believe that at least a significant portion of the funds required to increase teacher salaries, enhance special needs programs, and implement cutting-edge safety plans can be found in the bank accounts of every district’s highest-paid employee.
Tiffany Benson is the Founder of Restore Parental Rights in Education. Her commentaries on education, politics, and Christian faith can be viewed at Parentspayattention.com and Bigviewsmallwindow.com. Follow her on socials @realtiffanyb.
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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by Matthew Holloway | Jul 18, 2025 | News
By Mathew Holloway |
Municipal Affairs Liaison at the Goldwater Institute William Beard sat for an interview with AZ Free News to expand on an op-ed published Saturday, “Regional Transit In Tucson: Bigger Tax Bill, Worse Results?”
Beard warned in his column that as we approach 20 years of the 2006 vintage Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), only 18 of the 35 projects promised to the taxpayers of Pima County have been completed.
He wrote, “The mismanagement is staggering. Tucson’s unfinished Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) projects are estimated to be $400–$600 million short. At the current pace—roughly $50 million in spending per year—completing the work would take at least eight more years. There’s one big problem, however: the sales tax that funds the RTA is set to expire in 2026, and time is running out. Tucson officials have responded by throwing up their hands and admitting defeat, postponing four projects for inclusion in a future ‘RTA Next’ plan.”
Beard directly attributes the RTA’s financial woes and lack of productivity to a series of economic factors, exacerbated by the City of Tucson’s project mismanagement, delays, and unwillingness to shoulder the added cost burden. He explained, “Every infrastructure plan faces risks, and Pima County’s strategy was no exception. The 2008 recession slowed tax collections, and inflation has since driven construction costs well beyond the 10% buffer allowed by law. Tucson, however, made matters worse by repeatedly altering project scopes to appease neighborhood groups, further delaying timelines and driving up costs. Each time, Tucson failed to take responsibility by allocating more supplemental resources. Instead, city leaders appeared to hope the problem would simply go away.”
He added, “Tucson’s leaders clearly misunderstand the purpose of the RTA, viewing it more as a construction manager responsible for overruns than a basic funding mechanism distributing tax dollars. Each city was responsible for designing and building its own projects. Any change in scope—additional lanes, neighborhood preferences, unforeseen costs—was theirs to fund, not the RTA’s.“
Speaking with AZ Free News, Beard elaborated:
“I’m from Tucson. I grew up there, so this is a little personal for me. But there’s a history of kicking the can down the road by the community writ large, leadership, etc. A ‘Why deal with it today when we can postpone to tomorrow’ attitude. And it’s only when things truly reach a critical point that something happens politically.
“The powers that be down there would prefer to kind of maintain the status quo. They don’t want their boat rocked. They don’t want anybody coming in and potentially undermining their political power, so let’s maintain things as they are.
“To the point of the article, the problem fundamentally is two things. One, was it a failure to plan or a plan to fail? And number two, remember when voters vote on these long-term things, you always end up with a situation where the compromises politically that were made in order to get the thing past the voters that were approved in the beginning, political leadership that are elected further on into the cycle, they don’t believe that they are obligated to follow the wishes of whatever compromises were made in the first place.”
As for the political fallout, Beard predicted that an attempt from Tucson Mayor Regina Romero to extricate the city from the RTA, as she threatened in 2022, might not “end well for her politically speaking.”
He noted, “The problem is she is basically telling all of the voters across Pima County, not just the other communities, but the voters throughout Pima County, including her own voters, ‘eff you’. And I don’t think, given what happened with (Proposition) 414 a few months ago in the city of Tucson, I don’t think that will end well for her politically speaking.”
City voters soundly rejected Prop 414 or the “Safe & Vibrant City” proposition, which would have enacted a half-cent sales tax increase for the next 10 years to fund various city projects. City Manager Tim Thomure told AZCentral that the Proposition’s rejections sent city planners “back to the drawing board [to] sharpen our pencils and work it out so that we live within the budget that will be available to us.”
Beard continued saying that Romero, “is, of the opinion, and there are other people, including Supervisor Hines on the Board of Supervisors, of the opinion that the City can basically go its own way and make its own sales tax. They’re forgetting, of course, that if that happens, roughly… a third of the total revenue that would come to the region would disappear because it would revert back to the state legislature to determine whether or not those funds get distributed based on the regional planning that southern Arizona currently enjoys.”
He added that Tucson’s deviation from the RTA planning adopted in 2006 could leave the city open to legal consequences. He observed, “I’m not an attorney, so I don’t give legal advice, but I spent 30 years in the contracting world and I’ve read enough of the documents, the intergovernmental agreements, the procedures, policy procedures of the RTA that was adopted in 2006, all of them keep referring to voter language, you know, the amount of money that was set aside by the voters that could go to these projects.
“Under state law, you can vary that up to 10 % overrun, because it’s the vagaries of construction, that happens. But anything above and beyond that, you’ve got to go back to the voters in order to get their approval to make that kind of scope change. Again, I’m not an attorney, but I can read what’s in the language and it’s pretty clear.”
According to Beard, the RTA board did send its new legal counsel a question with the hope of getting an answer by the end of July at their next formal board meeting, asking: “What is the legal obligation of the RTA board to complete all of the projects if the revenue has not come in to satisfy all of the needs that the voters … determined 20 years ago?”
He concluded: “To be blunt, the city of Tucson’s got nobody to blame but themselves. You can point fingers at the RTA all you want to. You can point fingers to the leadership. The reality is in the numbers; the math is the math. And for all of these projects the City of Tucson kept postponing, it only dramatically increased the amount of money they would have to bring to the table, even assuming the RTA never had a revenue shortfall.
“Because the City of Tucson kept postponing these projects, the costs were going through the roof and there was no way legally for the RTA to step forward and say, oh yeah, we’ll cover those extra costs. That’s not possible.”
Matthew Holloway is a senior reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
by William Beard | Jul 12, 2025 | Opinion
By William Beard |
Reprinted with permission from the Goldwater Institute.
In 2006, voters in Pima County made a deal: an increase in the sales tax for better roads and infrastructure. But now, after nearly two decades of taxpayers holding up their end of the bargain, the results are underwhelming. Of the 35 projects originally promised, only 18 have been completed—and much of the unfinished work lies within Tucson’s jurisdiction. The question is no longer whether the plan was fulfilled, but why one city fell so far short.
The mismanagement is staggering. Tucson’s unfinished Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) projects are estimated to be $400–$600 million short. At the current pace—roughly $50 million in spending per year—completing the work would take at least eight more years. There’s one big problem, however: the sales tax that funds the RTA is set to expire in 2026, and time is running out. Tucson officials have responded by throwing up their hands and admitting defeat, postponing four projects for inclusion in a future “RTA Next” plan.
Every infrastructure plan faces risks, and Pima County’s strategy was no exception. The 2008 recession slowed tax collections, and inflation has since driven construction costs well beyond the 10% buffer allowed by law. Tucson, however, made matters worse by repeatedly altering project scopes to appease neighborhood groups, further delaying timelines and driving up costs. Each time, Tucson failed to take responsibility by allocating more supplemental resources. Instead, city leaders appeared to hope the problem would simply go away.
Tucson’s leaders clearly misunderstand the purpose of the RTA, viewing it more as a construction manager responsible for overruns than a basic funding mechanism distributing tax dollars. Each city was responsible for designing and building its own projects. Any change in scope—additional lanes, neighborhood preferences, unforeseen costs—was theirs to fund, not the RTA’s. State auditors reinforced this responsibility repeatedly over multiple years, including in 2017, 2022, and 2024. While overruns in other areas were previously paid for by partner municipalities under the RTA, Tucson now appears ready to go hat in hand to the rest of the county asking for a bailout.
Why should voters trust them this time around?
Taxpayers deserve clarity. Tucson’s chronic delays mean taxpayers will be asked to pay more. Approval of any extension or revision to the existing projects should depend on city leaders being transparent with the public. Why should all of Pima County be asked to pay for Tucson’s poor planning and execution? Kicking the can down the road is not a transportation strategy—it’s a sign of dysfunction. If Pima County taxpayers are expected to foot the bill yet again, they deserve full accountability before a single dollar is spent.
William Beard is the Municipal Affairs Liaison at the Goldwater Institute.
