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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