by admin | May 25, 2023 | News and Updates, Tax
Last week, Tucson residents exercised common sense by overwhelmingly rejecting Prop 412 in a special election. And whether you live in the city or not, this is a significant win for our future.
Disguised as a new agreement between the City of Tucson and Tucson Electric Power (TEP) to renew the Franchise Agreement for another 25 years using the current 2.25% fee, the proposal included a number of Green New Deal pet projects. Had it passed, it would have added a 0.75% “Community Resilience Fee” to fund the costs associated with building underground transmission facilities—and “projects that support the City’s implementation of the City’s approved Climate Action and Adaptation Plan.”
That would have meant:
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- Lengthy construction projects removing driving lanes from roads (Road Diets)
- Permanently inhibiting access to small businesses
- Reducing personal vehicles by 40% by 2050
- Establishing Tucson as a 15-minute city with local travel restrictions removing personal choice
Now, the citizens of Tucson have spoken. And it’s clear that they don’t want Green New Deal mandates that take money from their wallet and freedom from their lives.
But make no mistake about it. TEP and its leftist ally Mayor Regina Romero are committed to their “climate change” agenda. Following the resounding defeat of Prop 412, TEP put out a statement that it still plans to move forward on adopting the Green New Deal by phasing out fossil fuels. This is the same utility company that is currently seeking a 12% rate hike from the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) before the end of the year! They have a monopoly and are assuming that the ACC will simply rubber stamp whatever rate hike they request.
That’s why it also shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that right before the defeat of Prop 412, the Tucson City Council voted to make public transit free indefinitely despite not having funding secured beyond December. That’s right, after three years of not charging for transportation services, the government failed to listen to the people again.
Community members have complained that this three-year experiment has led to a rise in crime and public nuisances. Bus driver unions have complained that free busing threatens public safety and forces drivers to act as transit police. And other public safety activists have claimed that free busing facilitates drug sales, trafficking, and even usage.
But liberals like Mayor Romero and other members of the Tucson City Council just don’t care. The Left is committed to its agenda, but when you stay informed, when you make passionate arguments based on facts, and when you hit the streets and fight back, you can defeat them. Prop 412 is the perfect example of that. Now, we need to be prepared for the next battle.
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by admin | Apr 28, 2023 | News and Updates, Tax
A special election is taking place right now in Tucson, and even if you’re not from the city, you should pay attention. At first glance, Prop 412 appears to be nothing more than a new agreement between the City of Tucson and Tucson Electric Power (TEP) to renew the Franchise Agreement for another 25 years using the current 2.25% fee. But just like anything government bureaucrats put out there nowadays, you need to keep reading.
Along with the renewed agreement, Prop 412 would add a 0.75% “Community Resilience Fee” to fund the costs associated with building underground transmission facilities—and projects that support the City’s implementation of its Climate Action Plan. Ahhh, there it is. The agenda behind Prop 412 finally comes out. This isn’t about renewing a franchise agreement. It’s about forcing hardworking taxpayers to start funding the estimated $326 million it’s going to need to address Mayor Regina Romero’s so-called “climate emergency.”
According to TEP, it plans to use this “Resiliency” Slush Fund to:
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- decarbonize city-owned and operated buildings and facilities.
- promote distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar to provide local renewable energy and enhance energy resilience.
- pursue additional local sources of renewable energy, including resource recovery and heat exchange.
- promote electric vehicles via charging infrastructure expansion.
- transition public agency fleets to zero-emission and net-zero-emission vehicles.
- establish accessible resilience hubs across all City Wards to provide information and resources related to climate preparedness and response.
- bolster City-owned and community-wide heat mitigation resources to reduce urban heat island effect and protect vulnerable individuals and communities.
- deploy and maintain equitable nature-based solutions that reduce or sequester emissions, improve ecosystem health, and bolster climate resilience.
- bolster community and regional networks to improve community-wide emergency response and resource-sharing.
That’s right. It’s just another long list of Green New Deal pet projects all at the expense of taxpayers who are already overburdened by Bidenflation and exorbitant gas prices.
But there has to be some kind of benefit, right? Nope.
If Prop 412 passes, Tucson residents can expect to be on road diets through lengthy construction projects that remove driving lanes from roads. This will cause small businesses—many of which are still recovering from ill-advised COVID shutdowns—to suffer as lane reductions create a permanent inconvenience for customers. On top of that, it will reduce personal vehicles by 40% by 2050, and ultimately lead to what Mayor Romero really wants: establishing Tucson as a 15-minute city with local travel restrictions that remove personal choice.
Even if you don’t live in Tucson, that last one should concern you. Liberals around the world are pushing the 15-minute city concept more and more. In Barcelona, the city is limiting personal car vehicles only to residents or delivery services. And speed limits are a maximum of 6 miles per hour. In Oxford in the UK, the government has adopted an $86 fee for driving past the 15-minute filter in a personal vehicle.
But perhaps the biggest question of all is why does TEP even need more taxpayer dollars to begin with? Its reported profits from the last three years are:
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- 2020 – $191 million
- 2021 – $201 million
- 2022 – $217 million
In addition to these profits and the 0.75% Community Resilience Fee, TEP has already requested that the Arizona Corporation Commission approve a 12% rate increase before the end of the year. That would bring the total average impact between Prop 412 and the proposed rate increases to be about $180 per year for customers. This is outrageous! TEP and the City of Tucson don’t care about residents. They are just looking for another money grab to push a Green New Deal agenda that restricts freedom with no real positive impact on the environment. Now, it’s up to the citizens of Tucson to push back and vote NO on Prop 412.
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Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
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by admin | Oct 21, 2025 | Arizona, News and Updates
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.
Transportation Tyranny
The “Move Tucson” plan, as the foundation of transportation initiatives in Prop 417, is a shocking $13B cost over 20 years with the express purpose of building out “infrastructure” that serves everyone but drivers. Perhaps the most expensive element of the plan is their Complete Streets initiative which they adopted as an ordinance in 2021 (as an “emergency” order.) “Complete streets” is a cute way of saying narrowing or reducing road lanes to provide “mobility equity,” starving space for drivers to give equal space to all the other types of “transportation” that the vast majority of people don’t use and will never use unless coerced. Every new road must now be “remodeled” to serve the few at the expense of the many, worsening congestion and safety alike. They have even added another layer of intrusive oversight, making an already costly initiative of ripping out decent infrastructure even more cumbersome and bureaucratic.
Unaffordable Housing
And then there’s housing and development – guided by the same anti-driving, wouldn’t it be nice if we all lived in a 15-minute city – vision. Tucson’s Transit Oriented Development Handbook promote designs that “eliminate the need for personal vehicle use.” Its “best practice” for parking? Don’t provide it—or else put it somewhere inconvenient. The plan claims that done “right” mixed-use and transit-oriented development throughout the city will lead to “eliminating the need for personal vehicle use”.
Meanwhile, Tucson’s real housing problem is affordability: in 2023 only 38% of homes in the region were considered affordable to a family earning the area median income. Tucson’s idea of addressing the problem is more socialized housing schemes (paid by other Tucson residents who can barely afford their homes) and forced densification, waiving fees only for developers that commit to the city’s “equitable transit-oriented development” standards that force home buyers to submit to living in these carless communities.
The likely outcome? Artificial housing scarcity, higher prices, and more government control.
It’s All About Equity
Finally, the underpinning of the entire Tucson Plan is the city’s obsession with “equity.” Every initiative answers to the “Equity Index,” a bureaucratic checklist that prioritizes racial and demographic quotas over everything else. But like all communist utopian visions – Tucson’s ideological engineering has only made everyone in the city worse off.
The Bill Always Comes Due
If Prop 417passes, it will cost Tucson voters billions- as every utopian experiment does. But this won’t be new for the city despite voters’ opposition. Tucson has tried this before: Prop 414, a proposed sales tax hike for climate spending—rejected by voters. Prop 412, a “franchise agreement” turned climate slush fund—rejected again.
Just Say No, Tucson
So maybe there is hope that Tucson residents will reject another one of Tucson’s logrolled propositions. Voters should ‘Vote No’ on Prop 417 and send another message to city leadership that Tucson doesn’t want another climate-crusading, anti-driver, equity-obsessed bureaucratic plan to ruin Tucson.
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Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
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by admin | Mar 6, 2025 | News and Updates, Regulatory
From the Paris Climate Accords, to the Green New Deal (in the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,”) the global “Net Zero” agenda has been steaming ahead at full speed. And it hasn’t been just in the form of government mandates. Across the world, electric utilities have been making their own Net Zero Commitments – whether it is in response to government regulations against fossil fuels, or subsidies from the government for unreliable power, explicit mandates, or from the influence of investors like Blackrock. No, it’s not just in Germany, and it isn’t just in California, either. The Net Zero agenda, unfortunately, is alive and well here in Arizona too.
We always knew it would be costly, and experience has proven that true. But now, in a newly released report published by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and the AZ Liberty Network, the cost for Arizona’s largest utility to go “Net Zero” was found to be even more expensive than expected coming with a massive price tag of at least $42.7 billion by 2038.
History of the Green New Deal in Arizona
The “green” agenda is not new to Arizona. In 2006, then Chairman of the Corporation Commission Kris Mayes pushed through the first mandates in Arizona, requiring our utilities to get 15% of their energy generation from “renewables” by 2025. Those rules alone have already cost ratepayers $2.3 billion. In 2018, an out-of-state billionaire funded a proposition on the ballot that would have required utilities to obtain 50% renewable generation by 2035. That measure went down in flames, being rejected by a 2-1 vote.
Then in 2020, the Arizona Corporation Commission began pursuing another mandate – this time to require 100% renewable energy by 2050, also known as going “Net Zero” by 2050. The mandates almost passed without the Commission ever conducting an analysis to find out what it would cost ratepayers. Once an analysis was finally done, it was projected that the mandates would cost ratepayers $6 billion, leading to the proposal being rejected by the Commission.
But then, Arizona’s utilities, who opposed the 2018 initiative, announced publicly that they were voluntarily going “Net Zero” – mandate or no mandate. Or, for APS, Net Zero doesn’t even go far enough, and they have pledged to be 100% “carbon free” by 2050.
And these aren’t just public statements. The utilities have committed to going “Net Zero” in SEC filings to their shareholders, and they even compensate their top executives (page 68) based on how much “clean” energy they build in our state. Unsurprisingly, these commitments completely shape their resource plans.
Net Zero Resource Plans
Utilities are required to submit resource plans to the Commission every three years. These plans are supposed to project future demand in their territories and then evaluate several different portfolios of generation to meet that demand. This should be a technology agnostic process that selects the most affordable and reliable power generation for their ratepayers. Instead, it is guided every step of the way by their voluntary Net Zero goals.
The Commission is supposed to conduct their own independent analysis of these plans before approving them. Last year, after claiming they could not find someone to do an analysis, they voted to skip doing one altogether and charged ahead, approving the IRP without any idea as to the cost to ratepayers. Fortunately, we did find the expertise to do a cost and reliability analysis.
What the report found is shocking, yet not surprising. APS’ net zero commitments require a massive overbuilding of the grid, will eventually subvert the reliability of generation, and will cost ratepayers billions.
Overbuilding
With APS shutting down remaining reliable sources of power like the Four Corners coal plant by 2031, and building out almost exclusively wind, solar, and battery storage, the utilities plan to massively “overbuild” in order to meet future demand. This means nearly tripling the generation capacity currently on the grid to meet a 60% increase in demand over the next 15 years. Why? Because solar and wind are intermittent and unreliable, which means they must build far more than would be needed if they used reliable fossil fuel resources. Not only does building more cost more on its own, but it also increases shareholder profits as utilities are guaranteed a return on equity on every dollar they spend on new capital buildings. So, the more they spend, the more they profit, and the higher the costs are for ratepayers.
Sky High Rates
Given the amount of overbuilding, the cost of this Net Zero plan would be at least $42.7 billion by 2038, equating to an average $100 monthly electricity bill increase for Arizona families, and a $454 per month increase for businesses. Even worse, at this cost, the Net Zero resource plan presents serious reliability concerns.
California-Style Blackouts
Massively overbuilding “green” generation does not improve reliability. The report found that by 2038, APS could experience an up to 3,701 MW capacity shortfall in the middle of the summer late at night as Arizonans turn on their A/Cs to cool their homes. This shortfall represents 33% of the total demand in their territory, meaning hundreds of thousands of Arizona families and businesses would experience blackouts.
True Least Cost Portfolio Would Have Saved Billions
Despite the requirement to do so, the utilities did not evaluate a truly “technology agnostic” portfolio, but our report did. The findings are unsurprising. Instead of overbuilding by over relying on intermittent and unreliable sources, APS could have prioritized reliable, dispatchable power to meet future demand. By keeping Four Corners online and building new natural gas capacity, APS could reliably meet demand with no risk of blackouts by building just half the capacity APS would in their Net Zero plan at a cost of $20.8 billion, or a $21.9 billion savings for ratepayers.
Net Zero Costs Ratepayers, Rewards Shareholders
Because of this lower-cost plan, utility profits would be around $4 billion, instead of the more than $16 billion in profits the utility would make from ratepayers under their Net Zero plan. In other words, Net Zero is costly for ratepayers, but very profitable for shareholders.
Arizona Must Shut Down Net Zero
President Trump was right to declare an energy emergency on day one of his new administration. As utilities around the country continue to retire reliable power plants and replace them with unreliable wind and solar, not only are they driving rates through the roof, but they are also creating a dire reliability crisis that would plunge Arizona into energy poverty. The time to act is now. Arizona lawmakers and the Corporation Commission should draft off the Trump administration’s priority of unleashing American energy and protect ratepayers from these dangerous Net Zero Plans.
That’s why the Arizona Free Enterprise Club has spearheaded several pieces of legislation this year, including HB2527 which would prohibit utilities from retiring reliable sources of power unless they are replaced with equally reliable power, and HB2788, which would require the Commission to actually obtain a third-party analysis of the plans submitted by utilities before approving them in the future.
As this cost analysis shows, Net Zero means higher rates for Arizonans and California-style blackouts. If these plans aren’t shut down immediately, just as Germany experienced, there will be a point of no return. Arizona ratepayers will be left powerless and stuck with the bill.
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.
by admin | Aug 18, 2023 | News and Updates, Regulatory
For years, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) has been the stomping ground for the left to push its Green New Deal Agenda. In fact, it was just over two years ago when the commission quietly released its plan to impose California-style energy mandates in our state. Their goal was to ban fossil fuels and require most electricity companies to provide “clean” energy by 2050. Thankfully, the commission voted down these energy mandates in January 2022. But that hasn’t stopped the left from trying to find other ways to exploit the ACC.
One of their latest efforts has centered on Tucson, where they tried to push Prop 412 to create a taxpayer slush fund for Green New Deal pet projects. After a concerted effort to fight back with facts and inform the people of Tuson about what Prop 412 would mean for them, it was defeated. But the left wasn’t done yet.
As part of its Green New Deal agenda, Tucson Electric Power (TEP) also asked the ACC for rate hikes to subsidize electric vehicles (EV) that strain the grid and increase the risk of blackouts. TEP has been offering owners of electric vehicles (and them only) special, low electricity rates. They also give EV owners an additional five percent reduction for certain surcharges, just for owning an EV. These artificially low rates are to encourage EV owners to charge their cars overnight because TEP worries that charging during the day will crash the grid and cause blackouts.
This is not only unreasonable, but it’s unfair. Non-EV owners should never be forced to subsidize the cost of EVs or pay for incentives that attempt to protect the grid from the strain EVs put on it.
That’s why Commissioner Nick Myers proposed several amendments to the proposed rate hike to roll back subsidies for EVs. And the Free Enterprise Club helped lead the charge to get several TEP customers to email and show up at the commission hearing to oppose the EV subsidies.
While TEP did end up getting a rate hike, eight amendments from Commissioner Myers were adopted, resulting in a reduced rate increase for TEP customers. Among the amendments adopted were:
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- An elimination of the unfair subsidy benefiting EV owners.
- A requirement to refund customers any unused Demand-Side Management Surcharge funds remaining after December 31, 2023.
- A modification of TEP’s rate plans to encourage off-peak vehicle charging.
Because of these efforts, the estimated bill increase for TEP customers will be lower than originally proposed. And that’s a big win for ratepayers. After all, if someone wants to own an electric vehicle, it is within their right to do so. But EV owners should be the ones responsible for paying for the costs associated with the necessary infrastructure improvements. And they certainly should be paying for any excessive demand placed on the grid—not getting discounted rates.
Now, ratepayers in Tucson will have a little less money taken from their wallets, and this victory is another example of why it’s so important to stay informed, get involved, and fight back.
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.
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