by admin | Jun 12, 2025 | News and Updates, Regulatory
Earlier this year, President Trump signed a trio of executive orders aimed at keeping our nation’s vital coal power plants online. In fact, at the signing ceremony, the President explicitly called out one of Arizona’s coal plants by name. He directed Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright to keep the Cholla Power Plant online and told the workers to remain calm because they are going to have that plant “opening and burning…coal in a very short period of time.”
The Cholla Power Plant is one of many Arizona coal plants that have either been mothballed or slated for retirement in the near future. In 2019, SRP and the other utilities shut down the Navajo Generating Station, resulting in a loss of 2,250 MW of reliable capacity. Earlier this year, an additional 425 MW of generating capacity was taken offline at Cholla. And over the next 6 years, Arizona’s public utilities, as outlined in Integrated Resource Plans recently approved by the Arizona Corporation Commission, plan to shutter every last bit of coal generation in Arizona by 2032. Most alarming is that according to those same Resource Plans, the replacement fuel for this reliable source of energy will be solar, wind, and battery storage, all to meet carbon free “Net Zero” goals that will cost Arizona ratepayers billions and destabilize the grid.
On the same day President Trump signed the coal orders, the Arizona legislature, led by Representative David Marshall, sent a letter to the Department of the Interior urging the Administration to help keep Cholla, and every other coal plant in the state, online. Last month, every Republican in the legislature voted to send HCM2014 to the Corporation Commission, urging them to protect our grid, fight to keep these plants online, and support the Trump Energy Agenda.
What Arizona ratepayers got instead was a late Friday afternoon news dump from Kevin Thompson, Chairman of the Corporation Commission, blasting the idea of reopening Cholla. In his press release, Thompson and fellow Commissioner Nick Myers claimed that it would cost ratepayers $1.9 billion to keep Cholla online and then took the time to attack and belittle GOP lawmakers and advocates of the Cholla option.
It is interesting to note that prior to this figure being disclosed by Thompson and Myers, it was impossible to get any actual numbers or a cost analysis from the commission comparing the price of coal to other Green New Deal options. Every time the subject was brought up, we were simply told that going solar is the cheapest option and that we should just “trust the experts.” It is unclear how Commissioner Thompson even arrived at this figure.
But now that we have their figure, let’s take them at their word: keeping Cholla online has a price tag of $1.9 billion. That sounds high, and ratepayers might be concerned about footing that bill. But this doesn’t take into account that the 425 MW of electricity from Cholla has to be replaced with another source of energy. So, instead of keeping coal online and adding additional capacity to meet future demand, we now must foot the bill for replacement power and new capacity.
And what would that replacement power cost? Since the utilities’ future resource plans depend almost exclusively on green energy generation to meet their climate commitments, “Net-Zero Heroes,” that is what ratepayers should expect – solar plus battery storage to replace our coal plants.
And what do solar plus storage projects cost? The Eleven Miles Center, built in 2024 by SRP at a cost of $1 billion, has an advertised peak capacity of 300 MW with four hours of 300 MW storage. The APS Papago Solar and Storage project is planned to be operational in 2026 and has the same capacity. The advertised cost is $836.4 million.
At first blush, both solar projects appear to have a similar output compared to Cholla at a slightly lower price, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. A coal plant with a capacity of 425 MW of capacity can produce power 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Solar? The advertised capacity of 300 MW of solar from Eleven Miles Center or the Papago project will only produce 300 MW for a few hours each day and drop to zero every single night when the sun isn’t shining.
So how much solar needs to be built to match the dispatchable coal power being replaced? According to energy experts such as Alex Epstein, AlwaysOn Research, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, for every 1 MW of reliable, dispatchable coal power being replaced, the grid will need more than 3 MW of solar plus storage to meet demand.
In effect, to replace the capacity of 425 MW at a plant like Cholla, the utilities will need to build approximately 1,700 MW of solar plus storage at a ratepayer cost between $4.7 billion and $5.7 billion dollars! Additionally, paying triple the cost for solar will only provide the grid with four hours of battery backup, so ratepayers would still benefit more from investments in projects like Cholla than in unreliable solar and storage.
Given the exorbitant price tag to build thousands of acres of intermittent, unreliable solar and batteries, it seems crazy not to seriously consider keeping Cholla open. Combined with the announcement this week by the EPA to move toward repealing the radical Obama/Biden era “Clean Power Plan 2.0” rules and anti-science “endangerment finding,” the cost and regulatory barriers to expanding the use of coal and natural gas are being swept away.
Yet despite the efforts of the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers, Commissioners Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers continue to obstruct the exploration of expanded coal development in Arizona. They have also shown no interest in revisiting the utility Resource Plans that were rammed through the process right before the November election. The regulatory, tax, and subsidy environment that drove many of the assumptions in those plans are now defective with Trump in the White House. Items such as the closure of the Cholla Plant, along with other coal facilities on the chopping block, should all be reopened and reconsidered.
Arizona has huge energy demands on the horizon. The implementation of Trump’s agenda will secure our energy future and keep Arizona free and prosperous. The reflexive opposition to coal and other fossil fuel generation perhaps made some sense when Biden and the Green New Deal Left were driving the energy agenda, but that’s no longer the case. Instead, Commissioners Thompson and Myers seem stuck in the Green New Deal world of 2023, which means ratepayers all get stuck with a costly, unreliable grid while they are at the Corporation Commission.
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by admin | Jun 6, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Heading into November’s election, the Democratic Party felt good. They thought they had the presidency locked up. And here locally, they were convinced that they would gain control of Arizona’s legislature after outspending Republicans in every single race.
Then, a massacre happened. President Trump was handed a mandate by the American people, and Democrats actually lost ground in our state legislature. That had to feel like rock bottom for the Left, and yet, as we’ve seen so far in 2025, it wasn’t.
On the heels of their historic defeat, the Arizona Democratic Party (ADP) faced accusations of financial wrongdoing from one of its leaders, just days before its convention and officer elections in January. Then, in April, the ADP saw even more infighting between party leadership and the state’s top Democratic elected officials: Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, and U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego. Now, the latest news shows that, according to its own leadership, the Arizona Democratic Party will actually go broke by the end of this year.
That’s a lot of dysfunction in just a few short months, which is usually the domain for Republicans. But now it appears the Dems have become the standard bearer of political chaos.
In the midst of all this infighting and disarray has been more bad news for Democrats. Voter registration numbers in April showed that the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in Maricopa County has increased from 85,000 in April 2020 to 191,000 in April 2025. But that’s not even the worst part for the Left. According to the numbers, there are now fewer registered Democrats in Maricopa County than there were five years ago despite the fact that Maricopa County has grown by over 150,000 residents!
It’s tempting to want to grab a bowl of popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show. Heck, it’s better than just about anything Hollywood has put out in years. But the conservative movement can’t afford to take its foot off the gas. Right now, it is critical to keep the momentum going after a successful 2024 in two important ways.
First, conservatives need to unite around winning issues such as border security, school choice, and putting more money back into the bank accounts of Arizona’s families with lower taxes and utility bills. After the Biden administration’s disastrous handling of the border, illegal immigration ranked as one of the top concerns for voters this past November. And there isn’t a person in this state who wouldn’t like to have more money back in their wallets.
On top of that, teachers’ unions made it no secret that their top priority was to roll back and eliminate the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program in Arizona. They spent millions to push candidates with a long track record of being anti-school choice in this past election. And they lost big. Now, more families are recognizing the tremendous benefits of school choice in our state as enrollment in the ESA program continues to grow.
These are winning issues, and Republicans must unite around them to build on this success. But standing on the right side of key issues is only one part of keeping the momentum going.
Leading up to the 2024 election, a strong coalition of conservative groups got proactive. They excelled at registering thousands of new voters and converted countless disaffected Hispanic and young voters into pro-freedom Republicans.
But we can’t be satisfied or rest on our laurels.
Outreach and engagement with families, business owners, and voters all throughout the state of Arizona must be a priority. And if the conservative movement continues to build on these pillars—and the Dems continue to self-immolate—the winning won’t stop heading into 2026.
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by admin | Jun 3, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
In November 2022, Arizona voters narrowly approved Prop. 308, making Arizona the 24th state in the nation giving taxpayer-subsidized, in-state tuition rates to illegals. Its narrow passage on the ballot was preceded by its razor-thin passage at the state legislature, slipping out because two former Republican legislators, who since lost their seats to primary challengers, rolled their caucus and voted in lock step with Democrats to force it for a vote.
After making the ballot, the measure was bankrolled by a small but well-financed cohort within the political class, business community, and immigration activist organizations funded by George Soros. Even a handful of Republican elected officials and candidates jumped on board, including a few city council members and current candidate for the Republican nomination for Arizona Governor, Karrin Taylor Robson.
It was in part billed by proponents as only applying to “Dreamers,” or recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established under the Obama administration. In reality, it allowed for anyone here illegally to get in-state tuition rates as long as they spent at least two years in an Arizona high school—signaling to the rest of the world that if you enter here illegally in time to go to an Arizona high school, American taxpayers will subsidize your tuition at our universities.
But they hid from the public one important fact. It unequivocally violates federal law.
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton signed a bipartisan immigration bill, which included a provision explicitly prohibiting universities from providing lower tuition rates to illegals than they do to any other U.S. citizen, regardless of their residency. In other words, under this federal immigration law, a state like Arizona could give illegals in-state tuition rates, but only if they provide that same rate to every citizen of the country regardless of their residency status, ensuring illegals are not given a privilege and benefit not provided and extended to every lawful U.S. citizen.
This federal law is explicit and clear, but states have been ignoring it for years. When Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation wrote his report on it more than a decade ago, 12 states were in violation. Today, 24 states are still incentivizing illegal immigration by having every other taxpaying citizen subsidize their in-state tuition rate, some even providing scholarships, grants, and aid further subsidizing their tuition.
In the 2011 report, Hans noted that in 2005, it was estimated that providing an in-state rate to illegals in California was costing taxpayers between $222.6 and $289.3 million and in Texas between $80.2 million and $104.4 million. It’s costly for taxpayers, fundamentally unfair, and incentivizes more people to enter our country and states illegally.
But these states, including Arizona, continue to flagrantly violate federal law because there is no private right of action. So anytime a U.S. citizen who is charged more to attend a university than an illegal sues, the courts toss the case for lack of standing. It would take the federal government to enforce its own laws to put a stop to it. Since its passage in the 1990s, no executive has done so.
Until now.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order to, for the first time, do just that, directing the Department of Justice to investigate states violating the law.
Just think about it. A U.S. citizen who is a resident of another state will be charged $34,014 to attend Arizona State University this year, and that’s up from $26,470 just 10 years ago. An international student, someone who is not a U.S. citizen but is lawfully here temporarily to pursue higher education, will be charged $37,202. But a noncitizen who entered this country illegally? They will be charged $11,822, less than a third of out-of-state U.S. citizens and international students who followed the law. Those students and every taxpayer pick up the tab to subsidize the tuition of illegal immigrants.
It was bad policy then, when the border was wide open. It’s bad policy now. It was illegal then, and it is illegal today. It’s time for the Trump Administration to shut it down.
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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.
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 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.
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