City & Local Reform
It turns out that you can fight town hall. Here’s how we’re standing up for local citizens and winning.
How do you close a $35 million budget gap? Perhaps the better question is why that hole was dug in the first place. One answer for the City of Glendale is hockey. In fiscal year 2012, the city added $20 million (up from only $1.2 million the year before) to its operating budget for the Jobing.com Arena, where the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team plays. The NHL has been demanding financial support from the city since 2009, when the team filed for bankruptcy.
By Stephen Slivinski, Byron Schlomach, and Nick Dranias
Arizonans, through their state and local governments, are in debt to the tune of $66.5 billion. That’s over $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the state. To put that in perspective, the average person’s income in Arizona is less than $36,000 per year.
Whenever local bureaucrats or special-interest groups want to neutralize conservative legislators, one of their most-potent weapons is two words: “local control.”
By Nick Dranias and Lucy Morrow Caldwell
George Lee made a comfortable living running a pair of commercial buildings in Prescott Valley, until government debt helped drag him down.
In December, the Goldwater Institute filed a constitutional challenge to the City of Phoenix's practice of "release time" within the police union. This practice takes six city police officers off the streets and puts them behind desks to work as full-time union managers, 35 to work as part-time union representatives, and one to work full time as a union lobbyist — all while collecting city salaries and benefits.
The Goldwater Institute recently filed a lawsuit challenging Phoenix’s “release time” practice that sends six city police officers to work as full-time union managers, 35 to work as part-time union representatives, and one to work as a union lobbyist. Although these employees are released from city duties to perform union duties, taxpayers continue to pay the officers’ salaries and benefits.
According to the Texas Transportation Institutes Urban Mobility Report, Phoenix is the 15th most congested city in the nation.
It takes the average Phoenix commuter 30 percent longer to complete a trip than it would without congestion. The average Phoenician wastes the equivalent of a workweek sitting in traffic every year. Not to mention about 34 gallons of gas.
Proposition 200 is marketed as an effort to focus Tucson on giving priority funding to core local government services--law enforcement, emergency medical services and fire protection--in order to generate better response times. But the truth is it would just mandate more government spending with no strings attached.
The hiring mandates tied to the city charter amendment would be imposed on city taxpayers regardless of economic circumstances, and they won't be cheap. Independent audits estimate Prop. 200 would cost $150 million over the next five years.