by admin | May 29, 2025 | News and Updates, Regulatory
Within President Trump’s first 100 days in office, he has issued back-to-back executive orders aimed at cleansing America of woke ideologies as well as dismantling the Green New Scam. States can hardly keep up with the rapid changes being made. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary (USDOT) Sean Duffy is leading the effort to defund city projects involving road diets and “green infrastructure.” Leftists and bike-enthused activists are losing their minds over the removal of “Complete Streets” links on the USDOT website, horrified by the idea that vehicle travel might be prioritized over barely used bike lanes.
And good to his promise to unleash American energy, Trump’s team has eliminated excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) rules, vowed to get existing and new coal plants opened, and most recently played a major role in the House’s passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” that included the repeal of many of the Inflation Reduction Act green scam subsidies. Every day this administration is dismantling the Green New Grift and restoring practical, pro-America policies.
And if there ever was a city in Arizona that should be jumping on the Trump bandwagon – it’s the City of Prescott. Prescott is a conservative community where registered Republican voters out number Democrat voters 3:1. It’s “Trump Country.” But take a look at Prescott’s recently proposed General Plan and you would never know it.
In Arizona, every municipality is required by statute (ARS §9-461.05) to build out and adopt a General Plan that outlines a pathway for growth in the community, covering topics such as land use, transportation, environment, water, and energy. This seemingly innocuous document that must be ratified by voters has become a pathway for city bureaucrats to sneak woke ideologies and climate goals into city planning.
General Plan Transportation Policy: Drive Less
Prescott’s Plan is nearly 150 pages and includes a number of statements and policies that do not align with the conservative ethos of the community. Under the “Air Quality” section (pg. 26), the Plan editorializes the reasons increased urbanization is harmful to the environment and claims that they must reduce dependence on automobiles as a solution. It further promotes “alternative transportation” which is typically code for forcing people to walk or bike and subsidizing a bunch of public transit people won’t ride. It is unlikely that the residents of Prescott will agree with “Prescott’s Plan” that they should give up their cars.
The General Plan includes an entire section dedicated to “Complete Streets, Vision Zero, and Transportation Safety Planning” (pg. 79-81). The Vision Zero initiative, funded by the Left, claims to aim for zero traffic deaths by making it increasingly difficult to drive. This signals a shift toward a “multimodal transportation system,” and the emphasis on “traffic calming” measures reveals their intention to narrow roads, reduce speed limits, and expand heavily subsidized public transportation – such as buses, light rail, and street cars. Prescott’s General Plan also looks to create a “Traffic Calming Design Guide” to implement many of these policies and disincentivize driving by adding layers of inconvenience (pg. 53).
General Plan Energy Policy: Use Less
Additionally, rather than the proposed general plan recommending the prioritization of cheap and reliable energy, it pushes for “renewable” sources to reduce carbon emissions (pg.41), a policy goal the council itself hasn’t declared is a priority of the community to begin with. It calls for increasing energy efficiency by promoting land use patterns that “encourage walkability and reduce dependency on cars” (pg. 42). In other words, residents are to be forced into centrally planned 15-minute city boroughs so Prescott residents will stop gobbling up so much energy. And because bureaucrats are at least realistic about literally no one doing this of their own accord, the city plans to provide financial incentives to manipulate residents and businesses into installing solar. Because solar is unreliable and Prescott would rather residents just use less energy anyway, they then intend to conduct energy audits in homes, potentially requiring costly upgrades at the expense of the homeowner (pg. 43).
General Plan “Services”: Pay More
Lastly, Prescott is pursuing designation as a “Tree City” (pg. 83). Achieving this status would require the city to expand bureaucracy and increase costs for city residents. To be eligible as a “Tree City,” Prescott would need to create a “tree board” or designate a tree czar. They would need to adopt a “municipal tree ordinance” to “protect” public trees, and the organization recommends the city develop their licensure for any person looking to trim, plant, or work on public trees, and even become a certified arborist. The Tree City USA program also creates an unfunded mandate of Prescott taxpayers, requiring a minimum expenditure of $2 per capita every year on “urban forestry”. What does the city get in return for obligating taxpayers and expanding government? Nothing. They get to call themselves a “Tree City.”
This expansion of government authority over routine plant management is excessive and emblematic of something President Trump would undoubtedly sick DOGE on. The Tree City USA section as a whole should be removed, and Prescott City Council should reject adding more layers of unnecessary government.
The city council in Prescott will be voting on the language in its 2025 General Plan on June 3rd; if approved, it will go to the voters on the ballot in November of this year. The majority-Republican city in rural Arizona should be safe from net-zero, anti-car, 15-minute city goals. However, it seems that these bad ideas have seeped into even the reddest of areas.
Republicans have the momentum with President Trump leading the charge to restore sanity in our country. Prescott council should feel empowered to follow in this administration’s footsteps and send a General Plan to the voters that reflects their conservative values.
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by admin | May 16, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Joe Biden caused a lot of damage in just four years as president. He undermined national security, cratered the economy, and weaponized the deep state against ordinary Americans and civil liberties. Considering these monstrous failures, the devastation he caused in transportation and infrastructure is largely overlooked. But shockingly, Biden’s USDOT director Pete Buttigieg made it pretty far down the road implementing a woke transportation agenda across the country.
In the past decade, environmentalists and central planners have linked arms with woke evangelists to radicalize transportation policy across the country. This was super-charged under Biden’s administration that pushed propaganda about roads being racist, rewrote rules and policies to force the Green New Deal, and made billions in grants to states and localities contingent on them adopting this woke agenda.
Now, Trump is hitting the brakes on the Left’s anti-car agenda, and in just 100 days Secretary of USDOT Sean Duffy has begun reversing course, cleansing the agency of DEI, environmental red tape, and wasteful and damaging spending.
Taxes on Driving & Subsidizing Transit Boondoggles
Only four weeks after being sworn in as Secretary of Transportation, Duffy sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul informing her he was shutting down the congestion pricing pilot program, which charges most drivers a $9 toll for entering NY’s “congestion relief zone.” The “pilot program” is estimated to generate a half billion dollars a year, not for road improvements to benefit the drivers paying the toll, but to bail out the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which supposedly needs $15 billion in infrastructure improvements.
It isn’t just New York that needs a bailout for “Big Transit.” Billions every year get shelled out by the federal government to fund transit projects with embarrassingly low ridership. On February 20th, the USDOT announced they were launching a probe into California’s bullet train boondoggle, a pipedream of the Obama Era that has gobbled up over $16 billion in taxpayer subsidies and failed to lay one track in 16 years. Similarly, Duffy cut funding to another expensive train project in the state of Texas, cancelling the remaining $60M of a federal grant and telling project leaders that if they think the project is feasible, they should shoulder the cost and not expect the American taxpayer to bail them out.
Transportation Green New Grift
Sec. Duffy also immediately began eliminating the Green New Deal nonsense plaguing the USDOT under Buttigieg. Duffy rescinded the Federal Highway Administration GHG rule that forces states and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to establish targets to reduce emissions. And he reopened the CAFE standards to reverse Biden’s effective ban on gas cars and provide the choice consumers want. From top to bottom, Biden’s USDOT was forcing a radical environmental agenda, mostly through granting and withholding of federal monies. Billions of dollars were allocated to local city projects that ripped up perfectly good roads to narrow or eliminate them and replace that space with bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. No more.
It is obvious to see Duffy is over the target when radically liberal transportation publications like “Streetsblog” have a new lamenting post every day. They even commented on the USDOT’s “purge” of various links on the agency’s website supporting “Complete Streets” that were clearly put together by Left activist organizations and provided the justification for thousands of cities to redesign their roads to force people out of their cars. Lest you think complete streets sound like an innocuous, non-political design feature, Streetsblog explains it as, “a powerful tool to reduce racial and social inequities, as well as making cities more green and accessible.”
Transportation Gone Woke
Lastly, this administration has been quick and bold in their attack on the unamerican cult of DEI, embedded at every level of government. Sec. Duffy immediately began rescinding Biden DEI policies at the USDOT, including cutting the strings to federal monies contingent on DEI, “social cost of carbon,” or “disparate impact” findings. In fact, he has made it clear that states can expect not to receive funds if they break the law, including sanctuary jurisdictions that do not comply with immigration enforcement. And Duffy announced they would strip funding for pointless woke research projects such as the $6M spent on “intermodal inequities, particularly how improvements to auto travel can benefit higher income, often white drivers, while depressing transit ridership potential and depriving it of revenues necessary to provide comprehensive services to lower income, often BIPOC people and research… to address safety concerns of women and gender non-conforming people using public transportation.”
The Root Problem – Vision Zero
But what lies at the bottom of all of this – congestion pricing schemes and other taxes on driving, emission standards to ban gas cars altogether, rip out roads and replace them with bike lanes, and siphon transportation dollars to bailout transit – is the ideological rot that is the Vision Zero initiative.
In Arizona we identified the Vision Zero initiative as the most effective injection of woke ideology into transportation planning in the country. After all, who doesn’t want to end traffic fatalities? The initiative itself started in the states as a non-profit funded by a liberal Bay Area clearinghouse for leftist causes adopting an ideology founded in Sweden. It has since penetrated the educational institutions of transportation professions and gained saturation in 2016 when it was officially adopted by the USDOT and became central to planning and funding requirements. In the name of making streets safer, Vision Zero has been the vehicle accelerating the wokeification of transportation planning.
Arizona and Sec. Duffy Can Permanently Save our Roads
In Arizona, we have been the tip of the spear fighting all these issues. At the top of the list is our “Freedom to Move” referral which would enshrine in the Constitution a ban on the government tracking, taxing, or limiting our miles of travel. This measure is currently one vote in the Arizona House away from being on the 2026 ballot. But we have also introduced a host of bills, fought the extension of the half cent sales tax in Maricopa County that subsidizes transit to the tune of billions of dollars, and worked in local communities to stop road diet projects.
But all this will continue if Sec. Duffy doesn’t completely eradicate Vision Zero from the USDOT, which is why we sent a memorial to the Trump Administration and Congress to educate the agency about it.
It has only been a little more than 100 days since Trump has taken office. The breadth and speed of the actions taken by the USDOT in that short time is breath-taking. Secretary Duffy arrived just in time to start the reversal of the corrosive woke transportation trends in our country. Yet there is still a lot more work to be done, and we are hopeful, given the performance thus far, and with groups like ours, the administration will get around to it.
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 | May 13, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Since becoming Governor of Arizona in 2023, Katie Hobbs’ name has been synonymous with corruption. Now, one of her latest vetoes shows the lengths she is willing to go to protect her own schemes.
Buried on the afternoon of Friday, May 2, Hobbs vetoed SB 1612, along with 21 other bills. Sponsored by Arizona State Senator TJ Shope, SB 1612 would have required anyone applying for grants to various state agencies to disclose gifts, donations, or other support provided to the sitting governor. That sort of transparency should be something that every Arizonan can get behind—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, you name it—unless, of course, your agenda doesn’t involve the best interests of Arizona citizens, right Katie Hobbs?
This whole story starts at the very beginning of Hobbs’ tenure as governor. If you’ll recall, at the time, Hobbs set up a shady slush fund to provide donors with a conduit to buy political favor from her administration. While setting up and managing the fund, Hobbs illegally used public resources—like the state’s website—to solicit money for her inauguration. And she also tried to stop the disclosure of the names of those who donated to her inaugural fund.
But after immense political pressure and public records requests filed by groups like the Arizona Freedom Foundation (who operates AZ Free News), Hobbs finally released the names of the donors. One of the names of the groups on the list was Sunshine Residential Homes Inc., a for-profit company that contracts with the State of Arizona to provide some child welfare services. At the time, Sunshine Residential Homes made a donation of $100,000. But in June 2024, an eye-opening report revealed a deeper level of corruption—an alleged pay-to-play scheme between Hobbs and the group home.
According to the report, Sunshine Residential Homes donated approximately $400,000 toward the Arizona Democratic Party, Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaign, and her aforementioned inaugural fund. How generous! Surely there couldn’t be anything else behind this. Oh…wait a minute. The report revealed that Sunshine Residential Homes was granted a 60 percent increase at a time when the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) cut loose 16 providers! On top of that, no other standard group home provider received a rate increase. This arrangement set up Sunshine Residential Homes to potentially receive millions of dollars more at the taxpayers’ expense. Are donations supposed to yield that kind of return?
While the scheme is still under investigation from both Attorney General Kris Mayes and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, Hobbs could’ve given the people of Arizona greater confidence in the government by signing SB 1612. Instead, she dropped a two-sentence veto letter saying that AHCCCS’ procurement and award processes are “consistent with Medicaid best practices.”
That’s right. Hobbs dodged the issue and attempted to bury it because she knows she has no good reason to oppose this bill. And that just about sums up Katie Hobbs. Her entire tenure has been filled with corruption. We’ve seen it when she diverted millions for an unauthorized program that has blown a hole in our state’s budget. We’ve seen it when she broke the law to take credit for the Republican tax rebate. We’ve seen it when she approved a $700,000 contract for Urias Communications, owned by the brother of the now-former Office of Tourism Director Lisa Urias, to create a new state logo. And now we’ve seen it once again as she tries to hide from her pay-to-play scandal through her veto pen.
SB 1612 would’ve brought some much-needed transparency and accountability, no matter who is in the governor’s office. That’s something all Arizonans deserve. But as long as Katie Hobbs is governor, we’ll get neither.
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!
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by admin | May 9, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
PHOENIX, ARIZONA – This week the Arizona Supreme Court granted review of a critical 1st Amendment lawsuit, Center for AZ v. AZ Secretary of State. The case deals with Proposition 211, which established onerous and unconstitutional disclosure requirements on private organizations and donors that could lead to harassment, censorship, and chill free speech. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
The Arizona Supreme Court granted review on the following issues:
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- “Is the Voters’ Right to Know Act facially unconstitutional under the Arizona Constitution?”
- “If not, did the court of appeals properly dismiss Plaintiffs-Appellants’ as-applied challenge?
“We are thankful that the Arizona Supreme Court accepted review of this vital case for our First Amendment liberties,” said Scot Mussi, President of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. “Both the U.S. Constitution and the Arizona Constitution guarantee citizens the right to speak freely, which includes the right to not be forced to speak. Prop 211 not only violates this right for donors by silencing them from supporting causes they believe in but impairs the speech of nonprofits like ours as well. We are hopeful that the Arizona Supreme Court will rule in favor of the Constitution after considering the merits of the case.”
Joining the Arizona Free Enterprise Club on this challenge are the Center for Arizona Policy, with the Goldwater Institute serving as counsel.
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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