by admin | May 7, 2026 | Arizona, News and Updates
Less than an hour had passed from when Republicans delivered a budget to Katie Hobbs desk yesterday to when she stamped it with a ‘veto.’ No one is surprised, since from the moment she walked out of negotiations six weeks ago and “challenged” Republicans to show their budget hand, she had already made up her mind about vetoing it. She just needed them to do all the work first.
Hobbs has grown far too comfortable being the only one setting conditions on budget negotiations, considering every condition she has set has been unreasonable, unworkable, or erratic.
She tried to anchor the entire budget to an unprecedented raid of the state land trust, speculative revenue requiring voter approval that could never functionally bridge her reckless spending. She wanted to deliver only half the conformity relief Arizona taxpayers are entitled to under the One Big Beautiful Bill, in direct contradiction to tax forms her own Department of Revenue already issued, creating tax filing chaos. She tried to “trade” not forcing that tax hike on Arizonans for kicking kids off the ESA program (insane). And when Republicans said no to all of it, she flipped the table and stormed off, openly admitting she was out of ideas, and demanding Republicans produce a budget on their own.
While the veto from Hobbs was largely expected, Hobbs’ explanation for her veto was such brazen hypocrisy that it raises the genuine question of whether she is being ironic or fails to see the numerous contradictions in her opposition to the GOP budget.
She rails against “tax breaks for billionaires,” a line that would land better if the bulk of what she’s opposing weren’t no taxes on tips, overtime, and the depreciation schedules thousands of Arizona small businesses use to offset investments. The one provision that skews toward higher earners is the SALT deduction, which is only in play because Hobbs:
- Vetoed an earlier Republican conformity bill in January that replaced the SALT deduction with a child tax credit;
- Included the SALT deduction on this year’s tax form, which means she was in favor of the deduction before she was against it.
She positions herself as an opponent of data center tax carveouts, despite voting for them as a state legislator, while seeking to protect millions in solar and wind subsidies. She derides sweeping excess funds from the Arizona Commerce Authority, an agency that under her watch was found to have violated the state’s gift clause by blowing $2.4 million on Super Bowl tickets and lavish CEO forums. For Hobbs, hosting cocktail parties for wealthy executives apparently is a worthy taxpayer expense.
The bottom line is that Republicans did the job she walked away from and told them to complete. And now she thinks she can sit back and lazily redline their work from the sidelines. That is not how this works. Criticizing is not the same thing as governing. “Budget for All” platitudes are not the same thing as a real budget.
It’s time she put her budget cards on the table.
Governor Hobbs needs to produce an actual budget now.
She wants to pretend the “executive proposal” she unveiled in January was a real budget. It was not. It was a political document riddled with budget sins. The proposal relied on a $760 million federal border reimbursement that no one expects to materialize. She proposed raiding a voter-protected education fund and added $1.5 billion in new debt. It included fake budget cuts that will never happen. This isn’t just about fundamental disagreements in priorities, Katie Hobbs “budget” was a bunch of fabricated revenues and phantom savings designed to paper over a structurally broken spending plan.
But perhaps the most reckless component was her “solution” on tax conformity; the capstone of a months-long parade of failures since the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last July.
Just to recap, last year when Republicans called on Hobbs to convene a special session to conform Arizona’s tax code, she refused. Hundreds of thousands of Arizona families were left hanging, uncertain whether their tips, overtime, and higher standard deductions would survive on their state return. Then in November, she apparently decided the whole thing was actually a great idea, if she could just get away with taking credit for it. She issued an executive order branding Trump’s tax relief as her own “Middle Class Tax Cuts Package,” after spending months trashing the One Big Beautiful Bill as “devastating” and “dangerous,” a hypocrisy so bold not even the legacy media gave her a pass.
Her knockoff plan had another problem: it was a half-measure. Full conformity would guarantee Arizonans $420–440 million in tax relief. Hobbs’ cherry-picked version added up to about $215 million, meaning her plan would still leave Arizonans with a net tax hike of over $200 million compared to full conformity. Then she tried to torpedo her own proposal by recasting it as a bargaining chip to defund school choice, proving she was never serious about delivering the relief in the first place. The executive order in question was also a legally dubious power grab, directing a tax collection agency to effectively rewrite tax law. Her own Department of Revenue resolved the conflict by issuing 2025 filing season forms assuming full conformity. Arizonans filed on that basis. Hobbs’ “budget” would pull the rug out from under all of them, forcing hundreds of thousands to refile and pay more.
She simply won’t say that plainly (or put it in an actual budget), because saying it plainly would end her political career.
Hobbs knows her fake plan is an unworkable mess that will raise taxes and create filing chaos. That is why she will push to retreat into secret negotiations to avoid a public debate and further exposure of her bungling of the whole affair.
That is a request Legislative Leadership should flatly reject.
Instead, Republicans should not lift a finger until Katie Hobbs produces an actual budget. They should allow the minority party the latitude of late introductions and drop actual budget bills. Then let it be scored by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, receive public hearings and testimony, be debated on the floor, and evaluated in full public view, which is exactly the standard she applied to Republicans. If she has a better way, she should show us.
Arizonans deserve to know what their governor’s actual plan is. A real Hobbs budget would end the fog, put her priorities on paper alongside the Republican plan, and let Arizonans draw their own conclusions. That transparency is good for Arizona and deeply inconvenient for a governor whose strategy is to never be pinned down.
Critiquing is not leading, and vetoing is not governing. Show us your plan, Governor. For real this time.
TAKE ACTION NOW
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by admin | May 5, 2026 | Arizona, News and Updates
As we noted back in March, Chaos Katie ran away from negotiations after Republicans refused to anchor the entire state budget to her reckless Prop 123 scheme, a plan that would have ratcheted state trust land distributions to 10.9%, a raid on the trust that would have cut the corpus nearly in half over two decades.
When she concluded that she couldn’t get her trust land gimmick over the finish line, she passed the mantel of leadership to Republicans, demanding they needed to publicly release their own budget plan before she would reengage. “I know we can get big things done when we work together,” she said, “but that isn’t possible when one side refuses to show us their plans.”
By daring Republican leadership at the legislature to produce their own budget, Hobbs was gambling that they would either be unwilling or unable to produce their own spending plan.
It was a very poor bet.
This week, Republican leadership sent their budget to the Governor’s desk, one that exposes her lack of ideas and complete inability to lead.
The Republican Plan: Trump Tax Cuts for All
The Republican budget delivers over $1 billion in tax relief over the next three years by fully conforming to President Trump’s federal tax cuts while tailoring it to Arizona’s unique needs. It eliminates state taxes on tips and overtime pay, expands relief for childcare expenses, increases the dependent tax credit, and extends additional relief to retirees on fixed incomes.
And it does all of this while spending roughly $800 million less than Hobbs’ own proposal. The $1 billion+ in relief is afforded through real reductions in spending, not accounting tricks or fake revenues as Hobbs has proposed; primarily by eliminating corporate welfare and “DOGEing” government.
The corporate subsidy cuts include eliminating $76 million in solar tax credits and green energy scam incentives, including the sweetheart property tax treatment that lets large utility-scale wind and solar projects (owned mostly by out-of-state corporations) get assessed at just 20% of depreciated value, meaning a wind farm worth $100 million on paper pays property taxes as if it were worth $20 million. The budget also cuts funding to the Arizona Commerce Authority, the state’s economic development slush fund that Hobbs has used to dole out corporate favors, and zeroes out Tucson Rio Nuevo, a tax increment financing district that has long operated as a piggybank for politically connected interests. Together those two cuts save another $86 million. Cutting corporate carveouts to deliver tax relief to middle-class Arizona families is a great tradeoff.
The rest of the shortfall is addressed by DOGEing government by actually demanding that the state tighten its belt so families can get a little relief. That means a 5% across-the-board cut to agency budgets, which is especially necessary given that the Hobbs administration has operated less like a state government and more like a patronage network, handing out high-paying, benefit-loaded jobs like candy to her friends.
And Republicans proved they can put together a responsible, functional budget without relying on a nonsensical scheme like Prop 123, and they must keep holding that line.
Hobbs Should Sign This Budget
Katie Hobbs came to budget negotiations with exactly one (unworkable) idea: Prop 123. When that fell apart, she had nothing left. So, she flipped the table, stormed out, and shoved the whole problem into Republicans’ laps, daring them to do the job she couldn’t. And they did. The Republican budget delivers real affordability – over a billion dollars in tax relief, full conformity to end the filing season chaos, a 5% government efficiency cut, and the elimination of corporate tax carveouts to fund relief for middle-income Arizonans instead. It’s fiscally responsible, honestly paid for, and exactly the kind of plan Hobbs claimed she wanted but couldn’t produce herself.
Hobbs has no credible standing to criticize from the sidelines since she’s the one who walked away. She has no competing plan, and no better deal coming. This budget is her escape hatch, the cleanest exit from a mess entirely of her own making. The longer she holds out, the worse it gets for her. Which is why she should just sign it.
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by admin | Apr 30, 2026 | Arizona, News and Updates
Flagstaff residents have until May 19th to vote on the Flagstaff Regional Land Use Plan 2045, a mail-in only election that will determine whether this becomes the city’s guiding blueprint through 2045. The plan will shape “growth, development, conservation, housing, transportation, and other long-term community priorities.” It is a roadmap for how city leaders want Flagstaff to grow, move, build, and live for the next two decades.
The main themes of this Regional Plan are Climate Action, Housing Attainability and Equity. Climate and equity, two of the left’s favorite virtue-signaling obsessions. The plan runs roughly 250 pages and buried inside the planning jargon is a much bigger agenda: a comprehensive restructuring of everyday life in Flagstaff.
The plan repeatedly sounds the alarm over the so-called “climate emergency,” declaring that “climate change, driven by human-induced GHG emissions, is intensifying global weather disruptions.” Translation: the climate is spiraling into chaos, and it’s your fault, therefore the city government now needs to center major policy decisions around climate activism.
The plan repeatedly references Flagstaff’s Carbon Neutrality Plan (CNP) that has the goal to “achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.” What is supposed to be a land use and regional planning document instead reads like an environmental manifesto. In city government’s attempt to “save the planet,” residents should expect pressure for more mandates, regulations, and costly transitions as officials target emissions from “buildings, transportation, waste, etc.” Their call for the “displacement of fossil fuel-based generation with zero-carbon sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear energy,” will inevitably drive-up costs – even in the areas, like housing affordability, they claim to be trying to reduce.
Transportation is another major target. The plan states that “Reducing VMT (vehicle miles traveled) is critical to reducing emissions.” To accomplish that, it promotes street redesigns such as “narrower vehicle lanes” to “encourage slower driving speeds” and give more space to bikers. In plain English, road space would be taken away from drivers and handed over to planners’ preferred modes of transit. These changes would increase congestion, inconvenience commuters, and reduce accessibility for the people who rely on cars every day.
The plan also seeks to turn Flagstaff into a collective of 10- or 15-minute cities, promising to create a “walkable public realm” and build a place where “people can access jobs… without relying on cars.” That may sound utopian to planners, but most residents are not eager to ditch their cars and reorganize their lives around government-designed transit corridors and bike paths.
Even after the road diets, redesigns, restrictions, and behavior-changing policies, Flagstaff admits their “plan” won’t work. After implementation, with all the scenarios tested, they would fail to reduce total Vehicle Miles Traveled below 2024 levels. Unsurprising, a presumptive admission of failure does not dissuade the city from trying to force all their bad ideas on voters anyway.
Lastly, comes the favorite buzzword of modern bureaucrats: equity. The plan says officials should “prioritize residents most affected” and ensure costs and benefits are distributed “equitably.” That sounds harmless until you realize “equity” is often used as a catch-all excuse for government to pick winners and losers. It becomes justification for deciding who gets resources first, which neighborhoods are favored, and whose priorities move to the front of the line. Who decides what is equitable? What tradeoffs are made behind closed doors? When government replaces equal treatment with vague social-engineering language, taxpayers should beware.
Good planning should expand opportunity, protect affordability, and preserve personal autonomy, not micromanage how people travel, live, and consume energy – which seems to be the entire purpose of Flagstaff’s proposed 2045 Regional Plan.
So, Flagstaff voters, is this a practical plan for Flagstaff’s future, or an ideological wish list dressed up as urban planning? On May 19th, residents will decide.
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by admin | Apr 28, 2026 | Arizona, Dont CA my AZ, News and Updates
Last year, Katie Hobbs, by executive order, established a “task force” headed by her Office of “Sustainability” to develop a report on energy affordability and reliability. This month, her task force submitted their plan which would do the opposite of that: make energy more expensive and less reliable. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the “task force” called by Hobbs is made up of solar special interests, environmental activists, her own agencies, and utilities that have all committed to going Net Zero anyway.
Instead of reading 81 pages that brings nothing new to the table, the only questions that need to be asked (and answered) about the report are below.
Does it call for new natural gas generation? Not really.
Does it call on utilities to keep our coal plants open? No, they want to shut them down and “repower” them to “clean” energy.
Does it pave the way for new nuclear? Not until the mid-2040s, at the earliest.
What, then, does it advocate doing? Subsize special interests by blanketing state trust land and government buildings with even more solar, wind, and battery storage. The very thing causing utility rates to increase and leading to blackouts.
Ironically, they recognize that the vast majority of new generation being built in the state right now – 82% of it according to the report – is already coming from solar, wind, and battery storage, while conveniently ignoring that at the same time both of the largest investor owned, monopoly utilities – APS and TEP – are currently seeking double digit rate hikes. And these rate hikes aren’t the first. Since Hobbs has taken office, the cost of electricity for residential ratepayers has gone from 12.63 cents per KWh to 16.03 cents. For someone using 1,000KWhs a month, that’s a $34 per month increase, or 27%. Under her plan, that will go far higher.
Blame Trump
Instead of acknowledging this, the report blames President Trump, who has been working to unleash energy across the country, for slashing the trillions in subsidies for solar, wind, and battery storage from the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” from the Biden Administration. They also blame Secretary Burgum for protecting federal lands from being carpeted with unreliable solar and wind farms. But electricity rates were increasing before Trump took office and Burgum was named Secretary of the Interior, precisely because of what they halted. We have more paper capacity than ever before, but costs are skyrocketing and reliability is declining because most of the new generation is coming from intermittent solar and wind.
It should surprise no one, that even with taxpayer subsidies, the more solar, wind, and battery storage a utility puts on their grid, the higher costs are for ratepayers.
Replace Coal with Solar and Battery Storage
Instead of keeping our remaining coal plants online, as President Trump has called for, the report argues we should instead “repower” them with solar plus battery storage. Not only is it foolish on its face to replace a reliable source of energy with an intermittent source, it costs a lot more too. TEP even admitted so. In deciding to convert one of their existing coal plants to natural gas at a cost of $170 million, they argued that converting it to solar and battery storage would cost 27 times that, or $4.5 Billion.
Competition? Only if Monopoly Utilities Benefit
The only “solution” identified in the report that could actually help bring more capacity on the grid and shield ratepayers from increased costs from the massive energy demands of new large load customers, like data centers, is a “BYOC” or Bring Your Own Capacity approach where these customers self-generate their own power. But even here, the report doesn’t call for opening up the state for data centers to easily build their own power plants. No, for Hobbs it must be done in a way that benefits monopoly utilities. And, it must come with “sustainability” mandates on those data centers, which would cause prices to soar even higher. We ran a bill to streamline the process for data centers to bring their own power, likely to be natural gas, but the very utilities Hobbs is deferential to killed that bill at every step of the process.
The Hobbs Energy Promise? Higher Costs, Subsidized by Taxpayers
This is really just a political report, and if its recommendations were implemented, it would actually only increase the cost of electricity for Arizonans. We have seen the result of spamming the grid with renewables. 20 years after Kris Mayes spearheaded the effort to mandate 15% renewable energy, Arizonans have paid more than $3 billion for it. The Corporation Commission itself found that a renewable mandate would cost ratepayers $6 Billion. Our analysis of APS’ resource plan to go 100% renewable by 2050 found that it would cost ratepayers at least $42.7 billion through 2038, raising residential ratepayers’ bills by $100 a month.
So, what is Hobbs’ actual plan to lower the cost of electricity for Arizonans? Her budget proposal this year included a tax hike to pay for a fund that would subsidize the utility bills of a few ratepayers across the state. In other words, she has done nothing in her 4 years as Governor to actually lower the costs of electricity and seemingly has no problem with our utilities getting their double-digit rate hikes. Instead, she wants to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize those rate hikes. Under her plan, utilities get their rate hikes, and ratepayers pay doubly for it – in higher rates and taxes.
The Real Energy Promise that Delivers Affordability and Reliability to Customers
The path for lower utility bills is not complicated. Stop shutting down coal. Meet new demand with more natural gas. Allow data centers to build their own power, on their own dime. Pave the way for more nuclear power within the next decade. Stop wasting money on unreliable solar, wind, and battery storage. If Hobbs was interested in delivering affordability and reliability to Arizona ratepayers, this is what a real Energy Promise would actually look like.
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by admin | Apr 14, 2026 | Arizona, News and Updates
Proximity to the people does not prevent abuse of power. In fact, it often does the opposite. Municipal governments enact restrictive policies just as easily as state or federal governments and often with less scrutiny.
There is a myth in America that the closer government is to the people, the more checks exist and the better the governance. By that logic, local governments, city and town councils, being closest to the people, must be the least corrupt and most responsive. Because of this, municipalities and their proponents constantly argue that they should be free to govern their communities without interference, or as it’s often framed, maintain “local control.”
The local control argument might seem intuitive, however, does shifting power from one level of government to another actually protect individual freedom? The burden on the people is the same, if not more, whether bad policy comes in the form of higher taxes, increased fees, restrictive regulations, or costly utility rate hikes from federal, state, or local government.
In Gilbert, residents have been outraged by astronomical water bills and rate increases, decisions made not in Washington, D.C. or in Phoenix, but by their own local government. Proximity did not protect them; it made the impact more immediate. Gilbert is not the only town with unceasing increased costs, municipalities across Arizona are raising taxes, fees, and rates (good thing there is a resolution moving through the legislature to alleviate this).
Some argue that cities are to the state what states are to the federal government. That comparison fails. States created the federal government and, under our federal system, are recognized as sovereign entities. Cities, counties, and districts, by contrast, are creations of the state; the Arizona Constitution specifically delineates this. As a result, any authority municipalities exercise is not inherent but delegated by the state. Because of this, it is the state’s responsibility to place checks on local governments. And it is therefore completely within the legislature’s authority to reign in out-of-control city governments. Local control, as is often presented, is a fallacy.
The people give power to the states and the states delegate power to the municipalities. In this debate, the most important stakeholder is ignored: the individual. Any authority that shifts from the state to the cities does not reduce government but simply relocates it.
The meaning of “local control” must be reframed. The real question is not which level of government holds power, but how much power government should have over individuals in the first place. The answer should be as little as possible. True local control means empowering individuals, families, and businesses to make decisions without excessive regulation or extreme taxation.
The goal of any level of government should be to protect the individual’s ability to live and operate freely. American values and traditions prioritize self-governance at the personal level, not the shifting of power among government entities. So no, your city council taxing you is no better than the state legislature or Congress levying onerous taxes on you.
When did we, the people, become so complacent that we allow governments to tax and control us so extensively? A few centuries ago, Americans were throwing tea into the harbor to protest unjust taxation. Now, it is rampant. Do we not care that our freedom today is miniscule compared to what the Founders envisioned for us?
Local control is just that: control. The people are at the top of the power distribution pyramid, NOT your town councilmember. We must return America back to the land of the free and not the land of 100% water rate hikes.
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by admin | Apr 9, 2026 | Arizona, News and Updates
For more than a decade, the teachers’ unions and their allies at Save Our Schools (SOS) have made their mission clear: stop school choice in Arizona. They fought the expansion of our state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program at every turn. And after the program was made universal in 2022, they have endlessly pushed to repeal the expansion—including a failed ballot initiative where their signature count was off by more than 50,000. (Yes. These are the people pushing public education.)
With another election around the corner, SOS and the teachers’ unions have once again launched a ballot initiative designed to cripple ESAs. But a funny thing has happened in their efforts to get on the ballot. SOS and the teachers’ unions are suddenly claiming that the initiative isn’t about “eliminating the program.” And they’re pushing a talking point that their only concern is that the program isn’t “functioning properly.”
It’s a remarkable rewrite of history—and Arizona voters shouldn’t buy it.
Just consider the record. Leaders of Save Our Schools have spent years attacking ESAs as harmful “vouchers” that drain money from public schools. Not only have they tried to repeal the program, but they’ve pushed to cap it while continuing to demand that it be overturned, even after their previous ballot initiative failed.
On top of that, they’ve been quick to get activist reporters in the legacy media with ties to the Red for Ed teachers’ union to consistently push false claims about Arizona’s school choice program.
And if that’s not enough, SOS and its Executive Director Beth Lewis repeatedly blast the ESA program on social media. (See here, here, here, and here for just a few examples.) Beth even goes so far as to proudly feature the hashtag “#VouchersHurt” on her Twitter/X profile.
That’s not exactly the language of someone who simply wants to make sure the program “functions properly.” But for SOS and the teachers’ unions, opposition to ESAs has never been subtle or nuanced. It’s been loud and relentless.
So why the sudden attempt to rebrand themselves as concerned stewards of the ESA program?
The answer is obvious. They know that school choice has become wildly popular in Arizona. With more than 100,000 students now enrolled (and counting), families across our state rely on the ESA program to give their children better educational opportunities. SOS and the teachers’ unions know that if voters understood that this ballot initiative isn’t actually about “eliminating fraud” but rather an attempt to force kids back into failing district schools, support for their measure will crater.
So, now we get the SOS school choice makeover. For the next eight months, they will pretend to be the true caretakers of ESAs and that this initiative actually “helps” the parents and kids that are utilizing the program. But voters shouldn’t be fooled. This ballot initiative is nothing more than a Red for Ed power grab funded by a Washington, D.C. teachers’ union and designed to dismantle school choice in our state.
Now it’s up to us to make sure Arizona voters know the truth about this initiative. In the months ahead, as SOS and the teachers’ unions push their deceptive message, we need to meet them at every turn just like we did in 2022. School choice is the civil rights issue of our generation. We must do everything we can to protect it for decades to come.
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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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