February 21, 2020
By Nathan Callahan
If the Phoenix City Council has its
way, it may soon be a lot more expensive to take an Uber of Lyft to or from
Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport—but the Goldwater Institute is speaking out against
this municipal power grab.
In a recent appearance on Liberty
Watch Radio, Goldwater Institute Director of National Litigation Jon Riches
talked about the importance of keeping municipal government in check,
especially in light of the City Council’s recent attempt to quadruple
ride-sharing fees at Phoenix Sky Harbor. “Particularly at the local level, particularly
with municipalities, they really don’t care about popular opinion, they really
don’t care where the citizens are at. They’re gonna do what they want to do,”
Riches noted. While there is an existing fee of $2.66 on rideshare pickups at
the airport, the city of Phoenix has decided to both raise the existing
ride-share fee and create a new fee for dropping off at the airport.
The city claims that part of this
fee will be used to maintain the ride-sharing infrastructure at Sky Harbor, but
Riches explained that “the vast majority of it was going to the Skytrain which,
of course, no one who is using an Uber or a Lyft was accessing the Skytrain.
They had improperly budgeted that, were looking for a money grab, and they
found that with the popular ride-sharing services.” The city is now passing its
$740 million worth of poor
planning decisions down to people just trying to get an inexpensive ride to the
airport. Not only does the city appear to be passing along the cost of the
Skytrain’s operation and expansion to people trying to get to the airport, but
it has also failed to raise fees on taxis who use the same curbs and roads as
ride-sharing vehicles.
The most egregious offense in this
situation, however, is the fact that the city of Phoenix’s new fee is in direct
violation of Prop 126, which passed with strong voter support in 2018. “It did
a really simple thing by saying that no city, or the state, can increase
existing fees or impose new fees on any service that’s offered in Arizona. Of
course, this was an increase of an existing fee and the imposition of a new
fee, so it violated the very plain language of Arizona law,” Riches said. By
raising the pick-up fee to $4 and creating a new $4 drop-off fee (both of which
will go up to $5 in 2024), the city of Phoenix has directly violated both
provisions of Prop 126 and doubled the price of an average Lyft ride, which
currently costs just $10.
In the interview, Riches observed
that local governments can often be the worst abusers of government power,
combining a lack of constitutional authority and strong influence from local
interest groups that can often result in government decision-making that
ignores the sentiments of the general public. Hopefully, Riches said, “the
Arizona Supreme Court will read the Constitution to mean what it says and
strike down the city of Phoenix’s illegal activity and in doing so, create some
very favorable precedent for the taxpayers of this state so that when the city
of Phoenix, [or] the city of Tucson tries to do something like this again,
they’ll say ‘Oh, yup. There’s that Supreme Court case out there and we can’t do
that.’” As a result of this case, municipal governments may think twice before
raising and creating unconstitutional fees in the future.
You can listen to the full
interview with Riches here.
Nathan
Callahan is a Ronald Reagan Fellow at the Goldwater Institute.
