Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free, where this week's stories include:
But first, it's another case of zoning against the Good Samaritan.
A church in the border town of San Luis, Arizona, is suing the city government after its pastor was fined for distributing food on church property. The Gethsemani Baptist Church argues in a new federal lawsuit that those fines are part of a campaign of "harassment and intimidation" officials are waging against the church's legal, longstanding food ministry.
"This has been a vital ministry helping people, ranging from people crossing the border to people as far as away as Tucson and food pantries around the area that rely on this church to feed people," says Jeremy Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute, which is representing Gethsemani Baptist Church.
Gethsemani Baptist Church, and its pastor Jose Manuel Castro, have been distributing food, clothing, and other essential items to the poor, for over two decades from its property a few blocks from the U.S.-Mexico border.
For almost all that time, the city government was actively supportive of the church's ministry, according to its lawsuit. The city allowed the church to store food in a city-owned warehouse, and local elected officials participated in its food drives.
Since a 2012 zoning code update, the church's operation of a food ministry—which included receiving, storing, and distributing food and hot meals—in a residential area was considered a "legal non-conforming use" by the city.
Dys says the city's amicable relationship with the church ended with the election of San Luis Mayor Nieves Riedel, a named co-defendant in the lawsuit, in late 2022.
Riedel did not respond to Reason's emailed request for comment.
Following her election, the mayor told the church they could no longer store food at a city-owned warehouse nor use the public park across the street from the church to distribute food, per the lawsuit.
Throughout 2023, the church also received letters from the city saying that it couldn't accept semi-truck deliveries on its property and that its storage and distribution of food on-site changed the character of its food ministry from a legal, non-conforming use into an illegal zoning violation.
To appease the city, the church's pastor agreed to minimize the storage of food at the church and to have semi-truck food deliveries brought to a separate property, where they'd then be transferred to a smaller trailer and brought to the church.
Nevertheless, the city continued to assert that the church's food ministry was a zoning code violation. In February, Castro was twice cited by city officials. In the first incident, he received a ticket for handing out food to a crowd of ten people on the church property.
In the second incident, he was ticketed when a semi-truck driver mistakenly arrived at the church with a food delivery. The church's lawsuit claims that the driver was only there for a few minutes before Castro directed him to take the delivery to the off-site location. The next day, a city code enforcer came to the church and ticketed Castro for the incident.
After the second violation, the church stopped its food ministry completely. Its lawsuit notes that a third zoning violation would technically be a misdemeanor that would expose Castro to potential jail time. Already, the first two violations have netted the church $4,000 in fines.
The church's lawsuit accuses the city of San Luis, Riedel, and several other individual city officials, of violating the Church's First Amendment right to free exercise and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)—which limits the kinds of zoning laws that localities can enforce against religious organizations.
Reason has covered a number of cases where churches' charitable missions have been hamstrung by local zoning regulations and burdensome approval processes.
"The city has a specific target on the back of pastor Castro, trying to intimidate him into submission for engaging in otherwise protected activity. That's the kind of behavior the First Amendment and federal law stand against," says Dys.
Speaking of trying old ideas again, progressive lawmakers, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), have reintroduced their Green New Deal for Public Housing Act.
According to a press release, the bill would spend between $162 to $234 billion on public housing initiatives. That would include converting existing, aging public housing stock into all-electric, "climate resilient," renewable energy-generating complexes. All this work would be done with unionized labor (naturally).
The bill would also repeal a longstanding policy that prevents the federal government from building more public housing.
"We have seen our counterparts, everywhere from Vienna to Singapore, engage in truly revolutionary public and social housing policies," Ocasio-Cortez told Politico. "And the stigma around public housing has prevented everyday Americans from understanding that we can actually really have incredible housing in the United States under a public model."
Vienna's extensive stock of publicly owned, mixed-income housing developments is a lodestar for left-wing housing activists and policymakers. Even there, public housing units are suffering from deteriorating quality, long waitlists, and funding shortfalls.
In Ocasio-Cortez's own backyard, the U.S. Department of Justice just indicted dozens of public housing employees for allegedly accepting bribes and extorting contractors for smaller repair jobs. This endemic corruption might be adding to the public housing stigma the congresswoman complains about. Certainly, it would be an issue to address before funneling billions of more dollars to the same public housing agencies for green energy upgrades.
California's "builder's remedy"—a weapon of last resort to get housing built in anti-development jurisdictions—just won a major legal victory.
The builder's remedy is a longstanding provision of state law that allows developers to build residential projects of theoretically unlimited density in communities that don't have a state-approved housing plan.
Provided a proposed "builder's remedy" project contains a set number of below-market-rate units, cities can't deny them permits, even if the project doesn't comply with local zoning standards.
Until recently, no one had gotten a builder's remedy project approved. Indeed, prior to a few years ago, few had ever been proposed. One reason for that was that cities can deploy all sorts of procedural tricks to stop builder's remedy projects.
Witness the small Los Angeles community of La Cañada Flintridge, which was refusing to process a developer's builder's remedy project—an 80-unit apartment development on the site of a former church—because it didn't comply with the city's zoning code.
As mentioned, the builder's remedy allows developers to ignore local zoning codes. La Cañada Flintridge tried to argue that they weren't denying the developer's application for violating the zoning code, they were merely refusing to process the application as incomplete because it didn't comply with the local zoning code.
A Los Angeles Superior Court rejected that argument last week, ruling that the city had unlawfully disapproved the builder's remedy project.
"By holding that Builder's Remedy projects cannot simply be defeated by procedural loophole, the court's ruling ensures that Builder's Remedy remains a meaningful and impactful consequence," reads a write-up of the decision by attorneys with the firm Holland & Knight (which litigated the case).
The post Zoning Versus the Good Samaritan. Again. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the latest of a series of challenges by Pima County politicians to Arizona's relatively robust protections for self-defense rights, county supervisors earlier this month voted to penalize gun owners who don't quickly report the loss or theft of a firearm to police. Each violation would draw a potential fine of $1,000, seemingly putting the county once again on a collision course with Arizona law, which bars localities from imposing firearms regulations more restrictive than those enacted by the state.
"Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, it is unlawful for any person to fail to report to a local law enforcement agency the knowing loss or theft of a firearm," reads the ordinance proposed by District 1 Supervisor Rex Scott after two pages of throat-clearing justification for the legislation, mostly involving thwarting access to guns by people legally barred from ownership. "The report of a loss or theft of a firearm pursuant to section A must be made in the jurisdiction in which the loss or theft occurred and within forty-eight hours of the time the person knew or reasonably should have known that the firearm had been lost or stolen."
The text originally provided for a fine of "$300.00 for each violation," but that was changed to "up to $1,000 for each violation" on the advice of County Attorney Laura Conover. The revision seems to put the ordinance, which passed by a 4–1 vote, even more at odds with state law than it already was.
"A political subdivision of this state shall not enact any rule or ordinance that relates to firearms and is more prohibitive than or that has a penalty that is greater than any state law penalty," according to statutes. "A political subdivision's rule or ordinance that relates to firearms and that is inconsistent with or more restrictive than state law, whether enacted before or after July 29, 2010, is null and void."
On its face, that clearly preempts Pima County's efforts. But the county, and its seat of Tucson, have a history of authoritarian windmill-tilting attacks on Arizonans' self-defense rights.
"The city of Tucson and the state of Arizona are once again at odds on how to regulate the sale and use of firearms," the Arizona Daily Star's Kathryn Palmer reported in 2021. "The city has long attempted to enforce gun laws stricter than the state's, which have included mandating background checks for guns purchased on city property and destroying seized firearms."
That year's challenge was a symbolic declaration that the city won't abide by the state's status as a Second Amendment sanctuary—a matter to be tested if the federal government tries to impose gun restrictions state officials refuse to enforce. But the issue was more serious in 2017 when the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Tucson couldn't implement an illegal scheme for the destruction of confiscated weapons when state law generally requires their sale. Faced with the loss of tens of millions of dollars in state-shared revenue as a penalty, the city ended its program.
In 2013, two Tucson firearms laws, including one requiring people to report the loss or theft of a gun or suffer penalties, were ruled unenforceable by then-Attorney General Tom Horne (now the Superintendent of Public Instruction).
"Horne said Tucson cannot require people to report the loss or theft of a gun to police because it relates to the possession or transfer of firearms," Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services reported at the time. "And Horne said the $100 civil penalty for failing to report a missing gun conflicts with another law that bars gun ordinances that have a penalty greater than what exists in state law."
That law so closely resembled the new Pima County ordinance that it would seem destined for the same fate. I reached out to Supervisor Scott for comment as to why he thought his legislation might survive challenge (I also contacted the County Attorney's Office which had not responded as of press time.); Scott's office responded with a copy of the passed law, presumably to let it speak for itself.
"Supervisor Scott is right, the law does speak for itself," Media Coordinator Charles Heller of the Arizona Citizens Defense League (AzCDL), which advocates for self-defense rights, told me (full disclosure: I'm a member). "It speaks to deprivation of civil rights under color of law."
Heller went on to detail the decades-old history of largely unsuccessful Tucson-based efforts to restrict Arizonans' freedom to own and use firearms, dating long before the examples cited above. He predicted a brief lifespan for the Pima ordinance. Already, people are lining up to make that span as short as possible, as was predicted by District 4 Supervisor Steve Christy, the sole vote against the measure.
The new Pima County firearms "ordinance directly conflicts with at least two provisions of state law," warns a March 18 letter to the Board of Supervisors from the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, which represents the AzCDL in this matter.
"Indeed, the Arizona Attorney General's Office previously issued an Opinion finding nearly identical provisions of a City of Tucson Ordinance unlawful," the letter continues, with reference to the 2013 opinion by then-Attorney General Horne. "Based on the foregoing, we demand that the Board immediately repeal Ordinance 2024-2, no later than at its April 2, 2024 meeting. If the ordinance is not repealed by that date, we will seek all legal remedies available to our clients."
It's worth noting that it's unclear how Pima County would enforce this ordinance against those who don't report lost and stolen firearms. Arizona doesn't have firearms registration, which is specifically prohibited by state law. That means Pima County is unlikely to be able to link recovered firearms to their source unless owners supply descriptions and serial numbers when reporting them missing. That's required by the ordinance, but it's a step that would likely be taken by any honest owners seeking the return of property—unless, of course, they're worried that gun-phobic authorities might penalize them for not making a report quickly enough under some dishonestly determined 48-hour timeframe.
The ordinance has the very real potential to discourage reporting of missing and stolen guns by owners skeptical of county officials' intentions.
Hopefully, that will remain an unexplored unintended consequence of the law when it meets the same fate as so many of its predecessors that also conflicted with Arizona protections for self-defense rights.
The post Arizona County Again Defies State Protections for Self-Defense Rights appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>American chipmaker Intel will receive up to $19 billion in corporate welfare, the White House announced Wednesday, making it likely to be the largest recipient of taxpayer-funded aid intended to boost semiconductor manufacturing.
President Joe Biden is expected to make a formal announcement of the handout later today during a campaign stop at Intel's headquarters in Chandler, Arizona. In a statement, the White House said the subsidies would include $8.5 billion in direct grants to Intel, which will also have access to $11 billion in federal loans. For all that money, Intel is expected to create 30,000 jobs.
In other words, taxpayers will pony up over $283,000 per job created—and that's counting only the $8.5 billion in direct payments to the company.
The math gets even worse if you read Intel's press release, which clarifies that 20,000 of those 30,000 new jobs will be temporary construction jobs connected to building new facilities in four states.
But the real kicker is the fact that Intel was already planning to build those facilities—which makes sense, because there is huge demand for semiconductors and the market is growing increasingly concerned about the fact that so many of the world's high-end chips are made in Taiwan and are thus under constant threat from China. According to Intel, the federal government's handout "supports Intel's previously announced plans to invest more than $100 billion in the U.S. over five years to expand U.S. chipmaking capacity."
To sum up: The federal government is spending heavily to subsidize a successful, growing industry, is asking taxpayers to foot part of the bill for investments that the private sector was already funding, and is not spending the money in a particularly efficient way. Make it make sense!
Unfortunately, this is likely only the start. The Biden administration still has $39 billion in CHIPS Act subsidies to distribute in the coming months, according to The New York Times. Even before that money is out the door—and long before anyone has had a chance to measure how effective the spending was—administration officials and top executives at chip-making companies agree that Congress should pass another round of subsidies.
"I do think we'll need at least a CHIPS 2 to finish that job," Patrick Gelsinger, Intel's chief executive, told the Times this week, echoing comments made last month by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is overseeing the distribution of this corporate welfare.
Even if the semiconductor industry needed government handouts—which, again, it clearly does not—directly subsidizing certain projects and companies would be a poor way to go about it.
For evidence, check out a new paper from Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation (and former Reason intern), that contrasts the approaches taken by the CHIPs Act vs. the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by then-President Donald Trump. By reducing corporate taxes and enacting a series of supply-side reforms, Muresianu concludes, the Trump tax cuts "caused a substantial increase in investment."
"In contrast," he writes, the targeted subsidies included in the CHIPs Act "have not led to a broad increase in private investment outside of subsidized sectors."
At National Review, Dominic Pino explains why this distinction matters. "Supply-side orthodoxy and industrial policy often have a similar goal: to increase capital investment. But they go about pursuing that goal in very different ways." Neutral reforms like tax cuts reduce the cost of capital investments and allow private markets to decide how best to allocate new investments.
On the other hand, industrial policies like the grants to Intel "requires a series of bank shots," Pino writes. The government has to pick which sector of the economy to subsidize and has to choose specific winners and losers within that sector, of course. Then, it also has to decide how much to invest in each company and make sure those subsidies aren't displacing private investments—and it has to do all of that "in the absence of reliable price signals and persist through relentless pressure from advocacy groups."
Of course, specific subsidies for certain companies create something that broader reforms for the economy do not: the chance for the president to stand in front of a construction site and take credit for the jobs being created there.
Even if they are tremendously costly to the taxpayers. And even if those jobs were going to be created anyway.
The post Federal Handout to Intel Will Cost $283,000 Per Job, and That's Being Generous appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Happy Tuesday and welcome to yet another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include:
But first, our lead story about the darker side of housing bipartisanship. As most of the coverage of the 2024 YIMBYtown conference detailed, housing is one of those issues where Republicans and Democrats—while generally more polarized than ever—can still work across the aisle to pass zoning reform.
The flip side of this dynamic is that Republicans and Democrats work against their own co-partisans to undermine zoning reform. For an example of this, witness what happened in Arizona yesterday.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has earned herself a place in housing history/infamy by vetoing H.B. 2570, aka the Arizona Starter Homes Act, on Monday. Hers is the first gubernatorial veto of a major YIMBY bill.
The bill aimed to make smaller, owner-occupied housing easier to build by limiting local governments' abilities to ban smaller homes, require new housing to sit on larger lots, enforce purely aesthetic design requirements, force new housing to be covered by homeowners' associations (HOAs), or mandate community amenities that would require an HOA to manage.
H.B. 2570's deregulatory means in the service of more traditionally liberal ends of housing affordability produced unusually bipartisan votes in the Arizona House and Senate, with Republicans and Democrats pretty evenly represented in both the 'yes' and 'no' columns.
"We had very progressives like myself partnering with very strong conservatives, who saw this as a property rights issue, whereas people like myself look at it as a basic equal opportunity issue," Rep. Analise Ortiz (D–Glendale) told Reason last week.
A majority of legislators from her own party voting in favor of the Starter Homes Act wasn't enough to bring Hobbs around.
"This is unprecedented legislation that would put Arizonans at the center of a housing reform experiment with unclear outcomes," said the governor in a veto statement. "This expansive bill is a step too far and I know we can strike a better balance."
Hobbs' veto statement cited only the opposition of the U.S. Department of Defense—which complained the bill didn't exempt areas around military bases—and firefighters, who said limitations on local setbacks regulations and required amenities like swimming pools could increase fire hazards. (The Starter Homes Act bill expressly protects local health and safety regulations.)
Conspicuously, the governor did not mention the primary organized opposition to the Starter Homes Act: Arizona's cities.
As Reason reported last week, Arizona's influential League of Cities and Towns—a publicly funded association of municipalities that lobbies the state legislature—was dead set against the bill from the beginning. The league had refused to negotiate on it or propose amendments.
After the bill passed, Hobbs told reporters that she was undecided on the bill and that she would have preferred housing bills that also have the support of local governments.
In Arizona, Democrats have long been the party of local control.
As the usual minority party in control of the state's largest city governments, Arizona Democrats have been constantly fending off Republican efforts to preempt local, liberal regulations and taxes. Of all the elements of local control, cities are the most jealous guardians of their land-use powers.
The rising salience of housing has upset this dynamic somewhat. Among the champions of H.B. 2570 were a number of progressive Democrat lawmakers. They're now complaining about the influence cities are wielding in the legislature.
"Cities and their lobbyists cannot continue to be the only barrier to statewide zoning reform solely to retain power and uphold policy decisions that have been historically detrimental to so many, especially communities like mine," said Sen. Anna Hernandez (D–Phoenix).
My statement on the veto of the Arizona Starter Homes Act, HB2570. https://t.co/pm35LPzEtY pic.twitter.com/CkrsnT9IDz
— Senator Anna Hernandez (@AnnaHernandezAZ) March 18, 2024
An irony of the bipartisan nature of housing politics is that it might be too bipartisan. Conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats both support zoning reform. In the Legislature, they can form alliances to get bills passed. But come election day, they're still going to vote like conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats.
If Hobbs' calculation is that she can upset YIMBY Democrats while still keeping their votes, she might not be wrong.
As one former Arizona Democrat lawmaker and YIMBY activist told The Atlantic's Jerusalem Demsas for a recent article, "If [Hobbs] ended up being the biggest NIMBY in our state, I'd still vote for her reelection because zoning, even though I'm one of the biggest zoning-reform advocates in the state…still doesn't rise high enough for me to flip my vote."
In her veto letter, Hobbs tries to have it both ways on housing. She says she's "supportive" of the Legislature's ongoing "efforts" to find a compromise on other housing bills that would liberalize accessory dwelling unit laws, all for residential redevelopment of commercial properties, and the like. She also says that "the status quo is not acceptable."
Nevertheless, her veto preserves a status quo that increasing numbers of Republicans and Democrats find untenable.
When a politician says they love free markets, you always know a "but" is coming.
Such was the case with Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who said on X that he "strongly supports free markets. But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home."
I strongly support free markets.
But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home.
This must be added to the legislative agenda to protect Texas families. https://t.co/VBs6Rluh3K
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) March 15, 2024
Abbott was quote tweeting a profanity-laced TikTok video in which a woman claims that "private equity firms purchased 44 percent of single-family homes in America."
"This must be added to the legislative agenda to protect Texas families," said Abbott. No one said politics in the 21st Century would be uninteresting.
Cracking down on corporate home ownership has to date been mostly a cause of left-wing politicians, and heterodox right-wingers like U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio). They blame institutional investors for driving up the prices of single-family homes that could have been purchased by individual families who, the story goes, are now stuck perpetually in the renting market.
In fact, the woman in the TikTok video didn't quite have all her facts straight.
Writing over at Housing Wire, Logan Moshtashami cites data from Freddie Mac showing that large corporate purchasers who bought 100 or more homes in the last year make up about 2.5 percent of home sales. In the second quarter of 2023, very large landlords owning over 1,000 homes purchased just .4 percent of single-family homes.
Reading is a good thing folks ???????? https://t.co/IYogNbORuD pic.twitter.com/bD0nSCLJXG
— Logan Mohtashami (@LoganMohtashami) March 15, 2024
Investor-purchased homes have made up between 20 and 30 percent of home sales going back to the start of the century, but the vast majority of these investors are mom-and-pop landlords who own under 10 properties.
This is a far cry from BlackRock buying up all the homes. While a growing (apparently bipartisan) collection of politicians likes to complain about this phenomenon, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Renters who either don't qualify for financing or who aren't looking to buy can still have access to single-family housing by renting it from an investor-owner. Research shows that restrictions on investor-owned housing result in lower-income renters being excluded from single-family neighborhoods.
One way to boost homeownership would be to legalize the production of smaller starter homes. A bill that would have done just that happened to pass in Arizona. We know how that turned out.
A wave of in-migration to booming Austin, Texas, saw home prices, rents, and incomes increase. This has been followed by a rash of new home and apartment construction, which is now pulling housing prices back down.
Overall, rents are down 7 percent this year, according to Apartment List data culled by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal gives this all a somewhat negative framing, describing a "glut" of luxury apartments and single-family homes selling at a loss.
It's also yet more proof that the basic supply and demand story continues to be true, even for housing. Despite some important zoning reforms, Austin is far from a YIMBY paradise. Nevertheless, development is a lot less restricted there than in other high-cost "superstar" cities.
As a result, new construction in the city is able to partially accommodate new demand and moderate price spikes.
The Texas-sized edition of Rent Free earlier this month covered some of the ways that the city and the state could liberalize development even more to boost construction and bring prices down.
Sacramento, California, is trying out a novel approach to the city's homelessness crisis: leasing public land to an officially sanctioned homeless encampment. CalMatters reports:
When Sacramento changed its plan to demolish a homeless encampment on a vacant lot on Colfax Street, instead offering the homeless occupants a lease, activists and camp residents celebrated it as a win.
The first-of-its-kind deal, which allows the camp to remain in place and govern itself without city interference, was held up as a model Sacramento could replicate at future sites.
It's produced mixed results. Those who didn't like the encampment's presence haven't been mollified. Many of the encampment residents complain of a lack of city-provided services.
Homeless advocates still argue the city lease allows people with nowhere else to go some level of stability and sanctuary, and makes it easier for homeless service providers to maintain contact with the people they're trying to help.
The experiment appears to be the socialist version of the "homeless homesteading" I proposed last year. The idea was to give the homeless title to public land they already occupy. Once they owned the land, the homeless could go about improving homes on-site. If their presence continued to produce nuisances, nearby property owners could purchase the land from them. Encampment residents could use the proceeds of the sale to buy more traditional housing.
It's an "off the wall" idea, to be sure. By only leasing the land to the homeless, Sacramento is short-circuiting the Coasian bargaining that promised the biggest benefits of homeless homesteading.
this is so funny.
rich liberals in Vancouver who have been protesting for land be returned to Indigenous people are now upset because one of the city's last plots of underdeveloped land was sold to local tribes and they're razing it to build an ultra-high density condo project. pic.twitter.com/OnhP5ht77w
— pagliacci the hated ???? (@Slatzism) March 14, 2024
On the other hand, all these cities are run by Dems. The existing housing power combo seems to be a Dem-run city in a GOP-run state, where everyone is at least minimally interested in growth. https://t.co/6fLsGTjjZi
— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) March 18, 2024
The post The Dark Side of Housing Bipartisanship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free, where we cover the trials and tribulations of YIMBY reforms. This week's stories include:
But first! A word about this week's lead story.
Longtime followers of YIMBY/NIMBY battles will recall the case of San Francisco man Robert Tillman trying to redevelop his laundromat over the objections of activists who wanted to landmark the allegedly historic structure. Amazingly, another city is now wrestling with whether to landmark its own historic laundry.
The city of Phoenix is in the process of landmarking an old, industrial laundry complex to protect its wooden ceiling architecture, over the objections of the property owners who say bringing the 100-year-old buildings up to code would cost millions and legally preserving the structures would destroy the value of the land.
"We've never asked for any tax abatements, we never asked for asked for historical [landmarking], we never wanted it registered," says Marylin Milum who, along with her husband Craig, has been trying to demolish the old buildings and sell off the property to a developer. "This is our retirement."
When the Milum family acquired the property in the 1950s, a commercial laundry had already operated on the site for 30 years, reports The Real Deal. The septuagenarian Milums closed down the laundry on-site in 2020, around the time when they decided they wanted to sell the land.
In October 2023, the couple applied for demolition permits to raze the laundry buildings, which they hoped would make the site more attractive to a developer-buyer.
As a pro forma part of reviewing the demolition permit of such an old building, Phoenix Historic Preservation staff researched the property and found it an obvious candidate for historic preservation.
City reports praise the buildings' "outstanding" 20th-century brick commercial architecture, "Streamline Moderne" design, and, particularly, its vaulted lamella roofs as architectural features worth preserving.
The fact that a laundry has operated on the site for roughly a century connects the buildings to the theme of early Phoenix commerce, which also makes it a good candidate for preservation, says Helena Ruter, a historic preservation officer with the city.
In November, the city's Historic Preservation Commission initiated the process of applying historic preservation zoning protections to the property. That same month, they also denied the Milums' demolition permit applications.
The Milums appealed that denial, claiming an economic hardship.
Letters submitted to city preservation officers by the Milums' real estate broker cite an engineer who'd surveyed the property quote of $10 million as the cost it would take to bring the laundry buildings up to code.
The broker also says that the chance that the structures would be historically preserved has made the building impossible to sell, even at a steep discount, writing in one letter that "at this moment and certainly for the foreseeable future, we are finding that there is not any interested parties at any price."
The Historic Preservation Commission and the City Council both rejected the couple's appeals.
The aggregate, rough cost estimates and insurance bills the Milums produced didn't provide the kind of detail the city required to grant an exemption, says Ruter.
The Milums complain that the expense of getting itemized costs of what it would take to repair their buildings was a major expense by themselves.
"Certainly, I understand the Milums' reticence to hire someone to do the analysis that would be required to make that [economic hardship] argument. Not having that documentation left the hearing bodies without the basis for making that determination," Ruter tells Reason, saying this is "a situation of not providing in the documentation."
The Milums' appeals of their rejected demolition permits are now exhausted. The city council will hold a hearing on rezoning the property to include historic preservation protections in May.
The couple tells Reason they are considering a lawsuit to challenge any landmarking of their property. If the city wants to preserve the property so badly, they say, they could buy it.
"This isn't equitable. This is our property," says Marylin. "We keep saying [the city] can buy it from us, and they have no interest."
This past Wednesday, the Arizona Senate voted H.B. 2570—otherwise known as the Arizona Starter Homes Act—which preempts a long list of local regulations on new single-family homes.
The bill would ban localities from requiring new housing to be covered by homeowners' associations (HOA), as well as any shared amenities that would require an HOA. Cities would also be unable to enforce purely aesthetic design features. Larger cities would be prohibited from requiring that new single-family subdivisions have minimum lot sizes larger than 1,500 square feet or setbacks of more than five feet.
All told, it's a pretty far-reaching YIMBY reform aimed at making new, single-family housing easier and cheaper to build. The bill's prime sponsor was the House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci (R–Lake Havasu), but progressive Democrats championed them throughout the process.
"It provides the opportunity for folks to have more choices for the kinds of housing that meet their needs," says Kirin Goff of the Arizona Neighborhood Project, which drafted the bill.
The House and Senate votes passing the bill were both bipartisan, with the "yes" and "no" sides including Republicans and Democrats. It's an unusual coalition of votes in Arizona's otherwise polarized, Republican-controlled Legislature.
"We had very progressives like myself partnering with very strong conservatives, who saw this as a proper rights issue, whereas people like myself look at it as a basic equal opportunity issue," says Rep. Analise Ortiz (D–Glendale).
The primary opposition came from local governments whose regulatory powers are being preempted and the Arizona League of Cities and Towns, a taxpayer-funded association representing municipal governments in the Legislature.
Their opposition is now leaving the bill's fate in question as it goes to Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.
Traditionally, state preemption laws have been a tool used by the state's dominant Republicans to override liberal regulations passed by Democratic-controlled cities. If Hobbs were to sign the bill, she would upset a traditional Arizona Democratic base of support.
Hobbs herself told The Center Square that she's undecided on whether she will sign the bill, saying that she would have preferred any housing bill have resulted from a compromise with local jurisdictions.
Yet the League of Cities and Towns has been dead-set against H.B. 2570 from day one. Ortiz tells Reason that the League refused to negotiate on the bill while it was working its way through the legislature and ignored lawmakers who proactively reached out about proposed amendments they might have.
"I hope the governor will stay true to her campaign promise to deliver on housing solutions by signing this bill," says Ortiz.
On Monday, President Joe Biden spoke at the National League of Cities conference in Washington, D.C. The president's remarks were mostly a rehash of his State of the Union address last week.
State-level leagues of cities are typically stalwart opponents of any state legislation that puts limits on cities' abilities to restrict housing production however they please.
Biden deserves some credit then for striking a YIMBY note in the housing portion of his speech, when he said, "The bottom line is we have to build, build, build. That's how we bring housing costs down for good."
As far as rhetoric goes, the president is on point when he identifies a dearth of housing supply as the reason for the country's high housing costs and high rates of homelessness.
On actual policy, the administration's proposals leave a lot to be desired. At the League conference, Biden namechecked creating tax credits for homebuyers, cracking down on landlords' "price-fixing" through the use of third-party algorithms that recommend rent levels, and cutting "red tape on federal housing financing programs."
A factsheet released by the White House Monday also highlighted his administration's call to increase funding for a recently created grant program that is supposed to pay localities that liberalize their zoning laws.
The demand-side incentives Biden is proposing, like mortgage tax credits, could be counterproductive by increasing buyers' demand for supply-constrained housing. The odds are that the subsidy will just get eaten up by higher home costs.
I've argued before that the various attempts the White House has made to incentivize zoning reform from Washington are also poorly designed for that purpose. Funding increases won't solve that problem.
A couple of weeks ago, Rent Free covered the voters of Milton, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston, voting to reject zoning changes that would have allowed multi-family housing near the town's train stations.
That upzoning is a requirement of the state's MBTA Communities Law, which mandates that municipalities across the state allow apartments near transit stops. Most cities have been quietly complying. But in Milton, anti-density activists opted for rebellion instead.
In the run-up of the vote, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell warned Milton voters the town could face legal consequences if they approved the repeal of the zoning changes. They did, and now it is.
Campbell's lawsuit asks for an injunction requiring the town to pass the required zoning changes. If the town ignores that injunction, Campbell's lawsuit asks the courts to prevent Milton from enforcing any zoning restrictions that don't comply with the MBTA Communities Law.
The post Does This Laundry Look 'Historic' to You? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Republican lawmakers in Arizona are advancing a collection of bills targeting illegal immigrants and their activities in the state. One in particular, House Concurrent Resolution (HRC) 2060, has the potential to disrupt all manner of peaceful economic interactions.
Arizona law requires that all employers use the federal E-Verify program to ensure that hired employees are eligible to work in the United States. HCR 2060 would add to existing requirements by mandating that employers use E-Verify to check the legal status of subcontractors and independent contractors. Noncompliant employers could face felony charges and fines of $10,000 per undocumented employee.
HCR 2060 has already passed the Arizona House. If it passes the Senate, it will appear on the ballot in November. And though its sponsor, House Speaker Ben Toma (R–Glendale), says the proposal would keep "Arizona from becoming like California" and stop illegal immigrants from "tak[ing] advantage of Americans," plenty of Arizonans are concerned about its economic consequences.
That includes over 100 Arizona business, faith, and community representatives, who charged in an open letter to state politicians that the "anti-immigrant proposals" being considered by the Legislature "will cause unnecessary disruption to the workforce." Given that "Arizona currently only has 71 available workers for every 100 open jobs," the letter calls for elected officials "to support legal work permits for long-term immigrant contributors" rather than participating in "political gamesmanship."
For all the support E-Verify receives from state and national politicians, the employment verification system has many downsides. It's costly (especially for small businesses), it negatively affects lower-skilled native-born workers, and it's easily gamed. Rather than just impacting undocumented immigrants who want to work, it punishes employers for consensual hiring practices and forces native-born workers to get yet another permission slip to do their jobs and live their lives.
"Nationwide, the surge of E-Verify queries has not coincided with any significant reduction in the number of illegal workers," wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in 2019. "From 2007 to 2016, the number of illegal workers hovered around 8 million, even as the number of E-Verify queries increased tenfold….The only independent audit of the E-Verify system in 2012 concluded that half of all illegal workers run through the system evaded detection, primarily by borrowing the identification of legal workers."
"The E-Verify program has made significant improvements over the years," says Sam Peak, senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian advocacy group. "Despite this, making it mandatory for more people likely exposes them to many uncertainties that could disrupt the hiring process."
HCR 2060's vague language might also leave the door open for Arizonans to face legal consequences, perhaps unknowingly, if the businesses they patronize don't comply with E-Verify mandates. According to the resolution text, any person who "commits obstruction of the legal duty to use E-Verify," including acts "in association with any person who has the intent to obstruct, impair or hinder any person from using the E-Verify program as required by law," is "guilty of a class 6 felony."
What exactly the phrase in association with means is not clear. "What happens if a household unknowingly hires a roofing company that does not use E-Verify?" asks Peak.*
Mandating E-Verify for more Arizona workers will inevitably lead to headaches and increased compliance costs for employers and consumers. Voters would do well to remember those consequences if HCR 2060 appears on the ballot in November.
*CORRECTION: This quote has been updated to correct a mistyped word in the source's comment.
The post Arizona Is Weighing Nonsensical New E-Verify Measures appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before the start of the state legislative session in January, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, proposed a plan to heavily regulate the state's universal education savings account (ESA) program. Her proposal aims to make private schools comply with some of the same standards adhered to by public schools, including requiring that private school teachers meet "minimum education requirements" before teaching ESA students and that private schools provide special education students the same services they had received in public schools. Additionally, she wants to require that students attend public schools for 100 days before receiving an ESA and for the state to audit expenditures at choice-participating private schools.
Hobbs's plan is an attempt to stifle Arizona's booming ESA program and bureaucratize private schools into operating much like the public schools that ESA students already opted out of. It also comes on the heels of a failed attempt to repeal the state's ESA program last year. Like last year, the state's Republican-controlled legislature is unlikely to go along with her measures and already killed one of the bills sponsored by Hobbs allies before it made it to committee in February.
Hobbs will find it difficult to rein in school choice in Arizona—not just because so many families are benefiting from it, but students also made impressive academic improvements while choice expanded over the past two decades.
National and state level trends in student achievement, public school staffing, and education funding for all 50 states are detailed in Public Education at a Crossroads, a new study by the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this magazine). Because of lags in when the federal data are published, the paper only covers trends prior to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2003–2019, Arizona students made substantial gains across the board on student achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), better known as the Nation's Report Card. Across fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP scores for reading and math, Arizona ranks in the top ten in achievement growth when compared to other states, except for fourth-grade math scores for low-income students, where it ranks 14th. Fourth-grade scores for reading and math grew by 7 and 9 points, respectively. Eighth-grade scores on reading and math improved by 4 and 9 points.
The NAEP improvements are even more pronounced for low-income students. For Arizona students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, fourth-grade reading and math scores grew by 8 and 9 points, respectively, and eighth-grade reading and math scores grew by 7 and 12 points.
Arizona also managed to improve student achievement while eschewing the conventional demands for more money and smaller class sizes in public schools. In 2002–2020, per-student revenues for public education only grew in inflation-adjusted terms from $10,353 to $10,790, a 4.2 percent increase that ranks the state 47th nationally in per-student revenue growth. Nor has the state prioritized reducing class sizes or adding support staff: Despite enrollment growth of 25 percent in 2002–2020, Arizona's public school staff only grew by 13.7 percent over the same timeframe. By comparison, public schools nationwide added staff at more than twice the rate of student enrollment growth.
Instead, Arizona spent the past few decades extending a breadth of education options to families. It was an early adopter of charter schools and public school open enrollment in 1994. The state also established the nation's first tax credit scholarship program in 1997 and the nation's first ESA program in 2011. Beginning in 2022, Arizona's ESA program, which was initially only available for students with disabilities, expanded to universal student eligibility and now serves over 75,000 students. Charter schools currently serve more than 20 percent of the state's public school population, a larger proportion than any other state.
Over this period, educational approaches that would be considered experimental in other states have matured and found comfortable niches in Arizona. Arizona Autism Charter Schools, currently with four campuses, specialize in serving kids with autism spectrum disorder and have been operating since 2013. Many of the state's other well-established charters have diverse instructional approaches including Montessori, STEM-focused, and classical education. There's even an environmental sustainability focused charter school for Navajo children in rural Arizona. Prenda, the popular microschool management platform, supports 149 private and charter-partnered microschools in Arizona. In Phoenix, the Black Mothers Forum adapted Prenda's model to better fit the needs of black families early in the pandemic.
To be sure, Arizona students don't fare as well in absolute NAEP rankings. For instance, the state's fourth-graders rank 44th and 36th nationally in overall reading and math scores. But it's hard to know the extent to which greater investments in public education would have led to better outcome growth in Arizona. Consider New York, which led the nation in per-student revenue growth in 2002–2020—increasing from $18,054 to $30,723, or 70.2 percent. Despite those massive funding increases, New York students made almost no NAEP gains over that period. In fact, Arizona's low-income students outscore New York's low-income students in fourth- and eighth-grade math.
The fact that students have gained academic ground in Arizona's choice-rich, fiscally conservative context cuts against Hobbs's attempt to hamper the state's ESA program. Parents in the Grand Canyon state have already proven themselves capable of holding schools accountable without her help.
The post Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs Wants To Hobble School Choice, Despite Years of Student Achievement Gains appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In December, former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey received the Savas Award for Privatization, given annually to someone for innovation in the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. The award is given by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason. Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Ducey in December to talk about school choice, how to cut budgets, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.
Q: What is it about Arizona that seems to generate heterodox or unorthodox politicians?
A: Maybe the fact that we're the youngest state in the lower 48, that we're a place where so many people came to live. So few people that are there today were actually born there. People make that decision. There's something about the West and the spirit of Barry Goldwater, it brings an independent-mindedness to it.
Q: In the modern GOP, you get a lot of emphasis on tax cutting and a lot less on the reduction of spending or balancing the budget. Do you think there's a way to reconnect those two ideas in American political rhetoric or voters' minds?
A: Well, Katherine, I think you live here in Washington, D.C., and that's what you are responding to as to how the Republicans in this town behave. You see the Democrats tax and spend. You see the Republicans in Washington, D.C., cut taxes and borrow. Governors don't get to print money and there's no appetite to borrow money except in the worst of a crisis. So you really do have to find a way to shrink your government.
I'm proud of the growth and attractiveness of Arizona. We have 400,000 additional people in Arizona vs. the day that I came into office. But our state government is smaller. We were actually able to shrink the footprint of our state government, the number of people inside the state government, the number of buildings, and real estate holdings of the state government.
Q: What was the state of play on school choice in Arizona when you came in, and what did it look like when you left?
A: Arizona has always been very good on school choice, and it's something that I believe in. I stood on the shoulders of giants like Lisa Graham Keegan and Fife Symington. At the state level, we have 525 schools of choice in Arizona, charter schools, [which are] public schools with private management. If you take those schools, that's the No. 1 state in the nation for accomplishment on math, reading, and science. We did a lot to grow that model. The BASIS Schools system and Great Hearts were both founded in Arizona. Part of what animated my run for governor in 2014 was universal school choice. The Milton Friedman idea that he shared on Free to Choose is something that took me all eight years of my governorship to accomplish.
Q: And what about education savings accounts, which are essentially vouchers?
A: Milton Friedman also said in a crisis, people will look for the ideas that are lying around. And the crisis that came was COVID, and parents were able to see what their kids were being taught or not taught and the level of rigor and expectation from the public schools. They also saw that the charter schools opened and the Catholic schools opened and many of the largest public districts chose to stay closed for nearly two years, even when the government was telling them to open. So we were able to pass universal educational savings accounts. And every child in the state of Arizona is able to take a large portion of their tax dollars and go wherever they would like to school, including homeschool, microschool, or a new school. We were able to move the bar to the highest rung. Nine other states have since followed with universal school choice. Texas and Tennessee are on the one-yard line.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Doug Ducey on Budget Cuts, School Choice, and Arizona's Weird Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In Arizona, citizens can still lose their houses over minuscule tax bills, despite a unanimous 2023 Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to paralyze the practice nationwide.
A disturbing chasm is growing between the letter of the law and the spirit of justice. Christine Searle, a 70-year-old retiree, faces the loss of her home—valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars—over a mere $1,607.68 in back taxes. Sadly, her story is not uncommon in Arizona.
For nearly two decades, Searle's home in Gilbert, Arizona, has been more than walls and a roof—it has been a haven of happy memories. But because she owed taxes to Maricopa County, a tax lien was placed on her home a few years ago. Arizona law then allowed the company that purchased the lien to foreclose on her home, meaning Searle lost her home and all its equity. The notion that a home can be auctioned off and ultimately acquired for a fraction of its value over a minor tax dispute is terrifying.
The government appraised her home at $376,800.
Arizona is not the only state that has permitted local governments to transfer tax liens, along with the accompanying power to foreclose on the property, to private entities. In Nebraska, for example, private investors have been known to buy out tax debt without formal correspondence with the homeowner. Once notified, those unable to satisfy their debt in full—plus interest and fees—have watched as the county treasurer gave the deed to their property away to the investor, effectively evicting them and robbing them of any equity in surplus of their debt.
The situation brings us face to face with the victims of complicated law. Searle's plight is a stark example of everyday people who are often ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of tax law and real estate regulations. And the consequences for an ill-informed action can be life altering. The issue here is not some clerical error—it is the framework of state law.
Thankfully, in 2023, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County, vindicating a woman similarly-situated to Searle and sending a message to governments that the status quo was no longer tolerable under the Constitution. In 2010, Geraldine Tyler, who was then in her early 80s, moved out of her Minneapolis condo after some disconcerting neighborhood incidents left her wanting more security. But she was not able to afford both her rent at a retirement home and her property taxes on the condo, accruing a $2,300 tax debt with an additional $13,000 tacked on in penalties, interest, and fees.
Tyler did not dispute that she owed the government that money. What she did dispute was that public officials could seize her condo, sell it for $40,000, and keep the $25,000 in excess of what she owed them.
The Supreme Court agreed with her. Despite the fractious divisions among the justices these days, they reached a consensus in Tyler that the government cannot sell a person's home to satisfy a tax debt and then pocket the surplus from the sale. This seemingly common-sense holding underscores a fundamental principle in our country—the law must serve justice, not facilitate a financial windfall.
"A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. "The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but no more."
In Arizona, Tyler hasn't yet reverberated. But the only real "distinction" between the scheme that was invalidated in Tyler and Arizona law is who reaps the windfall: In Tyler, it was the government. In Arizona, it's the purchaser of the tax lien. But that's hardly a meaningful legal difference. One would think that the attorney general, or the Maricopa County treasurer, would step in and announce that state law can no longer stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, Colorado's Attorney General made such an announcement last year regarding Colorado law after Tyler was issued.
And while the Arizona legislature, to its credit, is considering amending the law, that won't do much to help Searle, who is already suffering. So, my firm, Mountain States Legal Foundation, has stepped up to represent Searle. We're suing in federal court because we believe that the law should be the first line of defense for homeowners, not a weapon that takes away their property. As Roberts wrote in Tyler, the taxpayer must render under Caesar only what is truly owed to Caesar—not more.
The value of a home extends beyond its market price—it is immeasurable in the comfort, security, and belonging it provides. For Searle, and for countless others in her position, the true cost of Arizona's law is incalculable. Her fight should be a catalyst for change. While the legislature figures out how to fix this problem, Searle's fight will continue in the courtroom, where she seeks the justice that every homeowner deserves.
The post This 70-Year-Old Woman Might Lose Her $377,000 Home Over a Small Tax Debt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>All investment is risky. What better way to avoid that risk than to use other people's money? Federal, state, and local governments dispense gifts, grants, and loans to private companies, generously funded by taxpayers and usually with vague promises of economic development in return. While politicians say they don't like to pick winners and losers, even the "winners" sometimes turn out to be losers for taxpayers.
General Motors I.T.
Innovation Center
Chandler, Arizona
General Motors announced in 2013 that it had picked Chandler for the site of its fourth Information Technology Innovation Center, an internal software development facility. The company would invest $21 million and create 1,000 jobs, and in return Chandler promised over $1 million in economic incentives between 2015 and 2017. In August 2023, G.M. announced that it would close the facility, laying off 940 out of 1,029 workers by the end of October. Chandler's development director told local news that the announcement "came as a complete surprise."
Lordstown Motors
Lordstown, Ohio
Amid the financial crisis in 2009, General Motors (G.M.) received $60 million in tax breaks to expand its Lordstown plant. All the company had to do was keep the plant open through at least 2039; instead, G.M. closed the plant in 2019. Rather than claw back the full amount, the Ohio government settled for a $20 million repayment. G.M. then sold the factory to upstart electric vehicle–maker Lordstown Motors, which received another $24.5 million in grants and tax credits. In June 2023, after delivering fewer than 40 vehicles to customers, Lordstown Motors filed for bankruptcy.
Tesla and SolarCity
Buffalo, New York
In 2013, New York pledged as much as $1 billion toward economic development projects to revitalize Buffalo as a manufacturing hub. The largest beneficiary was SolarCity, a solar panel manufacturer later acquired by Tesla in 2016. The state offered $1.25 billion in grants and tax credits in exchange for a factory that would create 5,000 jobs and generate 1,000 solar panel installations per week. But in 2023, after eight years of lowered job requirements and shifting deadlines, the factory employed just 1,700 people (mostly Tesla analysts) and averaged 21 solar panel installs per week.
Yellow Corporation
Overland Park, Kansas
In 2020, the Treasury Department was apportioned $17 billion in pandemic relief funds to disburse to companies it deemed vital to national security. It loaned $700 million of those funds to Yellow Corporation, a freight trucking company worth only $70 million that had lost $104 million the prior year. According to an audit released in 2023, Yellow had an outstanding balance of $729 million in March and had paid only a measly $230 toward the loan's principal. Yellow filed for bankruptcy in August 2023.
Amazon HQ2
Arlington, Virginia
When Amazon announced plans in 2017 to open a second headquarters ("HQ2"), it encouraged "local and state government leaders" to compete for the project. After receiving several multibillion-dollar offers, Amazon chose Arlington—directly adjacent to Washington, D.C. The state offered as much as $750 million in conditional grants for Amazon to build its campus in Virginia, and in April 2023, the company requested its first tranche of taxpayer funds—over $152 million. While phase one of the project was completed in May 2023, construction is paused indefinitely on phase two.
The post The Government Is Better at Picking Losers Than Winners appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When it comes to educational choice, Arizona ranks highly, offering a range of options for students with varying needs and preferences. But not everybody is happy that families have such leeway in teaching their kids. Chief among the opponents of such freedom is Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who is doing her best to herd kids into government-run institutions. She could do a lot of damage to what has been a healthy environment for education and learning.
At the moment, Arizona parents and guardians pick traditional public schools across district lines, select among publicly funded but privately managed charter schools, educate their children at home, or have per-student funding follow learners to their chosen private schools.
"Arizona provides K–12 students and their families ample school choice options, including five private educational choice programs, charter schools, magnet schools, home schooling and public school choice via open enrollment," EdChoice notes in its summary for the state.
In its 2024 EdChoice Yearbook, the organization ranks Arizona second after Florida for "the state that has the largest share of students choosing a non-public school option through a program like education savings accounts, vouchers or tax-credit scholarships." The listing puts special emphasis on the state's education savings accounts (ESAs) which were extended in 2022 to essentially all students.
"Part of what animated my run for governor in 2014 was universal school choice," former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey told Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward last month. "The Milton Friedman idea that he shared on Free to Choose in his book and his PBS series is something that took me all eight years of my governorship to accomplish."
The first effort to expand a limited ESA program was defeated at the ballot box by choice opponents, Ducey added. But then came COVID-19 "and parents were able to see what their kids were being taught or not taught and the level of rigor and expectation from the public schools. They also saw that the charter schools opened and the Catholic schools opened and many of the largest public districts chose to stay closed for nearly two years, even when the government was telling them to open. So we were able to pass universal educational savings accounts."
Arizona's ESAs (branded as "empowerment scholarship accounts") let students take "90% of the state funding that would have otherwise been allocated to the school district or charter school" for use "to pay private school tuition, for curriculum, home education, tutoring and more," according to the state's Department of Education.
A May 2023 Common Sense Institute report found 56,000 participating students; in the months since, the number has risen to over 73,000.
"The median income of families in the ESA program as of December 31, 2022 is about $60,600," the report noted. "The median income of families in Arizona with at least one child is $69,700. Meaning, on average, the typical family receiving an ESA is less well-off than the median Arizona family."
Critics complain about the cost of students using partial education funding on chosen alternatives, but the state is actually spending less than anticipated on schools.
"Arizona has seen an enrollment decline of 80,000 students in the state's public schools, relative to the pre-pandemic projections," Jason Gaulden of the education-oriented Oak Rose Group and Katie Ratlief of the Common Sense Institute argue. "Because the state budgeted money for those students, expecting them to attend a public school, this generates substantial savings."
This doesn't sit well with Katie Hobbs, who squeaked into office against Trump-backed Republican Kari Lake, whose campaign spent more time rehashing the 2020 election than on policy. Hobbs began boosting government schools, and teachers' unions, at the expense of education freedom.
"Arizona's newly sworn-in governor has repeatedly said that she wants to reverse the state's expansion of its school-choice program, arguing that Arizona should instead increase funding to public schools," Reason's Emma Camp noted a year ago.
With Republicans favorably disposed towards school choice in control of the state legislature, Hobbs has attacked the legal basis for funding ESAs, sniped at the program over minor data breaches, and repeatedly sparred with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, over the approval process for family education expenses.
"In this upcoming session…we must address the lack of accountability and transparency in Arizona's ESA program," Hobbs huffed two weeks ago in her State of the State address. "We have seen a steady stream of news coverage around unacceptable and sometimes downright outrageous use of taxpayer money under this program, including water park admissions, ski passes, and luxury car driving lessons."
"My office already reviews all expense requests regardless of amount," Horne mildly responded to the governor's so-called reforms. He blames lax practices under his Democratic predecessor for complaints.
The governor also wants to require background checks of anybody teaching ESA students, fix tuition prices, impose instruction requirements, and subject recipients to strict red tape. No student could use an ESA until they attend a public school for 100 days, though families still have to pay taxes that fund them (good luck to new residents of the state). She also wants to do away with tax credits for donations to groups that pay private school tuition.
"ESAs strengthen ALL schools because competition delivers the best product—leading to better students, families, and communities," observes the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. "That's why the program has become so popular—and why Hobbs knows she has to hide behind a flood of regulations rather than pushing for a repeal or cap on it."
"Gov. Hobbs policy proposal claims to improve the ESA program for the sake of parents, taxpayers, and students—particularly those with disabilities," comments Matt Beienburg, Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute. "But let's not forget that if the governor had had her way in 2011—when she voted against the original ESA program even for special education students—that thousands of students with special needs would still today be trapped in schools failing to serve their needs."
Right now, Arizona is a national leader in educational freedom for students. Gov. Katie Hobbs is the living embodiment of all the control-freakery families escape when they exercise their power to reject government institutions and guide their kids' learning.
The post Arizona Kids' Education Under Attack from State's Own Governor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last year, Arizona nearly legalized one of its most beloved illicit markets: the sale of homemade tamales. House Bill 2509, which would've legalized the sale of "potentially hazardous" homemade goods containing perishable ingredients, passed both chambers of the Arizona Legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support—but in a controversial move, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it.
This year, lawmakers are launching another legalization effort. Members of the House Regulatory Affairs Committee "voted 6–0 on Wednesday to move the amended bill on to the full House of Representatives," reported the Arizona Mirror. House Bill 2042, introduced by state Rep. Travis Grantham (R–Gilbert), contains training and licensing requirements to address Hobbs' concerns that the previous bill "would significantly increase the risk of food-borne illness." Producers would have to complete food handler training and register with the Arizona Department of Health Services.
If H.B. 2042 passes, these requirements would still pose barriers to licensure. But the bill would also ensure that Arizona's home chefs—many of whom are women and immigrants—would no longer have to work in the shadows, risking a $500 fine and up to six months in jail.
That would benefit entrepreneurs like Maria, a tamale seller in Arizona who spoke with Reason following Hobbs' veto last year. "I was working as a housekeeper but they paid me very little and sometimes I couldn't get to pick up my son from school," she said. "I've always liked to cook a lot and I've always been told that I cook delicious [food] so I said to myself, why not?"
Maria makes good money selling tamales. She can set her schedule to maximize time with her son, and her product keeps customers fed and happy. And, in a testament to how beloved this black market is, some of her customers are even cops in uniform—none of whom seem particularly interested in cracking down on the trade.
Hobbs cited health concerns when she elected to keep tamale sales illegal. But 2023 research from the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a libertarian public-interest law firm that supports deregulation in the "cottage food" industry, casts doubt on that argument. Drawing on data from "the seven states with the broadest homemade food laws" (California, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming), I.J. found that "not a single state has found a foodborne illness to be caused by food sold under their homemade food law."
Last year's legalization bill would have generated $55.3 million in new annual food sales, according to a Common Sense Institute estimate. But Arizona isn't just leaving revenue on the table by keeping "potentially hazardous" homemade food sales illegal—it's keeping a harmless market criminalized and keeping hardworking entrepreneurs from reaching their full potential.
The post Will Arizona Legalize Its Tamale Black Market This Year? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The media's eyes might be on the results coming out of the Iowa caucus, but readers of Rent Free will know that the real news (housing news) is happening elsewhere. This week's stories include:
But first, our lead story, which neatly illustrates in real time how zoning destroys shelter.
Two tenants in Claremont, New Hampshire, are being kicked out of their homes of a decade following a decision by the town's Zoning Board of Adjustment.
Since last summer, Claremont city officials have said that the tenants' two units were divided in violation of the zoning code and that they must be recombined into one apartment. Earlier this month, the zoning board shot down owner Zander Kempf's request for a variance that would have legalized the units and allowed the tenants to stay.
"We have a major housing crisis and a severe shortage of housing around the state and in Claremont," Kempf, a real estate investor who owns the apartments through the Claremont Fund, LLC, tells Reason. "By the city's request, we have to kick two tenants out who have been there for many, many years and who've called it their home."
The Mystery Unit
Kempf's 15,000-square foot property sports three roughly 100-year-old buildings with 13 units between. They long predate Claremont's zoning code, which only allows three units on the property.
The city accepts 12 of those units as legal but non-conforming units. That leaves a 13th unit, which appears and then disappears from city documents.
Some 1994 tax documents list the property as having 13 units, but a more recent certificate of occupancy shows only 12, according to a Claremont Planning Department report.
Kempf tells Reason that the property, which he purchased in 2020, was marketed as having 13 units, while tax documents described it as having only 12. Calls to the city's planning department during the purchasing process didn't produce any information about outstanding issues, he says.
But in July 2023, a routine fire safety inspection by the city discovered that what they thought was a three-unit building actually had four units in it.
It appears that a three-bedroom apartment had been subdivided into two one-bedroom apartments of around 500 square feet each. It's unclear when that additional unit was added, or by whom. There's also no record of any building permits having been pulled for the creation of the fourth unit, which is illegal under state law.
The additional unit also poses a zoning code problem, because non-conforming properties aren't allowed to be made more non-conforming. That means adding a 13th unit on a property zoned for three units is a no-go, regardless of whether it has building permits or not.
Failed Appeal
After it was discovered, Kempf tells Reason that he tried to legalize the 13th unit administratively with the city's planning department. The department, however, told him he either needed to recombine the two units into one apartment or ask the zoning board for a variance.
In November, Kempf applied for a zoning variance. At a zoning board meeting this month, his lawyer argued that allowing the 13th unit would only maintain the status quo on the property, and not create additional, negative impacts for anyone.
The board was unmoved.
"We are in a housing crunch, but that doesn't mean we can bend our codes to meet that," said Todd Russel, who chairs the zoning board, according to reporting from the local Eagle Times. "To me, public safety and public interest isn't about one tenant, and it's not about the financial loss of losing a rental unit. It's more about keeping everybody safe in the area."
The board voted to reject Kempf's application. He could appeal to the city council or local superior court but was told doing so wouldn't alter the result by his lawyer.
"The planning board has their discretion to decide these things. Our counsel didn't think there was much legal basis for [an appeal], although a moral and practical argument could certainly be made," he says.
That means his two tenants will now have to find somewhere else to live.
The U.S. Supreme Court is taking a break from guns and abortion to take up two cases that could deliver some incredibly consequential rulings for property rights, housing production, and homelessness.
Sheetz v. County of El Dorado
Last Tuesday, the court heard oral arguments in the case of Sheetz v. El Dorado County. Petitioner George Sheetz, a California retiree, is challenging the constitutionality of a $23,000 traffic impact fee El Dorado County is demanding he pay for a permit allowing him to place a manufactured home on a single-family-zoned lot.
Sheetz's lawsuit argues the county's impact fee is an "unconstitutional condition" because it charges him for impacts he's not creating.
The county has argued that questions of unconstitutional conditions only apply to decisions made by individual bureaucrats. Since Sheetz's impact fee is set by legislation, it is exempt from challenges under this unconstitutional conditions doctrine.
California courts have thus far sided with the county. Tuesday's oral arguments suggest things could go Sheetz's way. Justice Neil Gorsuch said there was "radical agreement" that legislative exactions are still covered by the unconstitutional conditions doctrine.
Pacific Legal Foundation Attorney Brian Hodges tells Reason that Gorsuch's comments suggest the court could issue a narrow ruling definitively holding that legislative exactions can create unconstitutional conditions.
There's a smaller chance, he says, that the court could go further and declare that legislative exactions attached to building permits have to meet the same standards as bureaucratic exactions and bear an "essential nexus" and "rough proportionality" to the actual impacts of the permitted building.
Such a ruling would open up legal challenges to all sorts of legislative exactions known to suppress housing supply, including other impact fees charged to builders and even inclusionary zoning laws that require builders to offer some of their new units at discounted (often-money losing) rates.
To be sure, the Sheetz case only asks the Supreme Court whether legislative exactions are subject to unconstitutional conditions claims. The court isn't being asked to establish a standard for legislative exactions.
The court's liberal justices also expressed concern that requiring legislative exactions to have some sort of "rough proportionality" to actual impacts of individual properties would effectively prevent governments from imposing all generally applicable impact fees.
City of Grants Pass v. Johnson
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that deals with local governments' abilities to fine and jail the homeless for sleeping on public property.
This case stems from a 2018 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case Martin v. Boise, which ruled that cities' enforcement of camping bans against the homeless when alternate forms of shelter aren't available violates the Eighth Amendment's ban of cruel and unusual punishment.
Shortly after the Martin decision came down, homeless individuals in Grants Pass, Oregon, sued the city for enforcing a camping ban in public parks while not providing any shelter to the homeless. A Ninth Circuit panel ruled against the city, and the full circuit declined to rehear the case. Grants Pass petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case in August.
Grants Pass, backed by amicus briefs from Gov. Gavin Newsom and the free-market Goldwater Institute, argues that the Martin decision "paralyzes" cities trying to protect public safety and address homelessness.
Homeless advocates had urged the Supreme Court not to take up the Grants Pass case, given the lack of a circuit split. They are now urging the Court to uphold the Martin decision.
"Cities that have failed to provide for the basic needs of their residents, like housing and shelter, should not be allowed to punish people when they have no safe place to go," said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center in an emailed statement.
Last year, housing supply-siders in Colorado, Arizona, and New York went for broke on big, bold housing bills that tried to squeeze through the entire "yes in my backyard" (YIMBY) agenda in one fell swoop. They all failed.
This year, housing is still a top issue in all three states, but housing supply-siders are forswearing omnibus bills in favor of smaller, more focused reforms.
New York
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's 2023 State of the State policy platform called for a far-reaching "housing compact" that would require cities to upzone or else forfeit their powers to approve or deny new housing to the state.
The governor's 2024 housing proposals are far more modest. She's called for renewing tax credits for mixed-income housing projects, legalizing illegal "basement units" in New York City, and lifting state-set residential density restrictions in Manhattan.
Colorado
Last year, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis' office put together an expansive housing omnibus bill legalizing "middle housing" and accessory dwelling units, upzoning transit corridors, and requiring cities to plan for housing growth.
This year, housing is still on the governor's mind. He referred to the issue as his "Roman Empire" in his State of the State address last week. (For those who missed the meme, that means he thinks about it every day.)
But housing activists in the state tell Reason there will be no attempt at another big, omnibus bill this year. Instead, one-off bills legalizing ADUs, upzoning transit corridors, paring back parking minimums, legalizing single-stair apartments, and requiring more proactive, pro-growth planning on cities' parts will be introduced.
Arizona
It's the same story in Arizona. In 2023, the Legislature there considered a wide-ranging bill sponsored by Sen. Steve Kaiser (R–Phoenix) that would have allowed housing in commercial zones, legalized four-unit "middle housing" in single-family areas, limited hearings on new housing projects, and preempted local design and minimum lot size rules that foil starter homes.
That bill likewise failed and its champion, Kaiser, is now out of the legislature. Bills incorporating some of the reforms of last year's omnibus are set to be reintroduced, but there will be no unified pro-supply push.
Changing Tactics
The changing focus to smaller bills reflects lessons learned from last year's failed efforts.
In a big housing bill, there's "one thing that could sour a legislator," says Courtney LeVinus from the Arizona Multifamily Association. "Instead of an omnibus, we're going to focus on our niche areas."
Single-subject bills also allow lawmakers to advocate for their bills more effectively, says Johnathan Pira, an activist with YIMBY Denver.
Colorado's housing omnibus bill last year had three chief sponsors who were responsible for explaining every provision of a huge, sprawling bill and addressing all concerns about it to other legislators. That was a big lift. Dividing up the omnibus bill into single-subject legislation means more legislators can focus on explaining and advocating for smaller, more manageable reforms, says Pira.
The states that passed the most reforms last year, Washington and Montana, did so via smaller, one-off bills. (The one exception might be Oregon, which passed a bill overhauling its entire state-wide planning system.)
Nevertheless, smaller bills can also be read as a sign of smaller ambitions. Hochul's single-issue reforms add up to a lot less than what her housing compact would have accomplished. Not every element on Arizona and Colorado's omnibus bills is likely to be reconsidered this year.
This year's bet is that one is higher than zero and that more focused bills that actually pass will add up to more housing than a super-ambitious mega-reform that goes down in flames.
A common argument against upzoning is that it doesn't actually improve housing affordability. Instead, increasing the allowable developmental capacity of land increases land values, which then gets tacked on to the costs of new housing. A new paper authored by Emily Hamilton at George Mason University's Mercatus Center finds evidence to the contrary.
Hamilton's paper looked at the results of two rounds of reform in Houston, Texas, that shrank the city's minimum lot size to 1,400 square feet—an effective upzoning in the famously unzoned city. Past papers have found that Houston's minimum lot size reform increased housing supply significantly. Hamilton's paper finds that land values stayed flat, or even decreased as a result of the reforms.
"In a case where upzoning leads to a large amount of newly built space, the effect on reduced rents may be equal to or greater than the value of the right to build more on a given piece of land," writes Hamilton.
It's possible upzoning single parcels in heavily supply-constrained cities increases land values, while the resulting additional supply does little to lower prices. The lesson from Hamilton's paper isn't that upzoning is useless, but that the more broad-based and productive the upzoning is, the more it'll improve affordability.
Arlington, Virginia's zoning code allows businesses to paint murals on their building, so long as the mural does not depict any products the business sells. So, in short, you can paint a big slice of pizza on your building, so long as you don't sell pizza inside it.
The post Zoning Board Orders Longtime Tenants' Homes Dismantled appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is hosted by Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. She sat down with former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
During his two terms as governor, Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures, reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government work force. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his constituents during the COVID pandemic. Today, he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise.
In December, Ducey received the Reason Foundation's Savas Award for Privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. In this week's episode, he talks to Mangu-Ward about his worries for the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.
Watch the full video here.
The post Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Loves Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During his two terms as governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures, reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government workforce. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his constituents during COVID. Today, he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise.
In December, he received the Reason Foundation's Savas Award for Privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. The former governor and Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down to talk about his worries about the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: What is it about Arizona that seems to just generate a kind of heterodox or unorthodox politician?
Doug Ducey: I don't know. I think it's a good question. I think maybe the fact that we're the youngest state in the lower 48, that we're a place where so many people came to live. So few people that are there today, were actually born there. So people make that decision. And then I think there's something about the West and the spirit of Barry Goldwater, where it brings an independent-mindedness to it.
Mangu-Ward: Arizona has been red of late, but it's trending blue. What do you attribute that to?
Ducey: Candidates matter. I would actually push back pretty hard. I was able to win in 2014 with the wind at my back and win by a larger margin in 2018 with the wind in my face in what was really a tough year for conservatives and Republicans around the country. And I was also able to capture 44 percent of the Hispanic vote against an opponent named David Garcia.
So if you have the right candidate, who's talking about common sense kitchen table issues, and actually persuading the electorate, I think the state is still a center-right state. If you have somebody that wants to come and relitigate 2020 and only speak to the base, that's a losing message.
Mangu-Ward: You campaigned in your first campaign on bringing taxes in Arizona as close as possible to zero, and you got to a 2.5 percent flat tax in the end. How did you do that?
Ducey: Persistence, persistence, persistence. It was our goal. Every year we lowered or simplified taxes and we actually had the left overreach and came into Arizona and I think deceived the voters with an initiative saying, "We can put 1 billion dollars additional into K-12 education and it won't cost you any money, only the rich people." And they took our 4.5 percent tax at the highest progressive level to 8. Now, 8 percent in Arizona would have been a cancer that would have metastasized over decades. That's Bernie Sanders' Vermont, Washington, D.C., or New York state. But it was popular. We worked hard to beat it. It was polling at about 65-35. We were able to drive it down to 51 percent on election day.
But when I was a young boy, there was a show on Saturday morning, Wild World of Sports, and they would talk about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. We suffered about 18 months of the agony of defeat while we challenged the initiative in court and eventually got to our Supreme Court. And then we reformed taxes in the legislature in the interim. The law, the initiative, was struck down and we had reduced taxes along the way. So had we been successful on election day, taxes in Arizona today would be 4.5 percent. But because we had a bad result, we persisted in the legislature and we had a Supreme Court that was not going to let out-of-state interest deceive the voter. Today, we have the lowest flat tax in the nation. So I would say a combination of good planning, good timing, and good luck.
Mangu-Ward: Is this something that other states can duplicate? I mean, this sounds like a lot of things coming together just right.
Ducey: Well, I believe so. I mean, I think if you make a pledge to your constituents that you're going to simplify taxes every year and you win on that, then you have the permission to do that. If you can grow your economy, you have surplus funds. So it allows you to basically buy down your tax rate. And I'm a huge fan of the flat tax. I want us to be fair and equitable. And I think a flat tax makes a lot of sense. And it's also very hard for the left to change because people understand it. Massachusetts is not known for being a low-tax state, but they do have a 5 percent flat income tax and they've not been able to change that or raise it. And today in Arizona, like I said, we're at 2.5 percent. But if you get your economy growing and that's my background, Katherine, I came from the private sector at Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream company was my business. And I ran on a platform of kickstarting the economy. Now I want to shrink a government and grow the economy. I was looking at places like Texas and asking, why are they so successful in comparison to other states? And I was trained coming out of University of Procter and Gamble [PG]. PG is a big fan of best practices of something called "search and re-apply." If you see another good idea anywhere in the world, you bring it back to headquarters with attribution.
In politics, I found people find good ideas all over the country and bring them back to their state, often without attribution. But Texas was the model. [Former Texas Gov.] Rick Perry and governors before him had turned an oil and gas state into a cosmopolitan place with international businesses that did business around the world. I saw no reason at all why Arizona couldn't occupy that space. And I also was aware of the bad decisions that California was making. So I thought we were perfectly positioned and I wanted to be the chief salesperson and spokesperson to do that.
When I came into office, we had a billion-dollar deficit that first year. I think the first tax reform that we were able to pass was to make certain that you weren't indexed out with inflation. And that was the start. We got the budget under control. The economy began to grow and we were able to ratchet that tax code down.
Mangu-Ward: I think sometimes, particularly in the modern GOP, you get a lot of emphasis on tax cutting and a lot less on the reduction of spending or balancing the budget. Do you think that issue is getting worse? Do you think that there's a way to reconnect to those two ideas in American political rhetoric or in voters' minds?
Ducey: Well, Katherine, I think you live here in Washington, D.C., and that's what you are responding to as to how the Republicans in this town behave. You see the Democrats tax and spend. You see the Republicans in Washington, D.C. cut taxes and borrow. Governors don't get to print money and there's no appetite to borrow money except in the worst of a crisis. So you really do have to find a way to shrink your government.
I'm proud of the growth and attractiveness of Arizona. I think we have 400,000 additional people in Arizona versus the day that I came into office. But our state government is smaller. We were actually able to shrink the footprint of our state government, the number of people inside the state government, the number of buildings, and real estate holdings of the state government.
If you look at governors around the country who take this winning game plan and execute it, there's a model that could be used in Washington, D.C. But here no one really seems to want to persuade on why we need to tighten the belt. I did take a hit that first year to balance the budget. There is no constitutional obligation to balance the budget. I just came from the private sector and I had lived through several downturns before, and I knew each time I navigated through a downturn as a CEO, I wished I would have acted faster with more of a sense of urgency and rightsizing the business. So I didn't want to lose those lessons. And the largest responsibility I had in my life to date at age 50. So I said to the legislators who said, "We don't really have to balance the budget. Nothing's going to happen" that I wanted them to blame me for it, that I ran on it, I wanted to do it. I thought it was possible and the economy was going to get better and we could begin to invest again next year. And if the economy didn't get better, we'd be happy we acted today because we wouldn't be exaggerating problems for tomorrow.
Mangu-Ward: What was the cut or elimination or reorganization that you enjoyed the most during that period?
Ducey: I had a lot of people from the business community that helped me become governor, but none of them wanted to come work with me in government, so I had to find the best people in these agencies, the best people from around the country, to come work inside these agencies. And in my first month, you have the inauguration, "state of the state," you present the budget, and in 2015, we were hosting the Super Bowl. So I was meeting with each of these agency heads and basically asking the same questions I would have asked somebody who wanted a top-level position in Cold Stone. "Who are you?" "What do you do?" "And how do you know if you do it well?" And you really want to hear somebody tie something to a metric as to how they measure things inside their agency. We had a director at Weights and Measures who said, "Let me tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to sting Uber and Lyft during the Super Bowl and shut them down." Obviously, he wasn't paying much attention to the campaign. I was able to ask my general counsel, "What's my authority over these agency heads?" He said, "They work at the pleasure of the governor." I was able to release this gentleman into the private sector in what would soon be a growing economy. But that was my way to capture the attention of the state government that I was serious about making real reforms.
We went through a strategic plan just like we would in business. I wanted every agency to know what the mission of that agency was, to have public metrics, and how they could advance it, to have transparency to taxpayer money, and then to memorialize what they had accomplished the past 90 days, and could accomplish in the next 90 days, and make adjustments. So it's basically a Six Sigma-type thing that you can do. I want to see us have less government, but I'm not somebody on the right that thinks government is unnecessary. I think the government serves a purpose. And when the government is responsive and it's not putting obstacles in people and small business owners' way people flock to your state. Businesses grow and have great success. And then in this economic development competition that we have among the states, we were winning the majority of them, and in yesteryear, it was all Texas. I think you'd see today that Arizona's leading on this. Places like Texas continue to do well. Utah is very good. Florida, Tennessee, are all states that are really growing and they're following the same model.
Mangu-Ward: Where do you think immigration fits into the picture of attracting the best people and kind of opening up the state to free enterprise?
Ducey: I think people in Washington, D.C. confuse border security with immigration. They are separate and mutually exclusive issues. Border security is about law enforcement. It's about national defense. It's about public health. We had a pandemic over the last two years, the border in Arizona is wide open and unprotected under President Biden. It was in the same condition under President Obama and that's not how the law works. This is illegal migration. So if we can secure and stabilize the border, which was happening in 2019 and 2020, we can talk about immigration. And I'm pro-legal immigration. And we need new immigrants from the service sector to software engineers.
My first visit as governor internationally was to Mexico City. My first international visit upon reelection was to Mexico City, and my last visit as a sitting governor was to Mexico City. They are our number one trading partner times four, we have an incredible relationship with them. But we weren't open to people illegally migrating. Solve the border situation, which is very solvable. It was already done in 2019 and 2020. Then we can talk about immigration reform, but border security happens in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Immigration reform happens down the street here in Congress.
Mangu-Ward: What was the state of play on school choice in Arizona when you came in and what did it look like you left?
Ducey: Arizona has always been very good on school choice and it's something that I believe in. I stood on the shoulders of giants like Lisa Graham Keegan and Fife Symington. At the state level, we have 525 schools of choice in Arizona, charter schools. Your listeners will know those are our public schools with private management. If you take those schools, that's the number one state in the nation for accomplishment on math, reading, and science. We did a lot to grow that model. We have systems like the Basis School System and Great Hearts, both founded in Arizona. Part of what animated my run for governor in 2014 was universal school choice. The Milton Friedman idea that he shared on Free to Choose in his book and his PBS series is something that took me all eight years of my governorship to accomplish. We actually were able to pass a limited [Empowerment Scholarship Account] program in 2017. We have an anomaly of our Constitution where if you get enough signatures, you can refer a law to the people, and ESAs were referred to the people in 2017. And it was crushed. It lost 65 to 35.
Mangu-Ward: And these are education savings accounts? So essentially vouchers.
Ducey: Milton Friedman also said in a crisis, people will look for the ideas that are lying around. And the crisis that came was COVID and parents were able to see what their kids were being taught or not taught and the level of rigor and expectation from the public schools. They also saw that the charter schools opened and the Catholic schools opened and many of the largest public districts chose to stay closed for nearly two years, even when the government was telling them to open. So we were able to pass universal educational savings accounts. This is for every child in the state of Arizona, [who are] able to take a large portion of their tax dollars and go wherever they would like to school, including homeschool, micro-school, or a new school. So I think we were able to move the bar to the highest rung. Nine other states have since followed with universal school choice. Texas and Tennessee are on the one-yard line.
It reminds me a bit of Roger Bannister, [who] was the first man to break the four-minute mile. People thought that that was physically impossible. From the marathon in Greece to the 1960s, no one man or woman had broken a four-minute mile. I think it was several months after Roger broke four minutes, somebody else broke four minutes. And it's been broken over a thousand times since. I think that this universal school choice is the way to truly reform K-12 education, and I think in many ways renew our country. This one crosses party lines. It was actually the African American pastors and a lady that leads the Black Mothers Forums, who wasn't very happy with the way that I handled the summer of 2020, who was my lead advocate on universal school choice. Now, one of them, a Republican, and we were able to pass this with no Democrat votes. I wanted those votes, but they were beholden to the teacher's union in Arizona. In my final year, we had a one-seat majority in our house, a one-seat majority in our Senate. We had a confluence of circumstances that happened that we were able to get in the final days. And like I said, other states have since followed.
Mangu-Ward: You were governor during COVID, and I saw there were moves from the Arizonans for Liberty who wanted to recall you for doing too much. And also from Accountable Arizona who wanted to recall you for doing too little. Which of them was right?
Ducey: I made the best decisions I could for the state of Arizona. I didn't want to play politics with COVID, and I didn't want to compete with other governors. I was going to make the best decision in real time for what was needed in our state. I did it a lot differently than many of the other Western states. I prioritized lives, livelihoods, and individual liberties.
I came from the private sector. I was the owner of a small business. Those are the people that I know and I understand what they go through. There were a lot of calls from elected officials with guaranteed government paychecks, people that would not miss a paycheck or a salary, choosing to work from home. I wanted to keep our businesses open. I think the evidence of how Arizona came out of COVID in comparison to other states is where the proof lies and to how COVID was handled.
Mangu-Ward: Is there something you would have done differently, though, in retrospect?
Ducey: I imagine there is, but not in the real-time of what was happening. Because, of course, I'm somebody who thinks you surround yourself with experts. But I made the decisions, so the experts were not on top. I erred on the side of caution until I had enough evidence that we knew where the vulnerable people were. We had communicated to the vulnerable people. And then they live in a free country, and it's up to them to make the decisions that they want. But to get kids back in school, to have our businesses open, and to allow people to make responsible decisions. It's something I felt very passionate about advocating for.
Mangu-Ward: Let's talk about the current state of the Republican Party at the national level, as well as in the States. You recently took a new gig at the Citizens for Free Enterprise. My perception is that the current Republican Party, to say nothing of the current Democratic Party, is not too friendly to free enterprise these days. What can we do about that?
Ducey: Well, again, I would separate what you're seeing in Washington, D.C., and some of the big government Republicanism that's happening here, versus what you see happening in many of our states. Yet, there are some folks out there that are bullying big businesses. I think if we're going to be a majority party, if we're going to win on our ideas. There's a lot of freedoms we could talk about over the course of this discussion, from freedom of speech to freedom of religion, freedom of assembly—all rights that we've seen under assault in the last several years. But they're all undergirded by economic freedom. And it's what's allowed us to be the mightiest military in the history of the world. It's also allowed us to make a lot of really stupid spending decisions and overcome that. I do think that if you go into a college classroom today and you held up a sign that says socialism and capitalism, it's about a 50-50 proposition, and that should scare every freedom-loving individual in the country to death. So I think we have some work to do, not only with our youth and college classrooms but also with our electorate.
Part of the reason Citizens for Free Enterprise exists is because it's an evergreen issue. There's going to be certain social and cultural issues that we fight about every two years, and these are worthwhile discussions. This is how we answer these questions. But it wasn't that long ago that a blue state governor who became president was actually accused of being pretty good on the economy. Under President Obama, it became more of a class warfare between the haves and the have-nots, with, I think, an overemphasis on inequality while now looking at the government supplements to what we do to those in the most vulnerable positions.
So we want to advance the cause of free enterprise, and we'd also like to drain some of the partisanship out of it. But it should always be protected on the right. And through what we're going to be doing, people that are going to be attacking it are going to feel consequences regardless of what party they're in.
Mangu-Ward: It's a pretty big project to convince Americans to feel better about capitalism or to like free trade or something like that. It's Reason's project as well, in many senses. Where do you see the doors that are open for that?
Ducey: Well, I would come at it from a different angle. I think that Americans love small businesses and they love small businessmen and women and they love many of these entrepreneurs and local shop owners and their own cities, towns, and municipalities. And if you go to CitizensforFreeEnterprise.com, you'll see many of their stories on our website. So part of it is, of course, the principles that you and I have read and understand and want to make certain are being communicated properly in our grade schools and our high schools and our colleges and happen at many places like a great arts academy in Arizona. Kids come out really understanding what makes the economy tick and how to live within your means and why this is not only a good personal habit. It's also a responsible habit of a business or a government or an enterprise.
But I think when people can hear the story from the entrepreneur, whether it's the local microbrewer or the guy who runs the four-wheel shop who retrofits pickups, it helps people understand why this is important. And we have so many stories of people that have had great success. The other thing that I think happened rather recently is we've separated the entrepreneur and the small business owner from the employee. Well, actually their interests are aligned. The more successful the company is or the city or town or municipality, the more opportunities are there for the employee. They may or may not want to cast their lot in the entrepreneurial world. They may just want to climb the economic ladder and be able to build personal financial security. And without that opportunity to build financial security, is there really freedom there? I mean, these are things that go hand in hand.
Mangu-Ward: Economic liberty requires more than just protecting small businesses. Right? What is there to do about this "we'll tax the rich and solve all the problems" mentality?
Ducey: Well, one, the numbers don't work. And you know that the math on that is never going to work. And that's not unusual. I actually think that's playing on some of the worst of human nature to build this envy in folks. There's all kinds of social scientists that will show you that people actually feel better if somebody is doing worse while they're doing better. And we're not going to participate in any of that. We're just going to educate and advocate around free enterprise and try to bring that voter into the fold so that they can make the decision on election day on who's in support of it. And it's regardless of party. I think you'd find more of that right now on the right, but as you mentioned, there are some folks here in this town and there are some folks in state capitals that are beating up on businesses. I think if we continue to do that or allow that to happen, we're only sharpening the knife that the left will eventually use on us.
Mangu-Ward: Who are some folks either in D.C. or around the country that you think are doing good work right now?
Ducey: Well, I mentioned the states. Greg Abbott's doing good work in Texas. Everybody's seen what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida. Bill Lee and Bill Haslam before him in Tennessee. Pete Ricketts just came out of Nebraska and you're lucky to have him in the United States Senate here. Hopefully, he can bring a little bit of the common sense of what governors have to deal with. Eric Holcomb in Indiana and Kim Reynolds are also people that are taking states that don't have some of the sunbelt attractiveness but are attracting companies and have their citizens very happy with what they're doing.
Mangu-Ward: Is attracting companies the right measure? I'm thinking here in D.C., we're currently having a battle over where our stadium is going to be. And of course, with that comes a bunch of cronyism. Can you talk about how to make those distinctions?
Ducey: Well, I think a company would be different than a stadium. I was trained at Procter and Gamble that any business that is won on price will be lost on price. So all of the incentives that we had in Arizona were performance incentives and they were in statutes. We were not able to negotiate with that business owner. And listen, if it was all about the numbers and all that mattered was the bottom line on that decision, you would have states going to the absolute lowest cost place in which to do business, but no business owner or CEO moves to where they do not want to live. They also know that quality of life is going to attract their senior management team and their employees. That's the mix that I believe we had right in Arizona. Not only low tax rate regulation, affordable, and reliable energy with excellent education, but we had a great quality of life. They could have confidence that their taxes were not going to be hiked and that they would be able to hire people from across the country and around the globe that would want to come live in these communities.
Mangu-Ward: What do you think about the rise of this kind of economic variant of national conservatism? To some extent, it's a D.C. phenomenon and certainly a D.C. chattering classes phenomenon, but it's manifesting in our politics for sure.
Ducey: Well, the right has always been a fusion. I think the right, especially from Barry Goldwater, and we like to say in Arizona that he never lost that election in 1964. It just took 16 years to count the votes. But that idea of what William F. Buckley and Goldwater and Ronald Reagan projected was what made the Republicans and the right a majority party. That not only had the fiscal conservatives and the tax hawks, but it had the social conservatives and the people that cared about Second Amendment rights and then Tea Party folks and evangelicals. And each time the party continued to grow.
I think you see this Washington, D.C. free-con versus NatCon discussion. One thing I wholeheartedly agree with the NatCons is countries have borders and those borders should be protected and ours is not on the southern border. And I think that's lost on people of responsibility here, including the president and vice president, who have not been to the border or understand the situation that ranchers in these small towns are going through. But I think the fusion between the folks that want to talk about national identity and our borders and what you see on the freedom side of the equation is where we'll land. I am much more of a free trader. And I do think that we were able to get some things right in the Trump-Pence administration in finally understanding what was happening in China.
I know from opening ice cream stores in both Beijing and Shanghai that they were able to play by different rules. No one had ever called them on it. There's an immense amount of trade that happens between the two countries, and I think that both countries benefit. But I don't think it's unfair for us to expect that they behave by a certain set of rules if we're going to continue to do that.
And the other opportunity I think COVID gave us was that we don't want to be put in that position again with our supply chain. One thing I really liked about the [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement], which was an improvement of [the North American Free Trade Agreement], my focus was first and foremost on Mexico as our top trading partner. Well, our number two trading partner was Canada. You can say that for pretty much all 50 governors. So if somebody is not going to open their business in Arizona, I'd prefer they open it in one of the other 49 states, if not one of the other 49 states. I prefer Mexico or Canada. That's not only good for North American free trade. It's also good for peace and prosperity. And in any pandemic or global crisis. This doesn't mean we decouple from China, but it also doesn't mean that we allow them to steal our intellectual property and to run roughshod over any way they would like to in which to do business. And we have a vote as well.
Mangu-Ward: People are going to feel closer to what they're seeing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People are going to feel closer to conflicts all around the world. How does that play out for U.S. involvement, either in terms of foreign policy or trade?
Ducey: Well, I am generalizing here, but I think that you and I have basically come of age in a magical American moment. I mean, in our lifetime we've had one bad day, and September 11th, and it changed a lot in this country. But we were one of two superpowers around the world and we were the only superpower in 1989. And smart people were able to write books where they claimed it was the end of history and freedom and democracy and free enterprise would spread around the globe. And then we had the shock and surprise of 9/11. Now, this is a return to real history. While I fear that we've projected weakness around the globe and these conflicts are what is more normal in the course of time.
I think us making responsible decisions at home, making sure we're investing in our defense, are projecting strength so that we can achieve peace. And then we're divided as a nation. There is an isolationist attraction right now. This is not new in this nation and it's not new for the right or for the left. We weren't eager to get into World War Two until the morning after December 7th, 1941. What we don't want is that kind of shock to our system or to what's happening around the globe. I do think, of course, Ukraine and Russia's aggression is something we were all talking about until October 7th. And then we saw how fragile geopolitics are right now. So I think we're having a real discussion. This is going to happen in an election year, and I'm going to be advocating that we project strength where necessary and make sure that we keep our alliances.
Mangu-Ward: You mentioned a few influences earlier, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley. In this sort of American era that you just described, what were some of your influences that shaped your politics?
Ducey: Well, what [former Gov.] Mitch Daniels did in Indiana, I found very encouraging. I always look for a model of someone that I can study. And Mitch really talked and thought and wrote like a businessman. I'm from the Midwest. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and lived there till I was 18. And God bless the Big Ten. But Mitch didn't inherit a state where a lot of people were dreaming of retiring. He did this in the traditional heartland. I thought in his book Keeping the Republic, where a lot of innovative entrepreneurial policy ideas. That really is the great thing about being a governor, most people wouldn't know who a governor is in another state. COVID might have changed a little bit of that because I think you were able to see a real difference between red states and blue states and how we handled it. I didn't realize how many of my peers on the left were closet authoritarians, but before that, we were all trying to solve problems. We might have solved them from a different point of view, but governors are very collegial.
I spoke about this in my last public speech before I left the governor's office at the Reagan Library about a return to federalism. I simply think that our federal government here in D.C. tries to do too much, and it does most of it poorly. So why doesn't it focus on a national defense and securing the border and reforming our finances to protect a social safety net for our elderly and most vulnerable, and then push everything else back to the states and let the states compete? Governors communicate or collaborate, but at the end of the day, we compete with each other. We want to show up at a Republican Governors Association meeting and talk about who's lowered the taxes the most or who's eliminated the most regulations. We know that Americans vote with their feet, and there will be a time—it may not be in Gavin Newsom's or Andrew Cuomo's or J.B. Pritzker's time—but where these governors will be held accountable for the people that are fleeing their states to go to a better quality of life. I think we would have better policies if we were able to do that with no strings attached because I don't know what happens when someone gets elected to Congress. They can be a good conservative in the state legislature and they come here and all of a sudden they think that you're a middle manager in their federal corporation.
Mangu-Ward: When Mitch Daniels made a kind of earlier foray into national politics, he ended up drawing a lot of fire for saying something that's always stuck with me, which is essentially "we don't have time to do culture wars because our economic situation is so dire and our fiscal situation is so dire. We simply cannot get distracted by culture wars." This was many, many years ago. Was he right?
Ducey: I think the reality of politics is that you have to meet the voters where they are. I have this same sense of concern around our finances and our debt. We've not paid a price for it, so to speak. And when we do, it will be devastating. So I think somehow you have to navigate the social issues and maybe part of the silver lining of an October 7th, if there can be any, is the exposure of what's happening. So many of our universities and our elite institutions that we realize that so young people aren't learning. Twenty percent of these young people don't believe the Holocaust happened and they've divided the world into oppressors and victims. I think if there's an issue right now, it's the woke stuff that you're seeing, for lack of a better way to put it, on the left, and then some of the discussion on the right that is much more top-down and driven from the newly elected king that will come to Washington, D.C. Those are realities. And it's going to be up to leaders to present a better, more constitutional alternative.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Loves Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The driverless car is here!
Finally.
Google has harnessed artificial intelligence to create a self-driving car they call Waymo, standing for "Way Forward in Mobility."
Regulators in San Francisco and Phoenix legalized Waymo cars because the robo-cars drive better than people do. They've already driven millions of miles on public roads without any fatalities. Not one. No injuries either.
Waymo achieves that with sensors attached to the top and sides of the cars. The sensors constantly shoot out lasers that bounce back, telling the car precisely where other objects are.
The magic of the driverless vehicle is the artificial intelligence behind the sensors. That allows the cars to operate like a human nervous system. Sensors and radar are the eyes and ears. The brain is algorithms trained by billions of simulated trips.
The more the robo-cars drive, the more they learn, and the smarter and safer they get.
The big automotive safety problem is people, not robo-cars. It's people who kill nearly 43,000 Americans every year. Drunk drivers kill 13,000 people. 6,000 of us die because we fall asleep while driving.
Waymo cars have accidents, too, but almost all happen because of human error: a human driver hits the Waymo.
Another robo-car, Cruise, owned by General Motors, is almost as safe, but Cruise cars have gotten into bigger accidents.
California regulators then said they pose an "unreasonable risk to public safety," and suspended their permit to drive. But California limited the ban to Cruise cars' autonomous mode, meaning Cruise can still operate so long as they have a human in the front seat as backup.
I'm surprised that the regulators have been so reasonable. Often, after accidents, bureaucrats simply ban new ideas. California regulators have exercised unusual restraint. 500 Waymo cars still operate freely in large sections of San Francisco and Phoenix.
They are wise to allow this because self-driving cars increase safety.
Still, there will be problems.
First responders in San Francisco told my executive producer, Maxim Lott, "[Waymo cars] freeze in front of us. It's a 15-to-30-minute fix waiting for a technician. That's time we don't have when a building is on fire."
Driverless car companies say they're making adjustments to let first responders move the cars in an emergency.
"We've heard that, too," the fire chief told Lott. "It hasn't happened."
The media hype other risks.
Quoting a magazine headline, Lott asks Alex Roy, former executive at Argo AI, "What if a hacker gets into Waymo and hacks 1,000 robo-taxis, ordering them off the road?"
"These what-ifs don't make much sense," replies Roy. "For every technology that's ever arrived, there was a 'what if.' The 'what ifs' played out…. Solutions arrived and everybody moved on."
Still, many Americans object to robo-cars. Unions complain that they will take away taxi driver jobs, delivery jobs, and especially truck driving jobs. They are right, but in the long run, that will actually be good for most workers. I'll make that argument in a future column.
Meanwhile, some anti-car activists in San Francisco are vandalizing robo-cars.
But most people who try them like them.
"It's one of the few things you can do today that makes you feel like people must have felt 100 years ago," says Roy. "First time they saw a light bulb, first time they saw a plane."
Fully driverless cars are here, and they're a very good thing.
More places should allow them.
The bigger threat, as usual, is overregulation. Delaying self-driving cars would cost thousands of American lives.
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Self-Driving Cars Have Arrived. They Will Make Us Safer. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Abortion access issues are up for debate in three state Supreme Courts this week, with at least one case carrying potential implications that stretch beyond its borders.
In New Mexico—where abortion is legal—state Supreme Court justices are being asked to consider whether individual cities and counties can pass local abortion bans and restrictions. The case stems from laws passed in two cities (Clovis and Hobbs) and two counties (Roosevelt and Lea) that banned the shipment of anything used to perform an abortion. New Mexico attorney general, Raúl Torrez asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to nullify these bans. Oral arguments in the case (State of New Mexico v. Board of County Commissioners for Lea County) are scheduled for Wednesday.
"The New Mexico Constitution provides broader protection of individual rights than the Federal Constitution, and these ordinances violate the New Mexico Constitution's protection of equality, liberty, privacy, and inherent rights," argued Torrez in his petition to the court. "The local governments' actions also exceed their authority to legislate on a matter of statewide importance for which the Legislature has preempted local regulation."
The case could reverberate beyond New Mexico, since the city and county bans in question all cite the federal Comstock Act. This 1873 law bans the mailing of obscenity, which is defined to include instruments of abortion (among other things). Since the four ordinances in question here were passed, the New Mexico legislature passed a law that prohibits local governments from restricting or interfering with reproductive freedom. But Lea County argues that it's impossible to say how it applies until federal courts rule on "the meaning and application of the federal Comstock Act in a post-Dobbs environment."
The Comstock Act "has been largely dormant for decades, but anti-abortion activists say that by citing the federal law in local ordinances, they hope to escalate the matter to the Supreme Court of the United States," notes NPR.
In addition, the local abortion laws could be "considered test cases for how anti-abortion activists will operate in 'blue,' or Democratic-controlled, states where abortion remains legal," as Reuters suggested last fall. "Mark Lee Dickson, the head of the Right to Life of East Texas and the architect of the 'sanctuary city' movement that has seen over 50 cities adopt anti-abortion measures in Texas and other conservative states, hopes to replicate the success elsewhere in New Mexico and in other blue Democratic states."
How this case is decided could render it a playbook for other abortion "sanctuary cities," or a playbook for state authorities looking to oppose them.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, a near-total ban on abortion comes before the court tomorrow, along with a ban on abortions that take place in later pregnancy. The latter was passed in 2022 and bans abortion after 15 weeks; the former, from 1864, outlaws abortion almost entirely (excepting cases where a pregnant woman's life is threatened). The older law comes with a sentence of two to five years in prison for anyone who assists in terminating a pregnancy and remains on the books even though it wasn't enforced post-Roe v. Wade.
After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe last year, it was unclear whether the state would start enforcing the century-plus old law again. In December 2022, the Arizona Court of Appeals weighed in with a ruling that the 2022 law applied to doctors and the 1864 law to everyone else.
Arizona's Supreme Court this week will hear arguments about whether the older ban is still in effect or whether the Arizona legislature repealed or limited it by later enacting laws like the 15-week ban.
The case in Wyoming stems from whether abortion counts as health care. A court in Teton County, Wyoming, is hearing the matter this week—and pro-life activists and lawmakers want to intervene (that is, to join in the case). The State Supreme Court has been asked to determine whether they—state Reps. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody) and Chip Neiman (R-Hulett) and Right to Life of Wyoming—can intervene, after the Teton County court ruled in June that they could not.
Oral arguments in the case are scheduled to start tomorrow. If the Court rules that Rodriguez-Williams et all can intervene, it would delay the conclusion of the case and could require it to start over again.
The post Abortion 'Sanctuary Cities' Under Scrutiny in New Mexico Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As some states go south, Remy heads west.
Music and lyrics by Remy. Instruments, background vocals, mixing and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.
LYRICS
Shopping for detergent but it's all locked up
The tax man and a guy in the alley want to take my stuff
Finally get to my door and I see Rob
That's the moment I discover that I stepped in a human log
That's why I'm moving to South Dakota
To a freer place that doesn't only view me as a ticket quota
I'm scraping human feces out the treads of my loafer
I wonder if I would be doing this if I lived down in Sarasota
Or South Dakota
I live in a box
It costs three grand a month
With bars on the windows so that people do not steal my stuff
The schools are…eh
My kid can't read
But to be fair to the teachers it is possible that she can't see
That's why I'm moving to South Dakota
To a place that isn't making me pay extra taxes on my soda
My bathroom toilet's four feet from my stove-ah
I hear it's better in a bunch of other places out in Arizona
Or South Dakota
As I sang that verse the schools got worse
How I wish that I could pause it
I get this thought each time I'm robbed and I'm hiding in my closet
I'm moving to South Dakota
To a place that doesn't over-tax and over-ticket my Toyota
I just Googled "human feces danger contact disease sole of my loafer"
It's times like this that have folks finding freer places they can go to
Like South Dakota
The post Remy: Moving to South Dakota appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Spoiled brats upset at losing a game sometimes take their ball and go home so nobody can play, but can petulant politicians do the same with advertising venues? That's the question as city officials in Flagstaff, Arizona, end advertising at the local airport rather than allow a firearms-related business to advertise its services to tourists. Well, they're discontinuing advertising for everybody except a city agency that promotes select businesses. That's unlikely to resolve the dispute.
Earlier this month I covered the case of Rob Wilson, who wanted to continue advertising his Timberline Firearms & Training to people visiting the high-desert community. "Officials rejected the ad, telling Wilson that its representation of shooting sports violated the city's ban on displaying 'violence or anti-social behavior' and its new advertising policy against depicting guns," I wrote.
That policy hadn't even been approved yet. "The City's Facility Advertising Policy remains in draft form," Flagstaff Public Affairs Director Sarah Langley told me via email. It was scheduled for consideration at the November 14 council meeting. Langley added that part of the city's objection is that Timberline's new advertisement is a video, unlike the rotating still images used in past ads. Arizona's Goldwater Institute, which represents Wilson, denies any such change and shared with me a video identical to the current one and date-stamped August 13, 2019.
Not that still vs. moving images should make a difference.
It quickly became clear that Flagstaff's city government didn't want Wilson's business, or gun-related businesses in general, advertising at its facilities and was scrambling to come up with a justification. But government agencies are limited in their ability to pick who can and can't speak on public property.
"By denying Mr. Wilson's request to advertise based on an unreasonable and pretextual application of the advertising policy, the City has violated Mr. Wilson's constitutional rights to freedom of speech and due process of law," John Thorpe, staff attorney for the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, informed Flagstaff officials in an October 24 letter. "Moreover, the new policy currently under consideration is unconstitutional, both as applied to Mr. Wilson (as it expressly targets his expression) and on its face (as it bans broad, poorly-defined categories of speech and discriminates based on content and viewpoint)."
Flagstaff was on shaky ground. While commercial speech enjoys somewhat lesser protection than other forms of expression, it is still covered by the First Amendment. Under the Central Hudson test, the U.S. Supreme Court established that if the speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading, to be allowed to regulate the speech the government must have a substantial interest, the regulation must materially advance the government's substantial interest, and the regulation must be narrowly tailored.
Importantly, as Thorpe pointed out to Flagstaff, Goldwater was involved in a similar case a decade ago when Phoenix refused Alan Korwin permission to advertise his firearms training effort at city bus shelters. An Arizona court ruled in Korwin's favor on First Amendment grounds.
Flagstaff officials apparently agreed they had little hope.
"Advertising at the airport is not something we depend on for our revenue stream, really, and I just get a little concerned about people's interpretation of what may be offensive," commented city council member Lori Matthews during the November 14 meeting after a presentation by a deputy city attorney about what the city might or might not be able to regulate, advertising-wise. "So, I'm kind of swaying to just opt out of any advertising at the airport."
"Litigation on this could be very costly," warned City Manager Greg Clifton, who agreed that advertising should be stopped at the airport as well as at city recreational facilities. "And we'll quickly exceed any benefit that we realize through the revenues that we're talking about."
So, the city council decided that nobody will get to advertise. Well, nobody except for the city's tax-funded Discover Flagstaff promotion program. That may be a problem.
"We're stewards of the bed, board, and beverage tax," Economic Vitality Director Heidi Hansen reminded the council about Discovery Flagstaff. "It is our job in our advertising to talk about those attractions, hotels, restaurants, and campgrounds that actually pay that 2 percent…. So, I just want to make it clear that if someone were to come to the airport, they might see actual businesses on our advertising."
"That raises the question: if the city is advertising businesses through Discover Flagstaff, does it become a problem that the city does not allow other owners to independently advertise their own businesses?" Adrian Skabelund noted in Arizona Daily Sun coverage.
Well, yes, it does raise a big question. By definition, Discover Flagstaff advertising is government-approved messaging promoting select businesses in the city. Instead of battling Rob Wilson and Timberline Firearms & Training in court, Flagstaff may find itself defending against multiple lawsuits over favoritism shown to businesses given a boost by the program.
"What's essentially happening here is the city is tying itself in knots to suppress viewpoints it doesn't like," Goldwater's Joe Setyon told me by email. "There's a better way: the city should simply allow Rob to run his harmless ad, as he has already done thousands of times, with no complaints."
Flagstaff officials could set aside their pearl-clutching and let all sorts of businesses, organizations, and individuals promote their goods and services to visitors within the broad limits protected under the Constitution. Those visitors could pay attention to the advertisements or ignore them as they please, as Americans do every day all across the country. That would be a healthy step towards promoting both good will and a little more prosperity for the city and its residents.
"I just want to say that if the council gives the direction I think they just gave, that we want to make sure we do that in a way that complies with the law," Deputy City Attorney Kevin Fincel advised Flagstaff city council members after declining to sign off on the new policy. "And so I'll just leave it at that."
It's not at all clear that Flagstaff is complying with the law when it comes to respecting the free speech rights of advertisers at city-owned venues. It's definitely not certain that the city is sparing itself from litigation and resulting costs by barring private parties from advertising at the airport and reserving that privilege to businesses promoted by a city agency.
What is clear is that a government body once again made what should be a relatively simple case more difficult by meddling and restricting. Flagstaff officials tried to take their ball and go home, but free speech rights were never theirs to take away.
The post Poised To Lose Battle Over Gun Ads, City Bans All Advertising But Its Own appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Arizona poultry regulation is increasing egg prices for restaurants and consumers. A Tucson restaurateur is suing, asking courts to declare the rule invalid.
In April 2022, the Arizona Department of Agriculture (AZDA) enacted a rule to shift the state to all cage-free eggs by 2025, based in part on "the public's growing concerns about animal welfare." Beginning in October 2022, "all eggs sold in the state must come from laying hens" with "at least one square foot of usable floor space per laying hen." Beginning in 2025, all hens in the state must be housed in such a manner. It was the tenth state to enact such a mandate.
Conditions in traditional egg production facilities can be miserable, with hens crammed into stackable cages smaller than their wingspans. Unable to move, they are forced to eat, sleep, and lay eggs in their own filth.
In 2017, responding to public pressure, businesses representing 70 percent of U.S. egg demand pledged to go cage-free within a decade.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), "cage-free" means that birds are "able to freely roam a building, room or enclosed area with unlimited access to food and fresh water during their production cycle." This differs from "free-range," which includes all cage-free criteria plus "continuous access to the outdoors."
No system is perfect. Cage-free facilities have higher rates of death and injury for birds as well as higher potential for disease and infection. And the cost to go from a stacked-cage system to cage-free is expensive, averaging around $40 per hen; in August 2022, the U.S. averaged 371 million egg-laying hens, according to the USDA. Poultry industry estimates have put the cost of switching the industry to cage-free at $6 billion or more.
A lawsuit filed last week by the Goldwater Institute, a free-market public policy organization, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, says the AZDA overstepped its authority. The groups note in their complaint that any such regulation must come from the Arizona Legislature, "which has the exclusive power to make laws."
In its rule, the AZDA claims "the express authority to regulate 'poultry husbandry' for eggs produced and sold in Arizona" under state law. In response, the complaint notes that the law says nothing about eggs or their sale.
Goldwater Institute attorney John Thorpe told Reason that even if the legislature had intended for the AZDA to have such authority, it couldn't. Under the Arizona Constitution, "it's unconstitutional to give that kind of sweeping delegation to an agency to essentially create new policies or to go in a new direction with regulation outside of the purpose that they've been tasked with."
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Grant Krueger, a Tucson restaurateur, and three restaurants he owns and operates. Krueger told Reason that between those three restaurants, he purchases "well over 100,000 eggs a year," and since switching to cage-free eggs to comply with the new rule, his costs have "doubled if not tripled." As costs are passed on to diners, Krueger worries "that there is some degree of elasticity in demand and that ultimately consumers will choose with their wallets and potentially dine out less often."
Even before the new rule, egg consumers were struggling nationwide. While inflation has been persistent for the last couple of years, the retail price of a dozen eggs more than doubled between January 2022 and January 2023. The dramatic spike came as the result of an avian flu epidemic that devastated the egg-laying hen population; prices have since fallen, almost to their previous levels.
But prices aren't Krueger's primary complaint; even if a ban had come from the legislature, he says he would prefer it. "However the law would have been crafted from the legislators of the 30 legislative districts that make up Arizona, it would be more reflective of some of these legislative districts that have a strong agrarian focus to them. So, the lawmakers that would make the law would probably be substantially more sensitive to their constituencies' needs rather than it just being made by bureaucrats in Phoenix."
"It's just as much an issue of separation of powers" as about costs, Krueger says, and "ultimately, laws that are put upon us should be done by the legislative branch of the government, that more accurately reflect the people who have chosen those electors to make those decisions for them. It's the core of representative democracy."
The post Arizona Restaurant Owner Sues Over Costly Cage-Free Egg Mandate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Maricopa County, Arizona, prosecutor fired for falsely charging protesters as gang members said during a disciplinary hearing before the State Bar that she did nothing wrong, even when she charged a bystander who was not part of the protest. April Sponsel said she still believes nurse Ryder Collins is part of a gang. Video evidence from both police officers and bystanders showed Collins did not take part in the protest. Sponsel dismissed testimony that Collins did not know any of the protesters and was in the area to shoot streetscape photos, which is his hobby.
The post Brickbat: No Regrets appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Can the law force you to sell your home to other property owners? What if that law was declared unconstitutional after you agreed to be bound by legislation in place at the time? Those questions, along with the security of private property, are at stake in a case before the Arizona Supreme Court.
In 2018, Jie Cao and Haining Xia purchased a condominium at Dorsey Place in Tempe, Arizona. Over time, PFP Dorsey, an investment company, acquired 90 of the 96 units in the complex. According to the covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs) that applied to the complex, owners were subject to state regulations regarding condominiums, and each unit had one vote within the association. That meant that PFP Dorsey controlled 90 out of 96 votes.
At the time, Arizona law (Section 33-1228) allowed an 80 percent supermajority (later increased to 95 percent) to terminate a condominium agreement and to "provide that all the common elements and units of the condominium shall be sold following termination." PFP Dorsey exercised its votes to force the remaining individual owners to sell their units to the investment company.
Outraged, Jie Cao and Haining Xia sued.
"Defenders of Arizona's law say it's necessary to prevent the 'holdout problem'—property owners who supposedly strategically refuse to sell at market price to compel extra compensation. In theory, such holdouts hinder economic development projects and their alleged trickle‐down effects," comment Anastasia P. Boden and Nathaniel Lawson of the Cato Institute. "The fact that some people would rather see private property go to a supposed 'better use' can't justify confiscating it. The Founders were very worried that private interests might coopt government power for their own ends."
Arizona, it should be noted, has strong protections for private property. Article 2, Section 17 of the state constitution states, in part: "Private property shall not be taken for private use, except for private ways of necessity, and for drains, flumes, or ditches, on or across the lands of others for mining, agricultural, domestic, or sanitary purposes." That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for private parties to use the law to force other people to sell their homes. That's certainly how the courts saw it.
"A statute that authorizes a private party to take another party's property constitutes a taking," the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled last year. "Without an exception to the general rule, A.R.S. §33-1228 is unconstitutional on its face."
So, that means all is A-OK with the world, right? Well, if you're a generic condo owner in Arizona, that's mostly true (N.B.: Condominium associations are for people who think HOAs aren't a big enough pain in the ass). But it's not so great for Jie Cao and Haining Xia because the ruling contained a sting.
"When the Xias bought their unit in January 2018, they agreed to be bound by the Declaration, which grants the Association the 'rights, powers and duties as are prescribed by the Condominium Act,'" argued the court. "A forced termination and sale under the statute is unconstitutional but for an owner's contractual agreement under the declaration."
So, the Xias are out of luck, because they contractually agreed to be bound by the law as it stood when they signed. The law at that time allowed for forced sales, and tough shit for them that the provision was later ruled unconstitutional.
"That ruling violates common sense," argues Timothy Sandefur, vice president for legal affairs of Arizona's Goldwater Institute, which has filed an amicus brief in the appeal to the state's supreme court. "While it's true that contracts are typically interpreted as including whatever law is in existence at the time the contract is made—a principle lawyers call lex loci contractus—that principle does not extend to laws that are unconstitutional. The reason is that an unconstitutional law isn't a law at all—it's a legal nullity."
The Cato Institute filed a separate amicus brief also supporting the plaintiffs.
"Cao has explained why she did not, in fact, agree to these statutory terms by signing the contract," the brief argues. "But even if Cao did agree, that would not make § 33-1228 of the Condominium Act constitutional—it would only mean that there is a separate private contract containing terms identical to those in the statute." And contractually binding people to an unconstitutional law shouldn't put that law into force.
Fortunately, the Arizona Supreme Court sees that there are significant legal questions raised by this case. It agreed to hear oral arguments over the state of the law and whether private contracts can breathe life into statutes that have been found unconstitutional. Of particular interest in this case, the court wants to address the questions:
In the court's hands are protections for private property—people's homes in particular. The justices will also decide whether zombie laws found to violate constitutional protections continue to lead an undead existence, wreaking havoc, if people sign contracts binding them to statutes in effect at a specific point in time. Also resting on the outcome is the confidence of the plaintiffs, two immigrants from China who sought freedom in the United States.
"This is a country ruled by law, that is why I studied law in the first place, but this gave me some disillusionment," Cao, who has a law degree from New York University, told the Arizona Mirror.
Keep your eye out for the Arizona Supreme Court's ultimate ruling to see just how secure private property is, and just how safely you can dismiss laws ruled unconstitutional. While you're waiting, you might want to dig through the various contracts you've signed and ponder just how many statutes you've agreed to abide by without really knowing what they require or whether they're still in effect for the wider world, and for you in particular.
The post Can an Unconstitutional Law Force You To Sell Your Home to a Private Investor? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Neighbors can host backyard barbecues. Churches and schools can organize potlucks. And sports fans can have tailgate parties. But if anyone tries to sell homemade meals, code enforcers in most states will shut them down.
Hypothetical worst-case scenarios scare lawmakers, so they block home chefs from using their own kitchens to make money selling anything that requires refrigeration. Homemade pizzas, puddings, and pumpkin pies are off-limits. Even lemonade stands are illegal in some jurisdictions.
The rationale is simple: Better safe than sorry. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs used this excuse on April 18, 2023, when she vetoed a so-called "tamale bill" that would have created a new source of income for immigrants and other home-based chefs. "This bill would significantly increase the risk of food-borne illness," Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.
It sounds scary. Yet new data from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, dismantles the narrative. States that allow home chefs to sell perishable foods report no confirmed cases of relevant foodborne illness. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
To make sure, we inspected public records from states with the fewest restrictions on "cottage food," which refers to homemade food prepared for sale. The list includes California, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. Most other states and Washington, D.C., limit the cottage food menu to shelf-stable items like cookies and jams. But these seven states go further.
As champions of food freedom—the right to buy, sell, grow, and advertise locally sourced and prepared foods—they allow home cooks to sell perishable foods that require refrigeration.
Critics gasp at the boldness, but doomsday predictions about foodborne illness have never materialized. Across the seven states, public records show only two instances of suspected foodborne illness from homemade meals sold under those states' laws, and neither case was confirmed nor serious.
Exercising caution makes sense when dealing with the unknown, but policy makers no longer need to speculate about safety. People working in their own kitchens have proven they can handle perishable foods responsibly.
California chef Elijah Brown knows why. He sells homemade coleslaw, mashed-potato balls, tacos, briskets, ribs, and chicken at his loft apartment near San Francisco and has yet to receive a single complaint after more than two years of operation.
Part of the reason is the built-in controls that come with a home-based enterprise. Most of these businesses are small, so owners do not have to worry about unsupervised employees. Food processing plants, in contrast, must manage hundreds or thousands of workers—and supply chains that sometimes span hundreds or thousands of miles.
The second reason is the built-in transparency that comes with homemade food. Vendors at farmers markets and other community events literally stand behind their work. Their customers are not strangers, but neighbors. The result is maximum accountability, especially when combined with professional pride. "Every person who is a chef takes their food extremely seriously," Brown says.
Lonnie Thompson, who sells bell pepper relish, spicy asparagus, fresh salsa, and other perishable foods from his own kitchen in North Dakota, says homemade food producers do a good job policing themselves because they must rely on their customers for word-of-mouth marketing.
"None of us wants to get people sick," he says. "All it would take is one mistake, one time, and you're out of business."
While the risk of an outbreak is small, the potential for economic growth is big. Most cottage food producers are women, especially in rural communities. Many are also immigrants, and some are homebound with limited options for income. Thompson works with his wife, who cannot hold a regular office job due to disability. "If any part of our cottage kitchen goes down, that's part of her livelihood that disappears," he says.
Cottage food producers could benefit from the same freedom everywhere. Most jurisdictions have already taken the first step. All 50 states and Washington, D.C., allow the sale of at least shelf-stable cottage food. Some of these cottage food laws have been in place for over a decade, although restrictions remain. Some states—including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania—allow individual cities and counties to opt out. Other states severely limit where cottage foods can be sold and how much income producers can make.
The excuse for these restrictions is always public safety, which might have made sense when cottage food laws were new. But now the evidence is overwhelming. Wyoming legalized the sale of homemade perishable foods in 2015, and other states began following in 2017.
Lawmakers now have years of real-world evidence to draw upon. If they want to claim that homemade perishable food is unsafe for sale, they need more than hypothetical worst-case scenarios. They need proof of widespread harm, which does not exist.
What does exist is opportunity. States can join the food freedom movement with meaningful reform during the next legislative session. The results would be delicious.
The post Tamale Police Lose Their Excuse To Restrict Homemade Meals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How many movies have remained so relevant decades after their release as the 1994 college comedy PCU? Within days of my son's arrival at the University of Arizona in Tucson, he and his buddies watched the film as a curative to the politicized weirdness they experienced as part of orientation. Happily, the students' reactions to the movie suggest that tolerance and fun still enjoy a constituency among college students despite the best efforts of ideologically driven campus killjoys.
"It consisted of a group of students (I wasn't sure if they were undergrads or not) all wearing white polos and standing on a stage," my son, Anthony, told me via email about the required "Wildcat Way" presentation to incoming freshmen. "They appeared to be reading from a script. The structure of the presentation was that one of them would say something, and then the others would repeat a few key words, or would say something different in unison."
The main topics of the presentation were inclusivity (in the identitarian sense) and consent (in the ask before each stage of groping sense).
"In general the message was good," my son added. "But it was delivered in an extremely creepy way. For example when talking about consent they emphasized the word always, in unison saying it several times while getting louder each time. The creepiness of the whole event, combined with the fact that it was mandatory, and the security guards and metal detectors outside the building made it feel like I was trapped in some sort of cult brainwashing."
Note to campus administrators: If you want to persuade students of the righteousness of your messaging, don't stage something that looks like a dystopian rally.
Speaking of movies, the cult-y "Wildcat Way" wasn't what prompted the impromptu PCU viewing. That session came after several days of intermittent oddities among useful presentations, helpful meet-and-greets, and inevitable wastes of time. For instance, at one gathering there was a "consent booth" where students were coached through the "right" way to ask for sex at each stage of an encounter. Prizes were awarded to those who said the magic words that unlocked the gates to paradise.
Here, horndog. Have a biscuit!
Strictly speaking, Anthony and his classmates got off easy. However eye-roll-inducing the presentation, urging students to refrain from bigotry and rape is a defensible activity for a university housing many thousands of residents. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has documented, though, some colleges go much further, demanding ideological conformity and segregating students by race as part of politically charged orientation programs for incoming students.
"At a growing number of colleges and universities, students are directed or even required to attend orientation sessions whose outward purpose is to introduce incoming students to life in college," FIRE warns in introducing its Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus. "These sessions have evolved in Orwellian fashion in the hands of college administrators."
"The form of censorship with which this Guide is concerned is the affirmative form of censorship that goes beyond prohibiting 'bad' speech and ideas. It instead seeks to impose on a student, and coerce the student to adopt and to believe in, the 'approved' point of view advanced by the authorities."
In 2021, writing in the pages of Reason, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff called the current wave of campus intolerance and indoctrination "the Second Great Age of Political Correctness." It followed, after a pause, an earlier period in the '80s and '90s which inspired the movie my son and his buddies turned to for relief.
"The 1994 movie PCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone," Lukianoff noted. "Not because the movie was especially good—it wasn't. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke."
PCU was written by Adam Leff and Zak Penn, both of whom had recently graduated from Connecticut's Wesleyan University. At the time, Wesleyan served much the same role that, say, Middlebury (or Yale, or Stanford Law) fill today—a sort of Wuhan Institute of Virology of self-righteous intolerance. That provided much fodder for a movie about "causeheads" imposing their views on others.
"The more I examined the script and the more I did my homework about where culture was going on campuses, the more I thought, geez, there's an opportunity here," director Hart Bochner told Vice in a 2022 retrospective.
Unfortunately, after a brief intermission, the culture went there again.
"The whole woke movement, it's obviously an echo of those times," writer Adam Leff commented. "I certainly feel like we're on repeat, although this feels more universal. It goes to the workplace, it goes into politics, it goes into your everyday life in a way that the P.C. movement probably didn't."
That's why my son and a bunch of his friends crowded into the rec room in their dorm of their own accord to watch a 30-year-old anti-authoritarian comedy that remains as relevant—more so—as it was when it came out. We probably need a PCU for today, but Hollywood is in no condition to rise to the occasion and the 1994 film still does the job.
"The movie was well received, and most people seemed to enjoy themselves," my son told me.
PCU isn't available for streaming, but you can find it on DVD and, as always, The Pirate Bay is your friend.
As mentioned above, the University of Arizona is generally a rather open campus, weird orientation programs aside. It gets a "green light" rating on free speech from FIRE and is number 18 of 203 in free speech rankings. Earlier this month, all three of Arizona's public universities dropped the use of often ideologically charged diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring. My son and his classmates may suffer the occasional cult-like gathering, but they should remain free to voice dissent.
They should remain free. But they'll have to be vigilant.
"One lesson of the First Great Age of Political Correctness and the P.C. wars of the 1980s and '90s is that it was a huge mistake to think that because a movie like PCU skewered campus culture, the problem had already fixed itself," Lukianoff cautioned in 2021. "As a result, the problem was allowed to grow worse."
I have high hopes for my son's college experience. But if his campus follows so many others down the path of intolerance and indoctrination, he and his classmates seem inclined to mock rather than submit, and to defend standards of free thought and free speech. They'll have PCU for inspiration.
The post 30 Years Later, Politically Incorrect <i>PCU</i> Has a Lot To Say About College appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When I moved from New York City to rural northern Arizona, I faced two obstacles: my vocabulary and my manners. Spicy language and brusqueness were normal in the East Village, where I was unlikely to see many faces again. But they were impediments in a sparsely settled place where you run into the same people day after day. Life in a relatively rural area encourages nicer manners, so I learned to rein myself in.
The lesson doesn't come easily for everybody. "Could you do me a favor?" a Flagstaff bartender once asked me. "Could you go talk to that tourist for me? He's from New York, like you, and I just…can't. The beers are on me if you deal with him." I spoke to the guy, who resembled an exaggerated version of myself from a few years earlier. He wasn't deliberately rude, but he was in-your-face and sharp-tongued, reflecting manners shaped by faceless crowds.
"For centuries," Conor Friedersdorf wrote in 2010 for The Daily Dish, "one reason people have chosen to live in cities is the comparative privacy that they offer: unlike [in] the small town, where everybody knows your business and community ties are pervasive, the city dweller can cultivate strong community ties if he likes, even as he is an anonymous man in the crowd everywhere except his apartment elevator, his weeknight soccer league, and trivia night at the corner pub." Friedersdorf wondered if the internet would end that anonymity.
It is harder than it used to be to disguise our online identities, as anybody who has been doxxed over a tweet can attest. But the internet did allow "city dwellers to calibrate their community ties as they saw fit," in Friedersdorf's words. Anybody can find communities in the digital world. But small towns and rural areas make you interact with familiar and not always like-minded people when you step outside.
"Everybody knows everybody," retired journalist Bill Bishop noted in a 2022 Politico interview, describing La Grange, Texas, the rural town he moved to from Austin, the state capital, several years ago. "Everybody goes to the same church. Everybody goes to the same clubs. The town isn't big enough to have a liberal club over here and a conservative club over there. If you're working on X problem, you work with everybody, and so the size of the place mitigates against segregation."
Bishop is the author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2009). By moving from Austin to La Grange, he aimed to counter the phenomenon he had documented of self-selection into ideologically homogeneous communities. He wanted to put himself on the other side of the political and cultural divide in a search for understanding. He discovered that his new community was more blended and required greater contact with different people than the city he left behind. "The diversity of small towns is more interesting than the sort of mono-politics of the big city," he noted.
That diversity and familiarity can also be demanding. If you blow your stack at the clerk in the grocery store, it will be remembered. If you cheat somebody on a business deal, forget about future investors. And if you get caught frolicking on an exam table with one of your medical assistants, as a married local physician near here did a few years ago, call the movers; you're done.
That's not to say you won't find curmudgeons in rural areas; we're knee-deep in them. It's been 20 years since my buddy Bryan passed away of complications from a brain infection. (I wrote about him in 2013 in "Leave Room for the Mountain Men.") He was committed to an eccentric lifestyle, living off the grid for half the year. But Bryan knew how to behave in town; those who don't tend to drift and disappear when their reputations are tarnished. It's a lot easier to get away with misbehaving on Twitter than in the few places available to sell you food and beer.
Seeing the same faces every day isn't for everybody. Anonymity can be a powerful temptation, with its assurance that mistakes and lapses of temper won't follow you as baggage. But the era of the internet could use a little of the discipline, moderation, and tolerance imposed by a familiar, physical community.
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]]>Have we hit the high-water mark of social-justice loyalty pledges? The signs are encouraging for those of us who prefer to move through life without declaring fealty to political ideologies. Mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion statements (DEI), which have become increasingly de rigueur political litmus tests for hiring at academic institutions, suffered a significant setback last week when Arizona's public universities unceremoniously dumped their use going forward.
"The Arizona Board of Regents said Tuesday the state's public universities have dropped the use of diversity, equity and inclusion statements in job applications," Ray Stern of The Arizona Republic reported on August 8. "In statements to The Arizona Republic, spokespeople from the Board of Regents, which oversees the university system, and Arizona State University said that 'DEI statements' were 'never' required. However, examples of job postings shows this is not true."
"Not true" nicely summarizes matters. Arizona's Goldwater Institute issued a report earlier this year which found extensive use of DEI statements at the state's universities.
"As of fall 2022, Arizona's public universities now mandate diversity statements from applicants in over a quarter (28%) of job postings at the University of Arizona, nearly three-quarters (73%) of job postings at Northern Arizona University, and in more than four of five (81%) job postings at Arizona State University," according to Goldwater's The New Loyalty Oaths: How Arizona's Public Universities Compel Job Applicants to Endorse Progressive Politics, published in January. The report added that "Arizona's universities appear to be using DEI statements in an attempt to circumvent the state's constitutional prohibition against political litmus tests in public educational institutions."
DEI statements are controversial because they're widely seen as intended to screen out those not committed to progressive politics. "Vague or ideologically motivated DEI statement policies can too easily function as litmus tests for adherence to prevailing ideological views on DEI, penalize faculty for holding dissenting opinions on matters of public concern, and 'cast a pall of orthodoxy' over the campus," cautions the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
For example, the University of California, Berkeley's DEI scoring "punishes any candidate who expresses a dislike for race-conscious policies," according to John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars. Western Oregon University looks for an explicit commitment to "advancing racial equity and eliminating systemic racism."
By contrast, maintaining a culture that encourages open discussion and a range of ideas played a center role on July 31 at the annual meeting of the Arizona Board of Regents' Committee on Free Expression.
"All three of Arizona's public universities maintain the highest green light rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), recognizing the commitment of the board and the universities to free speech," the committee's draft report boasts. "Furthermore, all three universities have adopted the Chicago Statement, the free speech policy statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago."
The report detailed free speech activities (and a few controversies) on the campuses of Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. All three institutions committed themselves to diversity of thought and institutional neutrality regarding speech.
Within the next week, the Board of Regents dropped requirements for DEI statements in hiring.
"The use of DEI statements has never been required by ABOR or Arizona public university policy but some university departments have requested statements in job postings," Sarah Harper, vice president of communications for the Arizona Board of Regents, told me by email. "After reviewing the Goldwater report, the Regents and the university presidents discussed ways to improve our human resource practices in this area and the presidents are taking steps to make those improvements."
"This is a huge victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment," Goldwater Institute President Victor Riches said as the organization took an earned victory lap. "The Goldwater Institute is continuing to show the nation how to defeat the destructive ideologies that are crippling colleges and universities."
Goldwater points to similar pushback against DEI policies at state universities in Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas where DEI statements have been dropped and related bureaucracies dismantled. Florida, unfortunately, has swung the pendulum too far in the other direction: State law doesn't just ban loyalty oaths but interferes in what professors can teach.
"The Florida Act abridges the First Amendment rights of a vast range of speakers—'woke' and otherwise—by interfering with university professors' ability to have honest and thorough classroom discussions with their students," argues UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and several of his students in an amicus brief opposing Florida's Stop W.O.K.E. Act. "It chills discussions on speech that is directly related to course content. And the illusory supposed safe harbor for 'objective' speech cannot provide constitutionally adequate protection."
Still, ideological neutrality and Florida's overreaction taken together mark quite a change from what had become a growing tide of required DEI statements at the nation's institutions of higher education. A 2022 American Association of University Professors survey found that DEI criteria are included in consideration for tenure at 21.5 percent of colleges and universities and at 45.6 percent of large institutions of higher education. Even if some of that represents sincere efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than impose litmus tests, high-profile misuse of DEI statements creates an expectation on the part of academic job seekers that they must proclaim loyalty to a specific ideology in order to gain employment. Dropping DEI statements removes that pressure from the job market.
As further evidence that ideological screening is losing favor, the ratings agency Standard & Poors is stepping back from similar considerations in the assessment of corporate creditworthiness.
"S&P Global will stop using alphanumeric ESG scores when assessing credit quality, an about-turn that comes amid a backlash against environmental, social, and governance investing," reports Barron's. "ESG investing has been under increasing scrutiny since last year, as conservative lawmakers and attorneys general claim that non-pecuniary considerations such as environmental and social issues would hurt investor returns."
And corporations are shedding their own DEI bureaucracies as they prove to be anything but the political insulation executives had sought, but instead become lightning rods for controversy.
"Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs," notes The Wall Street Journal. "Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments."
Universities retreating from DEI statements appear to be part of a larger reassessment of the wisdom of subjecting all areas of life to one ideological group's view of how society should be viewed and reshaped.
The post Arizona's Public Universities Drop Controversial DEI Statements for Job Applicants appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While experts applaud nuclear power for its ability to reduce carbon emissions, the Biden administration is restricting the mining of a key input in the process.
On Tuesday, Biden announced the formal designation of the 917,618-acre Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument to prevent public lands held sacred by local Native American tribes from hosting new uranium mines. New uranium mines have been prohibited in the area since 2012 due to an Obama administration moratorium that was set to expire in 2032. Biden's move has made that ban permanent.
According to a senior administration official, the area hosts 1.3 percent of the country's known uranium reserves. But this figure doesn't tell the whole story.
"Maybe if you're trying to count molecules then it's only 1.3 percent, but I'd say it's 100 percent of America's high-grade uranium deposits locked up in the monument," says Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels—a uranium-mining company that owns the Pinyon Plain mine in the Grand Canyon area. "And grade typically corresponds to lower-cost, more-accessible, and lower-environmental-impact mining. For every ton of ore you pull out of the ground, there is more uranium in that ton."
By prohibiting uranium mining, the administration is looking to preserve groundwater near the Grand Canyon. "Creeks and streams [flow] into the Colorado River, supporting farms and ranches across the Southwest and bringing clean water to 40 million Americans," said Biden during a Tuesday speech in Arizona.
"The area's unique hydrology has supported Indigenous peoples and other forms of life since time immemorial and is essential in providing drinking water and supporting agricultural production and other services for millions of people across the Southwest," noted a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
However, the claim that uranium mining near the Grand Canyon contaminates the water doesn't hold up to scrutiny. A 2021 study by the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 206 groundwater sites in the Grand Canyon region and found that "195 sites (95%) had maximum observed uranium concentrations less than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Maximum Contaminant Level of 30 µg/L for drinking water."
"Some uranium mines, particularly the ones that were used for nuclear weapons production, were not operated well and leave a legacy impact," explains Adam Stein, director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute. "However, modern uranium mining is very different, in both technology and regulatory requirements, from the uranium mines of the past."
A major political factor at play for Biden is the support of local Native American communities. These communities played an important role in helping Biden win Arizona during the 2020 election. "It is likely a strategic decision to focus on the Grand Canyon," Gabriel Sanchez, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told The New York Times. "Many Native Americans do not vote based on party, but on which candidates will do the most to advance the interests of Native American communities."
"I fail to see any rationale in this proposal beyond a selfish political agenda that locks away the very resources we depend on for our daily lives," said Rep. Bruce Westerman (R–Ark.), chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, in a statement.
Biden's authority to designate national monuments derives from the Antiquities Act of 1906, a comprehensive statute that "authorizes the President to proclaim national monuments on federal lands that contain historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest," allowing the president to regulate how the land is used. The new monument is the fifth of Biden's presidency.
"Although regulations on land use have not caused significant issues with uranium mining in the past, over time, more and more areas have been subject either to new mining bans or the use of national monuments to prevent new mining on a permanent basis," notes Stein.
The new monument will have a detrimental effect on the U.S. uranium industry, which has struggled in recent years. After experiencing a boom from the 1940s to the 1980s, domestic uranium production fell when prices dropped after the Chernobyl disaster. According to the World Nuclear Association, U.S. uranium mining production decreased from 1792 tonnes U in 2013 to 75 in 2022.
This production is essential for nuclear power. "Today, nuclear provides about 20 percent of all electricity in the United States and about 50 percent of our carbon-free electricity," notes Moore. "And that's all powered by uranium."
The possibility of the U.S. applying sanctions on Russian uranium has made the industry's need for domestic mining more urgent. When the U.S. threatened sanctions on Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation in 2022, the price of uranium skyrocketed to about $60 per pound.
"The United States imports about 50 percent of our uranium in U.S. nuclear power plants from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and Russia has their hands on quite a bit of Kazakh uranium production," explains Moore. "As we're trying to reduce our reliance on Russia, we should be trying to develop our own domestic sources of uranium."
If the Biden administration is serious about building clean energy projects, hindering an industry that's vital to the production of nuclear power is the wrong approach.
The post Biden's New Grand Canyon Monument Will Hamper Clean Energy Production appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The largest semiconductor manufacturer on the planet agreed to open factories in the U.S. instead of abroad. The company wants the government to pick up the tab for the difference in cost, even as it postpones production.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) makes semiconductor chips found in iPhones, MacBooks, and computer graphics cards from manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia. In December 2022, Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Joe Biden visited Arizona to announce that TSMC would build a new factory in the state while upgrading and expanding another. "Apple had to buy all the advanced chips from overseas" before, Biden said. "Now we're going to do more of their supply chain here at home." The company pledged to spend as much as $40 billion on the projects.
TSMC had teased the project as far back as May 2020, stating in a press release that it hoped to build a factory "with the mutual understanding and commitment to support from the U.S. federal government and the State of Arizona."
As it turns out, "support" doesn't come cheap: In June 2020, just a month after announcing its intent to build in Arizona, the company reportedly asked the federal government to "make up TSMC's running costs difference between the United States and Taiwan."
In April 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that TSMC sought between $7 billion to $8 billion in funding from the CHIPS Act, a $52.7 billion pot of cash earmarked specifically toward incentives for semiconductor manufacturers. It also sought an additional $6 billion to $7 billion in grants from the Commerce Department. If fully approved, the government would be on the hook for up to $15 billion, more than one-third of the total projected cost.
Now, however, TSMC says that it will delay the start of production in the Arizona facility until at least 2025, citing lower-than-expected revenues and difficulty finding skilled workers. The company already faced delays last year over a lack of skilled workers.
Nonetheless, the Journal reports that "TSMC faces significantly higher costs in the U.S. compared with Taiwan. [TSMC Chairman Mark] Liu said TSMC is counting on U.S. help to cover that cost gap for about five years."
Given the company's difficulties, it should be a relief that the U.S. has so far not acceded to TSMC's demands. But there are plenty of things the government can do that would have far-reaching benefits beyond just one company.
In a January 2023 earnings call, TSMC Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said that while he couldn't give an exact number for the financial discrepancy between building in the U.S. and Taiwan, "the major reason for the cost gap is the construction cost of building and facilities, which can be 4 to 5x greater" in the U.S.
Of course, part of that gap can be explained by factors like the difference in the cost of living—by one estimate, over twice as much in the U.S. as in Taiwan. But in November 2022, a month before Biden announced the project, TSMC wrote in a public response to questions from the Commerce Department that it doesn't "see access to capital as a significant barrier to growth in the US"—rather, specific factors making the project more expensive included "federal regulatory requirements that increase project scope and cost."
Rather than forking over billions of dollars to a single company, the Biden administration should take steps to ease regulatory burdens on expanding companies. Similarly, plenty of firms could benefit from a greater number of high-skilled workers, like those proficient in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. And yet foreign nationals who graduate in STEM fields from American universities face near-impossible challenges to stay in the country and most end up going elsewhere. Congress could help that situation by raising the number of green cards that can be issued annually.
With TSMC's delay, Biden and Congress have an opportunity. TSMC admits that its issues are bureaucratic, not financial, so there's no need to shovel more money at a wealthy company. Instead, lawmakers should get rid of cumbersome regulations and create a more welcoming environment for both businesses and workers.
The post Taiwanese Company Demands U.S. Taxpayers Cover the Higher Costs of Making Semiconductors in Arizona appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge on Friday permanently banned Arizona from enforcing a new law restricting how closely people may film police, finding that the law violates a core First Amendment right to record law enforcement officers.
U.S. District Judge for the District of Arizona John J. Tuchi wrote that the law, which made it a misdemeanor offense to film a police officer within 8 feet after receiving a verbal warning, "prohibits or chills a substantial amount of First Amendment protected activity and is unnecessary to prevent interference with police officers given other Arizona laws in effect."
The ruling is no surprise; Tuchi had already issued a temporary injunction last year suspending enforcement of the law in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and multiple media organizations. And supporters of the law could find no one to defend it on its merits in court—neither the Arizona Attorney General's Office, Maricopa County law enforcement, nor the state Legislature that passed the law.
The law, passed last year, made it a misdemeanor offense to continue filming police activity from within 8 feet of an officer after receiving a verbal warning. There were exceptions for filming the police in a private residence, during a traffic stop, and if the person filming was the subject of the police encounter. But the law qualified those exceptions, saying they applied only if the person recording is "not interfering with lawful police actions" or "unless a law enforcement officer determines that the person is interfering in the law enforcement activity or that it is not safe to be in the area and orders the person to leave the area."
The bill's sponsor, state Rep. John Kavanagh (R–Fountain Hills), wrote in a USA Today op-ed that he introduced it "because there are groups hostile to the police that follow them around to videotape police incidents, and they get dangerously close to potentially violent encounters."
There were several similar bills restricting the ability to film the police introduced in statehouses in the South Carolina and Florida legislatures as backlash to the George Floyd protests of 2020.
Civil liberties groups and media outlets opposed the legislation as soon as it was introduced, arguing it was overly broad, vague, and would chill the free speech rights of citizens and reporters.
The right to film the police has been upheld by multiple federal appeals courts as a fundamental First Amendment activity. Last July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that a Colorado police officer did not have qualified immunity from a lawsuit alleging that he illegally tried to stop a man from filming a DUI traffic stop. The court ruled that a reasonable officer would have known that he or she was interfering with protected First Amendment activity.
The Phoenix New Times reported that attorneys for the Arizona House and Senate warned lawmakers that there were potential constitutional issues with the law. However, the Republican-led Legislature passed it anyway, and then-Gov. Doug Ducey signed it into law.
When the lawsuit hit the docket, though, no one wanted to defend the new law. Former Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declined to show up, as did the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and lawyers for the state Legislature.
The ACLU of Arizona announced earlier this month that it had reached a settlement agreement with Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes to ban enforcement of the law and end the lawsuit.
"This settlement will ensure every Arizonan's fundamental rights are protected and people are not criminalized exercising their First Amendment rights," ACLU staff attorney K.M. Bell said in a press release. "Recording police officers is an important tool for holding law enforcement accountable to the public they are sworn to serve. We hope this settlement will deter the Arizona state legislature from continuing to pass flagrantly unconstitutional laws against the advice of their own attorneys."
The post Federal Judge Strikes Down Arizona Law Limiting Ability To Record Police appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January 2023, just days after her inauguration, Arizona's new Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, used her first State of the State speech to bemoan the high and rising price of housing.
"Our state is no stranger to the boom-and-bust housing cycles—but this is something wholly different," she said. "Three Arizona cities—Tucson, Mesa, and Phoenix—have seen some of the highest rent increases in the nation. The number of individuals experiencing homelessness has risen significantly in recent years."
The moment seemed ripe for reform.
Just a few weeks later, however, the new governor killed a bill that would have eventually zeroed out about $300 million a year in taxes people pay on their housing costs. In February, Hobbs vetoed legislation that would have barred local governments from charging taxes on the rents tenants pay.
Ending Arizona's quixotic local rent taxes has long been a goal of the state's Republicans, who argue they cost renters hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Soaring housing costs and big municipal budget surpluses even brought around a couple of Democrats in the polarized Legislature.
But those savings to taxpayers also meant $300 million of red ink for Arizona's local governments. Eliminating rent taxes was a non-starter for Arizona localities' influential state lobbying arm, the Arizona League of Cities and Towns.
"This bill does not provide meaningful relief, will likely harm those it's purported to help, and will likely only accomplish providing a tax break for landlords," said league president and Yuma Mayor Douglas Nicholls in a press release distributed by Hobbs' office.
According to the author of the rent tax legislation, Arizona Sen. Steve Kaiser (R–Phoenix), the league's opposition sealed his bill's fate. "It's 100 percent" the league, he told Reason in February. "They have a lot of control and influence over the governor right now."
With the exception of Hawaii, which doesn't have municipalities, every state in the country has an association of city governments dedicated to influencing state policy.
Funded by dues from city budgets and controlled by elected city officials, these organizations have exerted formidable influence on state-level lawmaking, almost always with the singular goal of preserving municipalities' maximum autonomy to tax and regulate as they see fit.
And because the dues-paying municipalities are public entities funded by tax revenues, they have done so at considerable public expense.
Over the past decade, these leagues of cities have increasingly sparred with free market activists trying to put state guardrails on municipal regulation and conservative state legislators eager to overturn the policies of large, liberal cities.
Meanwhile, the country's widening housing crisis has opened a new front in this war over local control.
During COVID, millions of Americans left expensive coastal cities for life in the Sunbelt and Mountain West. The sudden inflows to Texas, Colorado, Montana, and beyond accelerated already rising home prices and rents. Affordability problems that were once thought safely contained in New York and San Francisco have spread to the rest of the country.
In response, a bipartisan mix of policy makers is taking a fresh, critical look at how local housing regulations are gumming up the new construction needed to moderate these sudden price spikes.
In state capitols across the American West, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers have introduced very similar bills that would override existing local housing regulations in favor of more permissive state rules. These state policies would streamline the approval of new homes, allow more units to be built on less land, and legalize less expensive types of housing.
These bills are supported by an oddball coalition of left-leaning housing affordability advocates, right-leaning property rights supporters, environmentalists, and libertarian policy wonks.
At the state level, these reforms are always opposed by taxpayer-funded leagues of cities. State-level zoning preemption represents an existential threat to their members and their mission.
Leagues of cities have proven remarkably effective at besting bipartisan pro-housing reforms with the argument that local governments know their communities best, so local control should prevail—housing crisis or no.
Home Rulers
War and peace and national economic policy are still decided in Washington, D.C. But localities exercise considerable control over the fine details of the average American's day-to-day life. Whether you can start a small business in your garage, get a straw with your soda, or shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July is determined by city hall.
It wasn't always this way. For much of the country's early history, local governments were comparatively toothless. The U.S. Constitution gives them no powers or protections. Anything mayors and city councilors wanted to do, even just pave the streets, required them to ask state legislators.
But around the turn of the 20th century, municipal governments were rescued from obscurity by the "home rule" revolution.
The idea was "there's some natural domain of policy that cities have and can be defined by constitutions," says Yale Law School professor David Schleicher. "The progressives pushed this form of home rule to rationalize government. They also hated state legislatures, which they thought were super, super corrupt."
In the 1950s, the National League of Cities—then the American Municipal Association—spread a model home-rule law that continues to set the basic relationship between state and local governments today. Schleicher describes it as "great powers for cities to do things but no protections against override" from state governments.
Sweeping powers to tax and regulate combined with the ever-present threat that state lawmakers might take those powers away gives cities and their state-level associations a powerful incentive to lobby.
In her 2021 book When Cities Lobby, New York University political scientist Julia Payson notes that local governments are often the largest spenders of lobbying dollars at state capitals. For instance, from 1999 to 2014, local governments in California spent up to $100 million per legislative session* of taxpayer money on lobbying, more than any other interest group. They outstripped influential labor unions' lobbying spending by a 3–1 ratio.
The purpose of this influence operation is simple and explicit.
"That deep desire for local decision-making is the common thread that continues to link municipal officials across time, geography, and political ideology," wrote Clarence Anthony, the executive director and CEO of the National League of Cities, in 2020.
Payson is more succinct when she writes that cities lobby primarily for "more money, greater autonomy, fewer mandates, and increased institutional power."
Individual municipalities collectively spend the bulk of lobbying dollars. But their efforts are often directed at competing against other cities for state funding for local projects. Leagues of cities play a crucial role in fighting for cities' interests in local control generally.
Payson's book notes that state municipal associations collectively represent 95 percent of all municipal governments. In each association's charter is a commitment to two goals: ensuring state funding for cities and opposing legislation reducing local authority. It's less common for charters to mention specific policy goals like reducing homelessness or protecting public employee benefits.
In one sense, leagues of cities are no different from the Farm Bureau, the Teamsters, or any other interest group that tries to influence policies to the benefit of its members.
What makes them distinct, and controversial, is they're controlled by local elected officials using public resources for their lobbying efforts.
"This isn't some private entity, pursuing private interests. It's literally a collection of local governments that exists for advocating for local governments, not its citizens," says Jon Riches, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based free market think tank.
Riches notes that employees of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns draw from the state's public pension system. At the same time, Riches complains that they don't have to respond to public records requests like a normal public entity. In that respect, they are treated like a private organization.
The ability to draw from public resources makes them a powerful lobbying group at the state level, where interest groups are often less well-funded and organized, says Schleicher.
The Arizona league has an annual revenue of about $3.4 million, with $2.2 million of that coming from taxpayer-funded dues from its municipal members. That makes it about half the size of the influential Arizona Education Association (the teachers union) and about the same size as the Arizona Multi-Family Housing Association (which represents developers).
That comparison probably understates its influence at the state Capitol given just how focused the league is on lobbying state legislation. The Arizona league employs three in-house staff primarily focused on legislative issues. In FY 2023, it also spent $330,000 (or 10 percent of its budget) on contract lobbying and consulting services.
"The challenge with taxpayers funding lobbyists is that they're being forced to pay for services that typically run contrary to their interests," Chuck DeVore, then-vice president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Reason in 2017. Lobbyists with the Texas Municipal League, he says, "invariably lobby for bigger government, more borrowing, higher spending, and more regulation." Leagues of cities are dedicated almost exclusively to fighting limits on their taxing and regulatory authority.
The Goldwater Institute has fought the Arizona League of Cities and Towns on a number of policy issues, including bills the institute has sponsored to protect home-based businesses, prevent municipal employees from engaging in union activism on the job, and regulate short-term rentals.
League staff themselves say they play a vital role in the public policy-making process. They offer state lawmakers the invaluable perspective of local governments on how best to respond to local issues.
"We represent the governments that are closest to the people," says Tom Savage, legislative director of the Arizona League of Cities and Towns. "When we come down to engage with our legislators on issues that they're considering, we try to inform them of the decisions they're making and how they're going to impact their constituents at the local level."
Responding to criticisms about transparency, Savage argues that the Arizona league is exceptionally open about its operations. "Everything we do when we talk to our 25-member executive board, all of those conversations are occurring in an open meeting format. They're open to the public, we post our agendas online, we post our minutes online," he says.
Leagues of cities strive to appear bipartisan. They represent big liberal cities and small conservative towns as local governments first.
That task has become more difficult over the past decade. Growing Republican strength in state legislatures, and their waning influence in municipal governments, has seen conservatives get increasingly on board with state preemption.
In a 2020 research brief, the National League of Cities notes that laws preempting minimum wage increases, local gun control measures, expanded anti-discrimination laws, and more have spread like wildfire over the past decade. State leagues' mission increasingly shifted to stopping these conservative initiatives.
Saving them from becoming a liberal influence group by default is the most partisan-scrambled issue of all, one that up until now cities have had the most authority over: housing.
States vs. Cities
In January, at a meeting of the Montana House of Representatives Local Government Committee, Rep. Katie Zolnikov (R–Billings) rose to make the case for her bill to create a minimum lot size of 2,500 square feet across the state.
The bill was designed to allow smaller lots than many Montana localities currently allow. Larger lot requirements drive up home prices by forcing builders to use more land per house.
Putting some state-level "sideboards" on excessive minimum lot size regulations would help bring Montana's spiking COVID-era prices back down to earth, Zolnikov told the committee. "This gives landowners more freedoms to develop their property in a way that serves the demand for their community."
There's a growing consensus in policy circles that housing is expensive because zoning regulations make it difficult to build more of it. Most of those regulations are imposed by local governments. In response, some advocates have pushed for state legislatures to override local regulations with lighter, more pro-growth state zoning rules.
The move toward preemption has scrambled partisan factions—and the weird new divide was apparent at the Montana committee hearing.
Testifying in favor of Zolnikov's bill were representatives from the local free market think tank the Frontier Institute, the left-leaning housing advocacy group Shelter WF, the right-leaning Americans for Prosperity, a local environmental advocacy group, and a former Democratic lawmaker.
The opposition was far more selective. It included only a spokesperson for the Montana League of Cities and Towns, a small-town mayor who was also a director with the league, several local government employees, and a member of the state's city planning association.
Opponents' arguments against the bill focused almost exclusively on the merits of local control of housing policy.
"It shouldn't be forced upon every community regardless of local circumstances. I'm not joking when I tell you that has only been done in California under Gov. Gavin Newsom," said the representative from the Montana league.
This unified local opposition proved persuasive. Zolnikov's bill officially died in the Legislature in March.
"Unfortunately, virtually always, it's leagues of cities organizations that are fighting to kill these bills that would put guardrails around local planning," says Nolan Gray, research director for housing advocacy group California YIMBY (and occasional Reason contributor), which stands for Yes In My Back Yard.
Gray testified in favor of Zolnikov's bill at that January hearing. A few months later, he testified in support of Senate Bill 23-213 in Colorado, a bill crafted by the state's Democratic Gov. Jared Polis that would require cities to allow a wider range of dwellings, with a focus on increasing density.
At that hearing, the bill's supporters included a diverse array of environmentalists, YIMBY housing advocates, homebuilders, and business interests. Its opponents were almost uniformly local governments and associations representing local governments.
When Kaiser's own sweeping housing reform bill, S.B. 1117—which would have likewise allowed accessory dwelling units (ADUs) everywhere, shrunk minimum lot sizes, pared back height limits, and required faster issuing of permits—was up for its first hearing in February in Arizona, the opposition was once again local officials and the state's league of cities and towns.
Leagues of cities argue that housing is everywhere and always a local issue and should be decided by local governments with local knowledge.
"There's nothing more local than what happens in your neighborhood," says Savage, the Arizona League of Cities legislative director. "There's no way a state law can reflect the individual needs of these communities."
At the Montana hearing, the state's league of cities representative noted that the Legislature could end up approving lot size reform for the whole state after only a few brief committee hearings.
"In our communities, the discussion about whether or not to reduce or eliminate minimum sizes would literally take hours and hours, public meeting after public meeting. You'd be up late into the night having discussions about impacts to the local community in terms of health and safety [and] services," she said.
For supporters of state-level preemption, routing around all that process is a feature, not a bug. What leagues of cities say is crucial local knowledge, YIMBY zoning reformers argue are often just bad local incentives.
Local governments are often captured by anti-growth residents who are willing to keep regulatory caps on housing if it means quieter streets, less construction noise, higher property values, and less change generally. If that drives up the cost of housing for the state generally, so be it.
"There are just certain types of land use regulations that we know local governments abuse," says Gray. "It's gotten us into a place where many cities are not building enough housing. The most affluent neighborhoods and towns are building virtually no housing."
Because the politics of zoning reform are so scrambled, with Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue, nonpartisan groups like leagues of cities can punch above their already considerable weight. That's particularly true for a policy area that's long been assumed to be the exclusive domain of cities.
"They have this particular source of authority that comes from sounding neutral. The fact that it sounds so anodyne," says Schleicher. "They have this added benefit which is that they're nonpartisan. They are a convenient tool for people opposed to something to point to and say 'the league of cities opposes it.'"
The confusing and highly technical nature of a lot of zoning policy gives the league, and its assumed expertise, a lot of additional influence, which critics argue they abuse.
Kaiser says there have been two primary reasons people lined up against the Arizona housing bill.
The first is "people don't understand the bill," he says. The other is "they just hate it because they're somehow associated with or close to the league of cities and towns here. They're a no because [the league] told them to be a no. They trust them."
Leagues of cities will occasionally make other policy arguments against state zoning reforms that go beyond preserving municipal authority.
At a hearing on Kaiser's S.B. 1117, a league of cities representative complained that his bill did nothing to guarantee that newly legalized housing would be affordable. Nevertheless, the league is currently opposing a bill that would override zoning controls only for affordable apartments near rail transit lines.
The point is local control. And local control almost always means more control—more regulations, more restrictions, more rules and processes that ultimately make housing more scarce and more expensive.
One can see this clearly in the advocacy of the National League of Cities. The organization has produced reports criticizing "NIMBY politics" and pushed updated model home rule laws that would all but ban states from routing around those NIMBY politics to do the upzoning themselves.
At the state level, leagues of cities have endorsed legislation and reforms that limit public hearings on individual developments and restrict private citizens' and third parties' abilities to challenge local governments' approval of housing. They also often support or are neutral on bills that require them to assess housing needs in their community.
These bills are one example of where protecting the powers of local governments aligns with more housing production. League support for those bills nevertheless cuts against their claims that they're merely interested in preserving citizen input into local affairs.
Situations where leagues find themselves on the side of more housing are still the exception, not the rule.
Kaiser's housing bill made it out of committee with bipartisan support but ultimately died on the Arizona Senate floor. Some of the policies from that bill have been included in other pieces of legislation that the league continues to oppose.
Colorado's zoning reform bill failed in the face of unified Republican opposition and a Democratic caucus split over the idea of state preemption.
Kevin Bommer of the Colorado Municipal League tells Reason his organization could come around to supporting the bill if the state-level preemptions were replaced with a voluntary menu of policy options.
Such a version of the bill managed to pass the Colorado Senate but ran into opposition in the House, where members insisted on preemption measures being included.
Hitting this impasse, Colorado Public Radio said the bill "imploded" in its final hours.
Despite League opposition, the Montana Legislature managed to pass a number of housing reforms, including bills requiring local governments to allow duplexes, triplexes, granny flats, and residential development in commercial zones. A bill supported by housing reformers and the league that limits public hearings on individual development projects also passed.
A League of Their Own
Since their inception, critics of leagues of cities have been trying to take away their tax funding.
In the early and mid-20th century, a flurry of taxpayer lawsuits in California, Ohio, and Arizona challenged the legality or constitutionality of spending city funds on league dues.
In 1944, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled—in a case brought by a Phoenix resident against his city—that league activities weren't a public purpose and, therefore, couldn't be funded by municipal tax revenue. That defunded the state league for four years, before a 1948 Supreme Court decision restored cities' ability to spend tax dollars on the league.
In that latter decision, the court ruled that because the purposes of the league included the improved functioning of municipal government, its purposes were sufficiently "public" to warrant taxpayer funding. And if the league of cities went beyond those purposes, then the judiciary could step in again and revoke its funding.
That hasn't happened. Instead, critics of tax-funded government lobbying have had to take their case to leagues' home turf: state legislatures.
The preemption fights of the 2010s have sparked perennial, unsuccessful legislative efforts to eliminate taxpayer funding of lobbying, including the funding of municipal associations.
"If you're a [lobbyist] in this state, we think you ought not get more taxpayer dollars to lobby for more government. We think you ought not get tax dollars for anything," says James Quintero of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has supported several bills banning public funds from being used for lobbying over the years.
"I think that would fundamentally change the game in a hugely positive way. You would remove this artificial advocacy that exists and is growing government. You would return the people's house back to the average citizen," he says.
A Texas bill prohibiting taxpayer dollars from going to lobbying activities passed the state Senate but stalled in the House this year. In Arizona, bills to prohibit league staff from receiving state retirement benefits and to prohibit taxpayer funds from going to lobbying activities both failed.
Schleicher, the Yale professor, is critical of these efforts to totally defund municipal leagues. He says that these groups often support bad policies, including unfettered local control of housing policy. But in a world where local governments get their powers from state governments, it makes sense for them to have organized representation at the state level.
"Cities need to work with state governments. And they can't work with them if they can't talk to them," he says. "In a complex intergovernmental negotiating system, the idea that you'd have someone working in a state Capitol just seems not crazy at all."
While it's tempting to blame league advocacy for the failure of every bill that would remove or relax zoning restrictions, it's also true that public support for these policies is often weak. Organized taxpayer-funded opposition is a headwind on policies that are already a tough sell.
One YIMBY tactic is to encourage housing advocates to show up to planning commission hearings and neighborhood association meetings to make the case for individual projects and more housing generally.
The idea was that these traditional forums for NIMBY politics could be won over to the pro-housing side if people with better ideas showed up. Perhaps something similar can happen with leagues of cities.
In March, the housing policy committee for the League of California Cities met to consider S.B. 4, a bill that would make it easier for churches to build affordable housing on their land. Because it would override local zoning restrictions, one would assume the league would end up opposing it.
Instead, the committee deadlocked on several motions either opposing the bill or demanding amendments to weaken it. It was the first time that the league had deadlocked in this way. (The bill has since passed out of the California Senate.)
"I think there's a transitional moment. The league has pretty much always taken the position of opposing most major housing bills," says Sergio Lopez, a city councilmember in Campbell, California, and a member of the league's housing policy committee who voted against the anti-S.B. 4 resolutions. "There's a recognition that there's a constituency, a majority in my community, [that believe] that there's a need for more housing, and what we've done in the past is not going to cut it," he says.
Leagues of cities are unusual interest groups. They're publicly funded organizations representing public officials. That gives them great influence over the policy-making process and incentivizes them to push for greater government control at the local level.
It also makes them vulnerable.
Unlike almost every other interest group, leagues of cities' lobbying arms can have the majority of their funding taken away by state legislators. Changing political views on housing could see their membership replaced with officers and board members more amenable to state zoning reform.
In wars over zoning policy, leagues of cities are both participants and, increasingly, battlefields themselves.
*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated how much money local governments in California spend on lobbying.
The post NIMBY Cities Are Using Your Tax Dollars To Lobby Against New Housing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For over three years, Maria—not her real name—has been working in one of Arizona's most popular illicit trades. She makes good money, she can set her schedule to maximize time with family, and her customers are hooked on her product.
But Maria isn't a liquor bootlegger or a drug dealer—she's a tamale seller, part of a beloved economy that is technically illegal in Arizona.
"I was working as a housekeeper but they paid me very little and sometimes I couldn't get to pick up my son from school," she tells Reason. "I've always liked to cook a lot and I've always been told that I cook delicious [food] so I said to myself, why not?" In January 2020, her mother lent her some cash to launch her home business. She began making and selling dozens of homemade red chile tamales each week, always freshly made, "never reheated."
The happy comments poured in: "'Your tamales are [the] bomb,' 'I had never tried tamales so delicious,' 'I had not found tamales like the ones made by my mother who has already passed away,' and so many…that fill me with satisfaction," says Maria.
"Many people who work all day and come home hungry and tired without wanting to cook," she says, "what they want is to arrive and eat homemade food and well, here we are!"
State restrictions haven't kept tamale sellers from entering the market or buyers from consuming the product. Scroll through Facebook or stroll through a strip mall parking lot in southern Arizona and you're bound to come across a tamale peddler.
Arizona nearly brought this lively tamale black market above ground last month. H.B. 2509, a bill that would've legalized the sale of "potentially hazardous" homemade goods containing perishable ingredients, passed the state House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. But Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs was having none of it.
"The bill would significantly increase the risk of food-borne illness by expanding the ability of cottage food vendors to sell high-risk foods," she wrote in her veto letter. "It fails to establish sufficient minimum standards for inspection or certification of home-based food businesses." Hobbs cited "hazardous chemicals" and "rodent or insect infestation" as potential dangers.
Arizonans have been legally allowed to sell "cottage foods"—goods prepared in a noncommercial kitchen—for over a decade. That law is limited, though. A home chef can sell cookies, fruit pies, and muffins under Arizona's current cottage food regime, but not salsas, tamales, or dried fruit. "Cakes with hard icings or frostings" are allowed, but "cakes with custard filling" are not. Any chef who wants to sell food products "considered potentially hazardous" has to navigate more onerous steps like getting a license from the county environmental health department and producing all food in a sanctioned commercial kitchen.
Authorities point to health risks to justify those regulations. Tom Herrmann, public information officer for the Arizona Department of Health Services (AZDHS), tells Reason that "about 128,000 people each year are hospitalized nationally because of a foodborne illness, and an estimated 3,000 people die." But he notes that "the cause of an outbreak is not always clear."
"Because food prepared outside of a regulated food preparation setting, such as a private residence, is typically small-scale, outbreaks due to these foods often go undetected and unreported," Herrmann says.
Drawing from a 2014 Center for Science in the Public Interest report, Time magazine noted that 44 percent of foodborne illness outbreaks could be traced to restaurants, while 24 percent happened at home. "That means that you're twice as likely to get food poisoning eating at a restaurant than you are at home," it said. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that supports deregulation in the cottage food industry, has said that "critics who talk about the risk of food-borne illness give hypothetical examples of what could go wrong because real-world cases are rare or nonexistent."
"My gut says HB2509 would have been a net [public health] benefit," Will Humble, former director of the AZDHS, tweeted last month. After he helped to create Arizona's current cottage food regime back in 2008, "some in the environmental health world thought the sky would fall. It did not," wrote Humble. Instead, "it's been wildly successful and a big public health benefit by improving [social determinants of health] & I believe #HB2509 would have too."
There were nearly 15,000 registered home chefs in Arizona as of March 2023, according to the Common Sense Institute's Arizona chapter. But the veto means that many more Arizonans—Maria included—will have to keep laboring in the shadows. Paul Avelar, managing attorney at the Institute for Justice's Arizona office, anticipates that the veto "will hurt thousands of hardworking Arizonans who simply want to make an honest living or supplement their income."
That will come down disproportionately hard on women—the Institute for Justice has noted that 83 percent of cottage food producers are women—and immigrants, many of whom sell homemade food to begin making money in their new communities. If passed, H.B. 2509 would have generated an estimated $55.3 million in new annual food sales, according to the Common Sense Institute.
Maria knows many tamale vendors. Some sell red chile tamales like she does. Others sell corn variations, and others prepare recipes from their states in Mexico or native countries, including Guatemala. She also knows people who sell additional goods barred by state law, including pupusas and homemade pizzas.
Maria says that authorities in her city don't seem interested in cracking down on them. Some of her customers are even cops in uniform.
Enforcement is generally lax in Arizona. But keeping the restriction on the books—along with the harsh punishments of a $500 fine and six months in jail for violators—means that the state could invoke it to punish unlicensed home chefs. This already happens in other states: Carrollton, Texas, mailed Dennise Cruz a "warrant arrest notice" and fined her $700 for selling tamales without a permit. In New York, police officers handcuffed a woman selling churros inside a Brooklyn subway station.
Hobbs' veto amounts to the state "continuing to criminalize entrepreneurship and making it harder for people operating a home-based business to support their families and climb up the economic ladder," state Rep. Alma Hernandez (D–Tucson) wrote for the Arizona Daily Star. Hernandez was one of just five Democrats who voted to override the veto in late April—an effort that ultimately fell short. The governor hasn't yet said what would need to change in order for her to sign a cottage food bill into law.
On the campaign trail, Hobbs called Arizona's working families "the backbone" of the state's economy. Apparently, her commitment to the working class doesn't extend to home chefs like Maria.
They'll have to keep working in the dark, but there's little doubt that consumers will keep hungering for their tamales. "It would be impossible to end the sale of this kind of product," says Maria.
The post The War on Tamales appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters cross-checked a proposed new stadium for the National Hockey League's Arizona Coyotes on Tuesday, rejecting all three ballot measures connected to the $2.1 billion development scheme.
Tempe, Arizona, residents had been asked whether they'd approve of an arena deal that included about 2,000 apartments and several commercial properties. The Tempe City Council had given preliminary approval for the project earlier this year but wisely handed off the final decision to the electorate. Though ballots are still being counted, the tallied results show an apparent defeat for the project, and the team's owner has conceded defeat, reports The Arizona Republic.
Tuesday's results might finally ice the years-long effort to build the Coyotes yet another taxpayer-funded stadium in the Phoenix area. The team arrived from Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1996 and took up residence in the America West Arena (now known as the Talking Stick Resort Arena), which the city of Phoenix built in 1990 for $90 million for its professional basketball team, the Phoenix Suns. A few years later, the team and the NHL convinced the nearby city of Glendale, Arizona, to put up $155 million in bonds to build a new arena for the team. The Coyotes moved there in December 2003.
Glendale's experience with the Coyotes was not a pleasant one. After the Coyotes' previous owner put the team into bankruptcy in 2009, Glendale ended up paying the NHL $50 million over two years to keep the team from relocating. During that same period, the city had to lay off city workers, cut services, and raise taxes to close annual budget gaps. A new owner signed a 15-year lease with the city in 2013, but the city council voided that agreement in 2015, leaving the team without a permanent home. After the 2022 season, Glendale unceremoniously evicted the Coyotes, who played the current season in a 5,000-seat arena at Arizona State University.
Team owner Alex Meruelo and the NHL have spent the past few years trying to convince Tempe to finance a new arena for the team. The plan that eventually made it before voters would have cost the public $750 million in tax breaks and deferments. Meruelo backed the campaign for the arena with nearly $700,000 from his company. He also sent a cease-and-desist letter to arena opponents, demanding they stop calling him "corrupt" in campaign ads.
The fact that the opponents of the arena project prevailed despite being wildly outspent—by a margin of 35-1, according to the Republic—shows that voters generally think team owners ought to pay for their sporting palaces. The Tempe project came with all the usual promises about economic growth and new jobs, but people are wising up to the fact that those projections are consistently inaccurate. That's especially true when a team is trying to shift from one part of the Phoenix metro area to another—any "economic growth" generated by the new stadium in Tempe would have been merely redirected from Glendale.
The result also serves as a good reminder about why so few stadium projects go before voters. "Team owners would much rather deal directly with elected officials, who can be more easily, uh, let's go with 'influenced' by dropping a bunch of cash on lobbyists," writes stadium subsidy critic Neil deMause on his Field of Schemes blog.
With the Tempe deal frozen by voters, the future of the Coyotes is very much in doubt. The NHL understandably wants a team in the Phoenix region—one of the biggest media markets in the U.S.—but not enough to ask Meruelo to pay for his own damn stadium.
The post Voters Put Arizona Coyotes' Arena Project on Ice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Arizona's Department of Child Safety (DCS) seized Jakob Blodgett from his father's custody last December. Two weeks later, the boy died of ketoacidosis—a dangerous complication of Type 1 diabetes.
While DCS has already received a barrage of criticism over the child's death, an autopsy report obtained by Reason shows even more evidence of misconduct. According to the report, Jakob had been hospitalized for ketoacidosis once before in the weeks before his death. Despite this, those caring for him at a DCS group home did not take steps to prevent Jakob from developing the condition again, leading to his death.
Jakob was taken into DCS custody after his father, Richard Blodgett, was arrested for drug possession and taken to a jail in Holbrook, Arizona. Richard, who had a different drug charge pending against him at the time of his arrest, claims that he wasn't abusing the more than 4,000 fentanyl pills found by police. Rather, he says he was using them to treat chronic pain after weight loss surgery.
"I wasn't getting high. I wasn't abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son," Blodgett told the Associated Press. "Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can't get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working."
Jakob had Type 1 diabetes, a serious medical condition that occurs when an individual's pancreas produces little to no insulin, a hormone that helps control blood sugar. In order to manage the condition, people with Type 1 diabetes must constantly monitor their blood glucose levels and have regular insulin injections or have insulin delivered automatically through an insulin pump. When Type 1 diabetics don't receive enough insulin, death can occur in just a few days.
Jakob's grandmother claims that DCS took his insulin pump away from him after he had been "playing with it."
On December 9, the same day he was placed in the group home, Jakob was hospitalized with ketoacidosis. He was discharged six days later. After this incident, DCS records quoted in the state's autopsy report claim that Jakob "'sneaks food and candy' and is 'resistant' to glucose monitoring and insulin therapy." On the night of December 19—just four days after Jakob was released from his first hospitalization—DCS records state that he refused his insulin dose.
On the morning of December 20, Jakob's glucose was elevated, and group home workers "received medication administration instructions from his physician"; the report does not state whether DCS employees attempted to administer insulin. On December 21, the report states, Jakob "complained of headache" and drowsiness, after which he returned to the hospital. According to the autopsy report, he arrived to the hospital "with altered mental status and vomiting" and testing revealed that his brain was swelling. On December 26, after being placed on life support, Jakob died.
Though he had already spent six days in the hospital for mismanaged diabetes, those caring for Jakob don't seem to have taken appropriate measures to ensure that the child would avoid life-threatening complications again. While officials have not confirmed whether Jakob, in fact, had his insulin pump taken away, it is troubling either way that DCS workers were unable to keep a diabetic child alive for more than two weeks after he entered their care.
Failing to give diabetic children insulin injections is extremely dangerous. "Missing insulin doses places the child at imminent risk of [ketoacidosis] as well as the long-term microvascular complications of diabetes," says a 2020 article in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. "For young children, it is the parent's or guardian's responsibility to make sure all diabetes supplies are obtained without fail and all management tasks are completed on a daily basis and in a timely manner." While most children can learn to self-inject insulin with time and patience, DCF staff should have done anything necessary in order to deliver his medication.
DCS custody is an incredibly dangerous place for kids to be, especially if they have a serious medical condition. According to the Associated Press, children seized into DCS custody in Arizona have a death rate almost twice the national average. For children with significant medical needs, being placed with caregivers who don't know how to manage those conditions—or don't care to—can result in tragedy.
"They couldn't keep him alive for two weeks, two weeks," Richard told the Associated Press. "That's absolutely insane. That was my pride and joy. I'm lost. I'm completely lost. My family is completely lost."
The post Autopsy Shines Light on Death of Child Taken by Arizona's Child Welfare Agency appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The number of federal sentences for low-level marijuana possession has plummeted in recent years, thanks mainly to a dramatic drop in prosecutions of people arrested in Arizona. But prior state convictions for simple possession are still boosting federal penalties for other offenses by increasing the number of "criminal history points" considered under sentencing guidelines.
Under federal law, simple marijuana possession is punishable by a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail. Federal charges have always accounted for a tiny share of marijuana possession cases, which typically are prosecuted under state law. But according to a recent report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), federal courts sentenced just 145 defendants for simple marijuana possession in fiscal year 2021, down from 2,172 in FY 2014.
Most of these cases involved people caught with marijuana at or near the U.S.-Mexican border. The USSC says the downward trend was "largely driven" by cases in Arizona, which accounted for 79 percent of the total since FY 2014. Sentences in that state fell from 1,916 in FY 2014 to only two in FY 2021.
Among defendants sentenced in the previous five fiscal years, 86 percent were male, 71 percent were Hispanic, and 60 percent were not U.S. citizens. About 70 percent received prison sentences, which averaged five months.
The USSC attributes the 93 percent drop in simple possession cases since FY 2014 to an "evolving policy shift." It mentions President Joe Biden's mass pardon for low-level marijuana offenders and notes that the Justice Department "generally has treated marijuana possession offenses as a low enforcement priority in recent years." But the downward trend that the report describes predates the pardon, and federal sentences for simple marijuana possession were falling precipitously before Biden took office, beginning at the end of the Obama administration and continuing through the Trump administration.
The report also considers how prior simple possession convictions affect federal defendants charged with other crimes. In FY 2021, 4,405 federal offenders "received criminal history points under the federal sentencing guidelines for prior marijuana possession sentences." Those points put 1,765 defendants in a higher criminal history category, which figured in the sentences they received.
While the impact of a prior marijuana possession conviction might amount to just a few more months behind bars, that additional punishment could easily exceed the penalty imposed in the state marijuana case. The USSC reports that 79 percent of the prior sentences "were for less than 60 days in prison." In effect, these defendants are punished again for marijuana possession, and the second penalty is more severe.
The post Federal Pot Possession Cases Plummet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Scottsdale, Arizona, city council unanimously agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a wrongful arrest lawsuit. Yessenia Garcia called police to report her car had been vandalized while she was in a bar. But officers instead began to treat her as a suspect in a hit-and-run that had been reported nearby about a half hour earlier. When she asked for an attorney, bodycam video showed an officer telling her she was not entitled to one because she was under investigation. They arrested her for possession of drug paraphernalia, two counts of driving under the influence and failure to stop at the scene of an accident causing injury or death. Those charges were dropped shortly afterwards. Garcia's attorney said that security video from the bar's parking lot showed her car was parked at the time of the hit-and-run.
The post Brickbat: Reckless Parking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Arizona has one of the more liberating school-choice policies in the country, allowing funding for a student's education to follow that child to chosen learning options. The state also has a newly minted governor who is hostile to education freedom. Despite attending a private school, Katie Hobbs wants to roll back the state's scholarship program and offer all kids "high-quality public education" instead. With her allies, she pretends that's a goal easily defined and achieved with more money, instead of a hotly debated topic involving irreconcilable differences over priorities, education philosophies, and ideology.
After Hobbs opposed school choice in her inaugural address, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream asked, "Why shouldn't all students have a chance at what you said was so important in your own life?", especially in light of "the private Catholic high school that you went to."
"My parents made that choice," Hobbs answered. "I begged them to send me to public school. We sacrificed a lot. There were times when we were on food stamps. So, it was a choice that they made, and they struggled to make that choice. What I want is for every student in the state of Arizona, no matter where they live, to have access to high-quality public education."
OK. So, beyond throwing her parents under the bus for picking a school other than the default one assigned by government, Hobbs clearly thinks that "high-quality public education" is a knowable and achievable standard. She's not alone in that assumption; the American Federation of School Administrators also holds "high-quality public education" in opposition to independently chosen alternatives, as does the American Association of University Women of California. Nina Rees of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools argued there should be an enforceable right to a high-quality public education even while conceding that "endless struggle between the federal government and the states often leaves education policy mired in half measures and recriminations."
But if high-quality public education is a shared standard, what's the source of that endless struggle? Could it be that we don't all agree on what high-quality education looks like?
"A recent Pew Research Center survey found widespread partisan divisions in the topics that parents of K-12 students across the country believe are appropriate for children to learn about in school," Pew reported last week. "A 56% majority of districts in Democratic-voting areas mention their diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] efforts in their mission statements. That is true of just 26% of districts in Republican-voting areas, a difference of 30 percentage points."
The split can also be expressed as a rural vs. urban/suburban divide over the ideologically charged issue. Either way, there's sharp disagreement on incorporating DEI themes into curricula. That's unsurprising, given that DEI often stands in for other differences of opinion on sensitive educational matters.
"Americans are deeply divided over how much children in K-12 schools should be taught about racism and sexuality, according to a new poll," the AP reported a year ago. "The poll from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows stark differences between Republicans and Democrats who want to see schools make adjustments."
Far beyond race, sexuality, and DEI issues, Americans have long disagreed on interpretations of history and current events. That's why publishers tailor lessons in school textbooks for different audiences around the country.
"The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation's deepest partisan divides," correspondent Dana Goldstein wrote in 2020 for The New York Times.
OK, so forget about divisive curricula. We can at least agree on measuring our success at teaching kids the basics, right? Well, no.
Recent years saw a revolt against standardized testing in schools across the country. Many parents and students opted out, no matter what the rules said. "The problem, as educrats are discovering, is that there's a hell of a lot less agreement than they thought about what kids are supposed to learn, how they're supposed to learn it, and how fast it should be learned," I wrote in 2015.
Much of the controversy was over the adoption of Common Core standards for English language arts and mathematics at various grade levels. While intended as a means of guaranteeing high-quality education, it turned out that not everybody was on-board.
"Since the beginning of this year, many legislators and critics have dubbed Common Core 'developmentally inappropriate,'" North Carolina Public Radio noted in 2014. "They argue that the new Math and English standards should be repealed because they are not suitable for some students."
The debate echoed an earlier one over national educational standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. "With its emphasis — obsession, critics would say — on standardized testing, the law became unpopular among many teachers and parents and technically expired in 2007," NPR reported in 2015.
Lawmakers in conservative states are again pushing back against federal dominance of education, this time with a combination of resistance to burdensome regulations and objections to politicized curricula.
"Republican leaders in two states — Tennessee and Oklahoma — have taken steps to cut ties with the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that they'd rather lose billions in federal funding than comply with what they view as onerous mandates from Washington," according to education-focused The74.
So, when Hobbs and her allies argue that school choice, which lets families pick the educational philosophies, environments, and curricula that suit them, is a distraction from "high-quality public education," just whose definition of "high-quality" do they have in mind? Clearly, there's not just one.
We've spent decades arguing over lesson content, educational standards, and assessment methods only to discover time and again that Americans simply don't agree on these issues. Why isn't it better to encourage people to explore their own definitions of high-quality education for their children instead of trying to force all kids into one-size-fits-some government institutions that are doomed to serve as battlegrounds for people who could, instead, peacefully go their own way?
Hobbs may publicly resent her parents for sacrificing to send her to private school instead of the public institution she says she'd have preferred. But she wants to put all children in the position of suffering schools inflicted on them by government officials. School choice frees families to choose from a range of options that meet their definition of "high quality." If more people can pick the education that suits them now, that means fewer people resenting Hobbs and company in the future.
The post You Prefer 'High-Quality Public Education' Over School Choice? Define 'High-Quality.' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A North Carolina man will get back more than $39,000 in cash after police seized it from him at the Phoenix airport, despite never charging him with a crime.
Reason previously reported on the civil forfeiture case of Jerry Johnson. Johnson owns a trucking company and says he flew to Phoenix in 2020 to possibly purchase a semitruck at auction. Police detectives approached him at baggage claim, accused him of being a drug trafficker, and seized $39,500 from him.
It's legal to fly domestically with large amounts of cash, but under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, whether or not the owner of the property has been charged with a crime.
Johnson tried to challenge the seizure, presenting bank statements and tax returns to establish ownership of his money, but the judge in his case ruled that because of inconsistencies in his story and circumstantial evidence offered by prosecutors—an old criminal record, buying a last-minute ticket with a quick turnaround, his nervous appearance in the airport, having three cellphones, and the alleged odor of marijuana on the cash—Johnson hadn't established a legitimate interest in the cash.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that has challenged asset forfeiture laws in several states, picked up Johnson's case on appeal, and now, after a two-year legal odyssey, the state is returning his money.
Institute for Justice senior attorney Dan Alban said in a press release that Johnson's case "potently illustrates the injustice of civil forfeiture even when someone ultimately gets their property back."
"It took 31 months for Jerry to finally get his savings back even though he was never even charged with a crime," Alban said. "In the middle of the COVID pandemic, Jerry had to find a way to keep operating his small trucking business after its working capital was seized while also scraping together money to hire an attorney (before IJ took his case)."
Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is an essential tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by targeting its illicit proceeds. However, civil liberties groups across the political spectrum argue that the practice lacks due process protections and frequently ensnares innocent property owners, who then bear the burden of going to court and proving their innocence.
More than half of all states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform over the past decade in response to these concerns. Arizona passed civil asset forfeiture reforms in 2017 to raise the evidentiary threshold for forfeitures from a "preponderance of evidence" to "clear and convincing evidence," and in 2021, it became the 16th state to require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited
Airports are a particularly lucrative spot for police fishing for cash to seize. A 2016 USA Today investigation found the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers in 15 major airports over the previous decade. The Institute for Justice is litigating a separate class-action lawsuit on behalf of people whose cash was seized by the DEA at airports. One of the lead plaintiffs in that case, Stacy Jones, had $43,167 in cash seized by the DEA as she was trying to fly home to Tampa, Florida, from Wilmington, North Carolina.
"It's a blessing to finally have my savings back so that I can invest it in my business," Johnson said in the press release. "That the government could take my money, never charge me with a crime but hold onto my savings for so long is outrageous. It created a tremendous financial burden for me and my family, and there were a lot of business opportunities I've missed out on because that money was just sitting in a government account."
However, the Institute for Justice says the case isn't finished; the state of Arizona is refusing to compensate Johnson for attorneys' fees or interest accrued on his money during the years it was seized.
"We're glad that the money has been returned," Alban said, "but Jerry still needs to be made whole."
The post Arizona Returns $39,000 Seized From Man at Phoenix Airport Through Civil Asset Forfeiture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declined to publish investigative findings by his office that disproved 2020 election fraud claims, according to documents released February 22 by his Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes.
Mayes, who assumed office in January, released three documents: a previously unreleased "interim findings summary," a draft with staff comments of a published "interim report," and a September memo summarizing the investigation's conclusions. Brnovich's team did not draft a final report, a Mayes spokesperson told The Washington Post.
According to the memo written by Reginald Grigsby, a senior agent in the Arizona attorney general's office, Brnovich's investigators assessed 638 complaints, opened 438 investigations, and as of September 2022, submitted 22 cases for prosecution. Though his team identified supposed structural and operational flaws in the state's election procedures (outlined in the interim report), its unpublished findings debunked each theory that alleged significant—let alone potentially outcome-shifting—election-fraud theories tied to the state's 2020 presidential election.
"Agents and support staff have spent more than 10,000 hours investigating allegations of voting irregularities and reviewing alleged instances of illegal voting submitted to our office by private parties.…In each instance and in each matter, [Cyber Ninjas Incorporated, True the Vote (TTV), Verity Vote, and elected officials] did not provide any evidence to support their allegations," reads the memo. "The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate."
State lawmakers who had publicly alleged fraud recanted when questioned by investigators. "In interviews with the various media outlets, Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli alleged there was a cover-up with regards to election irregularities," reads Grigsby's memo, which also adds that "In an interview with agents, he did not repeat that allegation." Similarly, the memo says, then State Representative Mark Finchem publicly alleged more than 30,000 fraudulent votes. Speaking to Brnovich's office, however, Finchem said "he did not have any evidence of fraud and he did not wish to take up our (investigators') time."
The memo also targets supposed proofs of fraud supplied by private entities Cyber Ninjas and TTV (the latter's "evidence" was central to Dinesh D'Souza's debunked documentary, 2000 Mules). "Our comprehensive review of CNI's audit showed they did not provide any evidence to support their allegations of widespread fraud or ballot manipulation," the memo reports. "Based upon our review of CNI's audit, we identified 1 instance of deceased voting, which was not prosecuted as it was accidental. There were 2 instances of double voting that were submitted for prosecution." Instead, Cyber Ninjas' allegations relied on inaccurate databases, fabulist interpretations of routine events, and baseless accusations, Brnovich's office found.
TTV simply declined repeatedly to provide to investigators its purportedly conclusive evidence of fraud—despite myriad promises to do so. Further, at various intervals, TTV asserted that it had already disclosed the evidence to Brnovich's team or to the FBI, claims Grigsby disputes. "TTV says they gave the information to the FBI's Phoenix office, while also saying they were informants for the FBI office," he wrote.
Having never provided the information to us as promised, TTV said we should contact the FBI to obtain copies of the information they had provided to them. Checking with the Phoenix FBI office, they tell us they met with TTV but they never received any such information from TTV. TTV also reported giving the information to the San Antonio office of the FBI; we have not been able to verify this assertion. The Phoenix office says (TTV representatives) Ms. (Catherine) Engelbrecht and Mr. (Gregg) Phillips are not informants for the FBI; they also said they were told by both of them they had provided the information to our office. This is patently false.
Here is Grigsby's account of investigators' attempts to obtain that evidence:
Immediately after Election Day, 2020, Brnovich forcefully and publicly rejected allegations of election fraud. "It does appear that Joe Biden will win Arizona," he told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto in an interview on November 11, 2020. "There is no evidence, there are no facts that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change."
Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbes has advocated an ethics investigation into Brnovich's conduct, The Post reported Saturday.
The post Former Arizona AG Found No Evidence of 2020 Election Fraud. He Kept Quiet. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A bill aimed at forcing Arizona's public school students to recite the Pledge of Alliance each day passed the state House this week. Despite opponents citing that the measure is clearly unconstitutional, the House's Republican majority is pressing forward.
"We stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day on this floor. What's good for us is good for the children," Rep. Barbara Parker (R–Mesa), who sponsored House Bill 2523, said during a hearing for the bill.
H.B. 2523, which was introduced last month, seeks to require that the state's public primary and secondary schools "set aside a specific time each day for students who wish to recite the pledge of allegiance to the United States flag," adding that "each student shall recite the pledge of allegiance to the United States at this time." The bill allows students to refuse only when they are over 18 or have parental permission to refuse to recite the pledge.
"This is to make sure that students growing up understand the country in which they live and embrace the citizenship and the founding principles that we hold so dear," said state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R–Flagstaff).
The bill passed on Tuesday along party lines, with Republicans exclusively supporting the measure. It will likely pass the Republican-controlled state Senate. However, the bill is blatantly illegal, and even if it manages to somehow overcome a veto from the state's Democratic governor, it would likely be quickly overturned in federal court.
As much as Arizona Republicans want to enforce this "citizenship" exercise, the Supreme Court decisively ruled in 1943 that schoolchildren cannot be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court ruled that the state cannot compel anyone—even schoolchildren—to profess or vow a belief they do not hold.
"Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard," wrote Justice Robert H. Jackson in the Court's opinion, famously adding, "if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Constitutional law doesn't seem to bother the bill's supporters, who argue that the provision allowing parents to permit their children to sit out the pledge is sufficient protection for free speech. "The current law is that parents have a right to direct the education of their child," Parker said during the floor debate over the bill. "And this is a parents' rights state."
Regardless of Arizona Republicans' insistence, they don't have the power to singlehandedly quash the First Amendment rights of Arizona schoolchildren. If the bill becomes law, they'll likely learn this in court.
The post Arizona House Passes a Bill That Would Force Children To Say the Pledge of Allegiance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Biden administration will let the soy boys have their milk. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new draft regulatory guidance that would allow makers of almond, soy, pea, walnut, and more "plant-based milk alternative" (PBMA) products to keep calling their products milk.
The agency is, however, encouraging these milk alternative companies to voluntarily include information on their labels explaining the nutritional differences between their products and cow milk.
"The FDA determined that consumers generally understand that PBMA do not contain milk and choose to purchase PBMA because they are not milk," reads the FDA's draft guidance. "However, many consumers may not be aware of the nutritional differences between milk and PBMA products."
In a more normal world, one would think consumers could be trusted to understand all on their own that almond milk comes from almonds and not cows.
But as nondairy milk products have grown more and more popular, the dairy industry and elected politicians from dairy-producing states have pushed for regulations that would ensure the words almond and milk don't appear on the same label.
For a time, it seemed like the FDA might actually cow to their demands.
Back in 2018, the agency invited requests for information on how to label these products, with an eye toward cracking down on "misleading" product descriptions.
"An almond doesn't lactate," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb quipped at the time.
In Congress, Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.) and Jim Risch (R–Idaho) have pushed the DAIRY PRIDE Act to ban the use of milk, yogurt, and cheese on labels of nondairy products.
The FDA's skepticism of consumers' ability to understand the difference between dairy and nondairy milks seemingly spilled over into the Biden administration. This past summer, Wired reported that the agency appeared "poised" to issue stronger labeling rules.
Current FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in Senate testimony last year that consumers aren't "very equipped to deal with what's the nutritional value of non-dairy milk alternatives."
Given this history, the new draft guidance released by the FDA is a lot less bad than it could have been. Soy milk can continue to be called soy milk, regardless of how much lactation went into making the product.
The dairy industry has expressed disappointment with the new guidance.
"It falls short of ending the decades-old problem of misleading plant-based labeling using dairy terminology," said the National Milk Producers Federation in a statement. "The decision to permit such beverages to continue inappropriately using dairy terminology violates FDA's own standards of identity, which clearly define dairy terms as animal-based products."
The Good Food Institute, which advocates for the whole range of alt foods, likewise expressed some disappointment. It gave a statement to NPR saying that direct nutritional comparisons to cow milk are unnecessary, given that product labels already have to list nutritional facts.
The FDA suggested that alt-milk products come with labels saying things like "contains lower amounts of Vitamin D and calcium than milk."
Defenders of oat and almond milk in Congress have noted in the past that these kinds of nutritional comparisons are not currently required of dairy milks from other animals.
"[The] FDA has not previously asked producers to disclose other wide variations in nutritional components—including among milks derived from different animals. Goat milk, for example, has less folate, zinc, riboflavin and vitamin B12 than cow milk. Buffalo milk has twice as much saturated fat as cow milk, as well as considerably more calcium," wrote Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Rep. Julia Brownley (D–Calif.), and Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) in a 2022 letter to the Biden administration.
For now, the FDA's guidance about making nutritional comparisons on labels is voluntary.
Product label regulations might seem like a minor issue. But for companies trying to sell trepidatious consumers on innovative foods, the freedom to brand their products how they wish is crucial. Fewer people would be reaping the added utility of almond milk if regulators had insisted it be called "nut juice."
Stricter labeling rules could have ended this nascent industry. Dairy producers obviously think so. That's why they're pushing for rules that require competitors to call their products something a lot more off-putting.
The FDA's decision on nondairy milks could be a sign that it will likewise take a relatively hands-off approach to how other makers of alt foods, like plant-based burgers and cultivated meats, can label their products.
Google is blocking Canadian users from viewing news content in advance of a proposed law requiring tech companies to compensate media outlets for linking to their articles. This "test" of restricting content will affect 4 percent of randomly chosen Canadian Google users and will run for five weeks, according to the company.
It's being done in response to the pending Online News Act, which the Associated Press reports will "require digital giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for republishing their content on their platforms."
The bill was passed by Canada's lower house of Parliament last year and is now being considered by the country's Senate.
A similar standoff played out in Australia when that country's government forced tech companies to negotiate rates with media companies for linking to their content. Google and Meta at first blocked news links entirely but eventually caved and started signing deals with publishers.
Arizona is considering a bill that would liberate developers to build more, denser housing. Working its way through the legislature right now is Senate Bill 1117, which would force cities to allow duplexes, triplexes, and smaller lot sizes. It would also allow larger multifamily buildings in commercial areas and near rail stops.
The bill managed to pass one committee thus far with bipartisan support. But it's being opposed by local governments and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Similar state-level zoning reforms have been passed in California, Oregon, and Maine.
Arizona has proven a magnet for Californians fleeing high housing costs for years now. It saw a large influx of people during the pandemic. Liberalizing restrictions on new housing would allow the state to accommodate its growing population without the price hikes that have bedeviled the more strictly regulated states its residents fled from.
• The Pentagon issued a memo instructing servicemembers to avoid eating poppy seed bagels and other poppy seed–containing foods as they might cause them to fail drug tests.
• Rep. Barbara Lee (D–Calif.) famously cast the one dissenting vote against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that empowered the U.S. to go to war in Afghanistan (and a lot of other places, it would turn out). She's now being protested by anti-war activists for supporting continued U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine.
• The U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear a legal challenge to the National Security Agency's warrantless spying program.
• The New York Times uncovers the existence of a whole city at the southern tip of Florida.
• Conservative pundit Jesse Kelly suggests the smooth, bloodless revision of European national borders over the past 1,000 years is proof of concept for an American "national divorce."
"National divorce is such a stupid, online concept."
This is why I love history. Here's a map of Europe from the year 1000 and then one from the year 2000. The break up and realignment of nations is the entire history of the world.
"Too online". Yeah. Someone is. Read a book. pic.twitter.com/ZTlsxOqVKL
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) February 21, 2023
The post The FDA Will Let the Soy Boys Have Their Milk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Arizona is halting executions pending a review of the state's death penalty procedures. The pause comes in the wake of a series of botched and mishandled executions—a pattern going back more than a decade.
"It's time to address the fact that this is a system that needs better oversight on numerous fronts," Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said in a Friday press release. "Arizona has a history of mismanaged executions that have resulted in serious questions and concerns about [the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry's] execution protocols and lack of transparency."
On January 20, Hobbs signed an executive order establishing a formal review of the state's execution procedures. Hobbs' review will examine the "lethal injection drug and gas chamber chemical procurement process, execution protocols, and staffing considerations including training and experience."
The same day Hobbs signed that executive order, Arizona state Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) announced that she would not seek court permission to execute any of the state's 110 death-row prisoners until the review is complete and that her office had withdrawn a request—made by her predecessor—to obtain an execution warrant for one prisoner.
"I applaud the Governor's decision to establish an Independent Review Commissioner, who will begin thoroughly reviewing the processes governing Arizona's capital punishment system," Mayes tweeted, "My office will also pause all requests for warrants of execution while the review process is pending. If executions are carried out at any point in the future, I am committed to providing as much transparency into the execution process as the law allows."
Arizona has a history of bungled executions. Until 2022, the state had not performed an execution for nearly eight years, after a 2014 execution was horrifically botched when the state injected an inmate repeatedly with an experimental drug cocktail. Arizona began executing death-row inmates last year after the state regained a supply of appropriate lethal injection drugs.
However, despite successfully executing three prisoners in 2022, the state has still come under fire for its handling of the execution process. In May of that year, witnesses claimed that the state's execution of Clarence Dixon was mismanaged when it took prison officials nearly half an hour to insert the I.V. needed to begin the execution—leading the execution team to physically cut into a vein in Dixon's groin to place the I.V.
Hobbs' review will look to improve execution procedures in Arizona—though the governor has not stated an intent to outlaw the death penalty in the state.
"These problems go back more than a decade," Dale Baich, a law professor at Arizona State University, told NBC. "The department of corrections, the governor and the attorney general (in past administrations) ignored the issues and refused to take a careful look at the problems. Gov. Hobbs and Attorney General Mayes should be commended for taking this matter seriously."
The post Arizona Pauses Executions After Gov. Hobbs Orders a Review of the State's Procedures. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Arizona's newly sworn-in governor has repeatedly said that she wants to reverse the state's expansion of its school-choice program, arguing that Arizona should instead increase funding to public schools. But the program seems safe for now.
In July, Arizona expanded its Education Savings Account (ESA) system, creating the largest school choice program in the nation. Any child who opts out of public school will receive around $7,000 per year to use toward private-school tuition, a homeschooling curriculum, tutoring, or other expenses. Previously, this funding had been available only for students who met certain requirements, such as having a disability, attending a low-performing school, or living on an Indian reservation.
"This is a monumental moment for all of Arizona's students. Our kids will no longer be locked in under-performing schools," then-Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted after he signed the plan into law. "Arizona is cemented as the top state for school choice and as the first state in the nation to offer all families the option to choose the school setting that works best for them."
Hobbs doesn't have the same warm feelings. "This voucher system we are under now doesn't provide real choice in educational opportunity for most families," Hobbs claimed in an October PBS interview. "It diverts resources from public schools." In her recent State of the State address, she even argued that ESAs "will likely bankrupt the state."
In fact, the Common Sense Institute has argued compellingly that the program will save money. While the state spends more than $12,000 per student in public schools, a typical ESA award is jus $7,000 for non-disabled students. The savings gained from reduced attendance at public schools means that "policymakers can still expect net aggregate statewide education cost savings of over $274 million," the institute concludes.
"Opponents claim that ESAs 'siphon' or steal money from a student's local public school each time a child opts for an ESA," writes Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. "But in reality, under the ESA program, funding simply follows the student, just like it already does for charter and district schools via the state's 'open enrollment' system." Beienburg argues that "the financial impact to a child's local school is virtually identical."
In any event, Hobbs doesn't have the votes to repeal the measure. Her budget plan defunds the program, but Republicans narrowly control the Arizona legislature and they have made it clear that they won't accept that. (House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci recently included attacks on school choice in a list of ideas he declared "non-starters.") Hobbs can't even use her line-item veto powers to defund the progran, because it is—to quote Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis, writing last week in The Wall Street Journal—"funded by formula tied to money for public schools."
That may be better not just for students but for Hobbs' political fortunes. "A Morning Consult tracking poll this month found 67% of Arizonans and 77% of parents with school-aged children support ESAs," Bedrick and DeAngelis note. "Enrollment has surged to 45,000 from 10,000 since the expansion. Even Ms. Hobbs should think twice before alienating these constituents."
The post Will Katie Hobbs Take Down Arizona's Expanded School Choice Program? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In early January, the unthinkable happened for hundreds of households in the Rio Verde suburb of Phoenix: Their water was cut off. Families in the cactus-pocked desert foothills were forced to skip showers, use paper plates, and haul laundry elsewhere. The nearby city of Scottsdale had supplied water deliveries to the community for years, but officials there decided they had to conserve more water to serve their own residents.
Amid historic western water shortages and a 20-year drought, for years some have expressed interest in helping meet demand for water where there is not enough to go around: Native American tribes. The reality, however, is that outdated federal law prevents many tribes from leasing their water off reservation.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden signed legislation backed by Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz) that grants the Colorado River Indian Tribes authority to do something that many other Americans can: lease their water rights to others. While the law is welcome progress, Congress should act now to give all western tribes full authority over their water rights. Native Americans deserve that authority on principle. More practically speaking, it would allow them to realize the full value of their rights while helping off-reservation water users who would be willing to bargain for more of the increasingly scarce resource.
Forty million people across seven states rely on the Colorado River to drink, bathe, wash, irrigate, and use water generally. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that reservation treaties nominally granted Native Americans some of the oldest rights to the river's water. But treaties did not quantify or codify those rights, leaving them unclear and unenforceable for decades. Some tribes have successfully used courts and subsequent negotiations between the federal government, states, and other water users—a process that takes 22 years on average—to quantify and gain meaningful access to their rights.
Today, western tribes collectively hold "paper rights" to roughly a quarter of the Colorado River's annual flow. Those rights, however, remain severely limited. For one thing, many tribes lack the proper infrastructure to divert and harness the water that is rightfully theirs, meaning that it is effectively lost to them, used up by others downstream. Moreover, most tribes are still barred from leasing water off reservation—to a thirsty urban area in the arid West, for instance. So while many other westerners can strike deals to lease their allotments elsewhere, many Native Americans lack this basic aspect of property rights.
In Southern California, for example, the water supplier for Los Angeles and other cities has paid nearby farmers $180 million for water since 2005. The farmers voluntarily cut back on their irrigation, temporarily fallowing some of their cropland, and city users happily stump up with payments that keep residential taps flowing freely. Water goes to its highest-valued use in the region because markets are allowed to function, producing win-win trades.
Notably, some Native Americans object to trading water due to religious or cultural beliefs. But it's long past time for the government to give tribes the option to decide for themselves whether to pursue the economic benefits that leasing could yield. A Property and Environment Research Center report by water researcher Leslie Sanchez found that tribes in the Colorado River Basin "may be forgoing $563 million to $1.3 billion annually, or between $3,200 and $7,300 per person" living on those tribes' reservations.
The other major objection to allowing tribes to lease their water comes from an obvious source: people who are worried they'll have to pay more for water that currently flows downstream to them because tribes cannot put it to use. But there is no valid reason that, absent one-off congressional approval, tribes are prohibited from leasing their water in the same sort of manner that some western farmers do.
The recent legislation pushed by Arizona's senators allows the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a group of four tribes on a single reservation, to lease its water to others. The group holds some of the most senior and significant rights to Colorado River water. "Since time immemorial," Chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes Amelia Flores told a U.S. House subcommittee in 2021, "the river has sustained us. I am here today to tell you that we are committed to helping to support the river that has provided for us, and we have water to offer for this effort." But, as Flores noted at the time, "We lack the authority to lease water because of the prohibitions in the 300-year-old Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. Without the right to lease our water, we can do little to directly assist communities in Arizona or our neighbors on the river, who may face drastic water shortages in the coming years."
The Colorado River Indian Tribes can now help supply water in this time of shortages, which appears to be a new normal. But three centuries is far too long for Congress to wait to fix paternalistic federal laws that continue to strip numerous other Native Americans of their rights.
The post One Small Step for Native American Water Rights appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you've sent or received money to or from somebody in Mexico, law-enforcement agencies have probably tracked your transactions.
In fact, if you've sent money across American borders at all, Big Brother is likely watching. In what began as an Arizona-led effort before going nationwide, a not-so-independent nonprofit organization has been indiscriminately compiling sensitive financial information and making it available to law-enforcement agencies across the country.
Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) revealed that "Homeland Security Investigations used a form of subpoena power to order two companies to turn over every money transfer over $500, to and from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico. This data was shared with hundreds of federal, state and local government agencies, who can search it without any court oversight, through a non-profit created by the Arizona Attorney General."
His office subsequently discovered the surveillance was worse than originally believed.
"The program included far more states and foreign nations than the government disclosed in briefings," Wyden's office announced this week. The government demanded data from many other companies, including Euronet (RIA Envia), MoneyGram and Viamericas, and "included records for transfers of $500 or more between any U.S. state and 22 foreign nations and one U.S. territory." Agencies demanding data included not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Arizona, but also the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Department of Justice.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also dug for information and has published more than 200 documents revealing details of the program which fed a vast database of sensitive data.
"The database, run by an organization called the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), contained 145 million records of people's financial transactions as of 2021, and we have reason to believe it's still growing," reports the ACLU.
The surveillance dates to 2006, when Arizona's attorney general sought details from Western Union about money transfers to and from the Mexican state of Sonora. That led to a legal battle settled in 2010 when "Western Union agreed to turn over records of all money transfers exceeding $500 to or from the Southwest border states and to or from Mexico for the next four years," notes the ACLU.
TRAC was established in 2014 as a nominally independent repository for intercepted financial records. While supposedly a separate organization, it was originally funded by Western Union and under the control of the Arizona attorney general's office.
That agreement expired in 2019, at which time DHS took over funding TRAC and joined the arrangement to compel financial disclosures with customs summonses, a type of subpoena badly abused by this mass application. By this time many companies were being forced to surrender data on private transactions for perusal by a large number of law enforcement agencies.
Ironically, while the original 2006 effort targeting transactions between Americans and Sonora had been rejected by Arizona courts as "overbroad," that didn't prevent the surveillance operation from growing vastly broader. In addition to federal subpoena power, Arizona continued to gather money transfer records using the same authority originally rejected by the courts under much narrower circumstances.
Once compiled by TRAC, the extensive collection of financial records was available to a wide array of local, state, federal, and military law-enforcement agencies.
"The database of people's money transfer records grew from 75 million records from 14 money service businesses in 2017 to 145 million records from 28 different companies in 2021," reports the ACLU. "By 2021, 12,000 individuals from 600 law enforcement agencies had been provided with direct log-in access to the database."
Rather than investigations of past crimes, many demands for financial records could best be described as speculative fishing expeditions. A June 2021 subpoena from the Arizona attorney general's office demanded data "relating to each send and receive transaction of $500 and greater, sent to or from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas and to or from the country of Mexico, on a bi-weekly schedule as each such period becomes available, beginning with July 1, 2021 and ending with June 30, 2022."
While many of the demands originated with Arizona authorities, TRAC board minutes from 2021 report that the organization "has provided or is currently providing assistance to the Financial Crimes Task Force, the Special Operations Division of DEA, and has been assisting with complicit agent investigations in PA, FL, OH, OK, CO, and CA. TRAC is in discussion with FBI in Boston, MA and is collaborating in a sex trafficking investigation in Camden, NJ."
The surveillance operation has tried to stay current with evolving financial technology. Among the 28 money service businesses surrendering data to TRAC as of 2021 were four Bitcoin ATM companies.
A decade after Edward Snowden revealed mass interception of communications by the National Security Agency, it's obvious that government officials are still very comfortable with bulk surveillance. Without trying to narrow their focus to specific suspects or crimes, they hoover up the details of our financial relationships. Coupled with recent efforts to extend such surveillance to cryptocurrencies, which were explicitly developed to enable private, permissionless transactions, they clearly want everything involving money under their scrutiny and control.
Wyden has asked the DHS inspector general to look into the financial surveillance operation and "investigate the program's origins, how the program operated, and whether the program was consistent with agency policy, statutory law, and the Constitution." More recently, he also asked the Justice Department's inspector general to "examine the role that DOJ-component agencies, including the FBI and DEA, have played in forcing companies to turn over customer data to TRAC and the querying and use of TRAC data by DOJ component agencies."
That's a nice start, but it's not enough. Whether or not federal officials conclude that other federal officials were wrong to violate Americans' financial privacy, government agencies should not be permitted to engage in bulk surveillance, period. TRAC and related operations should be shut down, as well as any other operation that engages in similar abuses.
The post Arizona-Led Effort Spies on Americans' Financial Transactions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.
Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.
If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.
In 2010, Tyler moved out of her Minneapolis condo, which she owned, in response to a series of local incidents that made her feel unsafe. That included a nearby shooting. She relocated to an apartment in a different neighborhood but struggled to afford both her rent and the property taxes on her condo, accruing that $2,300 sum.
The vast majority of what Tyler ended up owing, however, was not the property tax itself. It was the additional $13,000 in penalties, interests, and fees added by the government, upping her total to about $15,000—more than a 550 percent increase.
She didn't have the $2,300, much less the $15,000. So the state foreclosed on the condo and sold it to satisfy the debt. That's to be expected. What Tyler didn't expect: After selling the property for $40,000, the government pocketed the remaining $25,000 instead of putting it back in Tyler's hands. This despite no party claiming she owed anywhere near a $40,000 debt.
What the state took had little to do with the amount of debt itself. Had Tyler's condo been valued at, say, $300,000, it would have proceeded the same way. The government would have just been quite a bit richer.
Which is what happened to Tawanda Hall of Oakland County, Michigan, when she, too, accrued a property tax debt. Hall, who lived in the house with her husband and children, set up a payment plan with the local authorities. She eventually fell $900 behind schedule. The total bill—after penalties, interests, and fees—came out to $22,642.
Not unlike Tyler, the government then seized the home, sold it to collect the debt, and kept the profit. Unlike Tyler, the Halls' home was worth more than $300,000.
The state kept the change. It totaled more than $286,000.
What also sets Tyler and Hall apart is that they've had different fortunes in front of federal judges. But that may change for victims of home equity theft everywhere as one received notice on Friday that she will get to make her case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is standard practice for governments to seize properties whose owners fail to pay their taxes. People at city council meetings across the U.S. will debate just how much those taxes should be—they vary widely—or how much local treasury departments should be tacking on in interests and penalties for those who fall behind.
But neither Tyler nor Hall have argued against such a taking.
"We agree that the government can seize the property to collect a debt," says Christina M. Martin, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation who has represented both women. "What it can't do is take more than it's owed."
Whether or not you'll meet such a fate, should you fall behind on your taxes, depends on where you live. Among the states that allow home equity theft—when the government not only satisfies the debt but also keeps the profit—are Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. That list used to be longer. Several states have abolished it.
But the process by which the government steals home equity also looks different in those states that permit it. "In Nebraska…people are shocked about how the law actually operates," says Jennifer Gaughan, chief of legal strategy at Legal Aid of Nebraska, which has represented clients similarly situated to Tyler and Hall. In that state, people who fall behind on their property taxes are bought out, without their knowledge, by private investors. They receive no correspondence.
That changes after three years go by, when they finally get notice in the mail. Included in that letter is that they have 90 days to satisfy the tax burden, the 14 percent interest, and additional fees. It's a Herculean task for individuals and families to accomplish when considering they were struggling to pay the original debt, much less a multiyear accumulation and the associated penalties. If they fail to pay within the short period, the county treasurer gives the deed to the private investor, who then takes the home, sells it, and keeps the change.
Nebraska isn't the only state with an unsavory public-private partnership, which is a distinguishing factor in how states execute home equity theft. Arizona and Illinois, for example, operate similarly, allowing investment companies to do the government's work for them. The prize is someone's home equity. That's contrasted with states like Minnesota, where Tyler lives, which sees stolen equity deposited into government coffers.
"It's usually elderly people…people who own their homes outright who don't have a mortgage, and there's usually some kind of intervening situation," says Gaughan. "It's not just poverty. It's illness, or something happens in their lives….And then they don't have notice of it. And then [the home] is being taken."
In other words, home equity theft targets the most vulnerable people simply by the nature of how it operates. If you fall behind on your taxes, then it stands to reason that you are low-income, or dealing with a life-altering event, or both. Someone unable to pay a tax debt is unlikely to be able to pay that same debt plus the litany of fines and fees that expand it multiple times over. And someone in such a situation will be even more crippled when their last remaining asset is taken from them—their house—and the profits kept. If you didn't have enough money in the bank to pay your taxes, then you probably don't have enough money in the bank to buy a new house.
"I had one person tell me they were suicidal because they lost everything they worked for," says Martin. "It's hard enough to lose your home, but when you lose all your life savings, that's just beyond devastating. It's completely shocking. It often destroys people."
At the core of home equity theft cases is the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "Nor shall private property be taken for public use," it reads, "without just compensation." It would seem fairly straightforward.
It has not been.
Tyler's case arrived before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in October 2021. The question before the judges: Was it constitutional when the government seized the 94-year-old's Minnesota condo valued at $93,000, sold it for about half of that, and then kept every last cent, all to satisfy a $15,000 debt?
The answer they arrived at was yes. "Where state law recognizes no property interest in surplus proceeds from a tax foreclosure-sale conducted after adequate notice to the owner," wrote Judge Steven Colloton, "there is no unconstitutional taking."
In other words, according to the 8th Circuit, Tyler—and the many people also in her shoes—simply have no recourse when the government profits off of their poverty. "In every other debt collection context, the debt collector is only allowed to take what is owed, plus the cost of collecting the debt. But here, the government gets to tack on penalties, interests, fees, and then they get to take everything that's left over after that?" asks Martin. "That can't be right."
Maybe it can't be. Hall—the Michigan resident who saw almost $300,000 taken from her in excess—also sued. She wishes it didn't have to go that far. "[I was] running around trying to find out who can I talk to, what can I do to stop this from happening?" Hall tells Reason. "There was really no one there to work with us or help us or even tell us what route to go." Her case fed into the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and she was joined by seven other parties who had also met that grisly fate. Would the judges rule similarly?
They did not, and their opinion spared no prisoners. "The Michigan statute is not only self-dealing: it is also an aberration from some 300 years of decisions by English and American courts, which barred precisely the action that Oakland County took here," wrote Judge Raymond Kethledge. "The government may not decline to recognize long-established interests in property as a device to take them."
Hall was lucky, although that word feels perverse here. The court ruled that her suit had been prematurely dismissed, and it resuscitated her claim. But she still has to go before a trial court and win to get her six figures in equity back. "We all have problems sometimes and fall behind," Hall says. "To take someone's home…to have them homeless because of a little late payment I think is unfair."
There are some things she cannot get back, however. Her husband, Prentiss, had pneumonia when they lost their home. He rushed back to his job after the government took the entire value of their house—depriving them of their life savings, in other words—though he was still too sick to be there. At work, he fell on his head, sustained a severe brain injury, and died.
For the last several years, it has been unclear if Tyler will see an end to her case or if her legal challenge—with the bureaucratic hurdles that prolong such disputes for years—will outlive the 94-year-old.
She got closer on Friday, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear her appeal, giving the highest rung of the judiciary the opportunity to end home equity theft for everyone.
"This case identifies a pressing national problem that has festered for decades in the lower courts," reads her petition. "This Court should put the controversy to rest."
Tyler is not alone in her challenge. She has attracted the support of advocates of diverse professional affiliations and backgrounds. Those who have filed briefs in support of her include the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the Wisconsin Realtors Association, AARP and the AARP Foundation, the Buckeye Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute, among others. There aren't many things that unite people these days. Perhaps outright government theft meets that bar.
"We're not asking for anything unusual here," says Martin, who will be arguing the case in front of the high court. "We're asking that the government not [receive] self-dealing, preferential treatment that allows them to just take a massive windfall, usually at the expense of the most vulnerable people."
Should Tyler win, it would be a fitting metaphor for justice: a 94-year-old woman who had everything taken from her and who, in the last big fight of her life, toppled that giant.
The post They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In December, Richard Blodgett's 9-year-old son, Jakob, was taken into Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) custody. Two weeks later, Jakob had died of complications stemming from diabetes.
The incident, which is now under investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, highlights the dangers children face when they are taken into state care.
"They couldn't keep him alive for two weeks, two weeks," Blodgett told the Associated Press. "That's absolutely insane."
Jakob was first taken into custody after Blodgett was arrested on drug charges. Blodgett, who already had a drug charge pending against him at the time of arrest, told the A.P. that after operating a backhoe for several hours that day, he pulled over to take a nap at a gas station. A police report confirms this, though officers believe Blodgett was sleeping as a result of drug use. According to the A.P., authorities ultimately found over 4,000 fentanyl pills in Blodgett's possession. He was then arrested and booked on one count of drug possession.
Blodgett claims he wasn't using the drugs to get high, but rather to manage pain following a weight loss surgery. "I wasn't abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son," Blodgett told the A.P. "Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can't get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working."
Jakob, who was staying in the motel room the two shared, was quickly seized by the Arizona Department of Child Safety. According to the boy's grandmother, someone working for DCS told her that Jakob's insulin pump was taken because the boy was allegedly playing with it. From there, it seemed that the boy's condition worsened. He developed ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication of Type 1 diabetes that occurs when there isn't enough insulin in the body. Jakob was eventually placed on a ventilator, and just two days after arriving at the hospital, the boy was declared brain-dead.
Blodgett thinks that his son's death—officially listed as natural with complications from diabetes—was due to negligence from the Arizona Department of Child Safety. Both Blodgett and his mother, Cheryl Doenges, insisted to the A.P. that the boy could not manage his medical condition on his own.
While rare, the deaths of children in Arizona state custody are far more common than the state average. According to the A.P., the death rate of children in state custody was 97 per 100,000 children in the last year that data was available—nearly double the state average for the same period. One 2020 study of national data found that from 2003 to 2016, children in foster care were 42 percent more likely to die than children in the general population.
Thousands of children are taken by child protective services each year even though there is no evidence of actual abuse. While some children are certainly better off in foster care than with truly abusive parents, overzealous seizures of children can have horrible consequences. In some cases, like Jakob's, children are placed into state custody because their parent has been jailed for a nonviolent offense.
"That was my pride and joy," Blodgett told the A.P. "I'm lost. I'm completely lost. My family is completely lost."
The post A Boy Was Taken Into State Custody. 2 Weeks Later, He Was Dead. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Arizona businessman is suing the Phoenix city government over its ban on displaying temporary signage on private property downtown that hasn't been preapproved by the National Football League (NFL) and a private Super Bowl host committee.
"The city of Phoenix is letting the NFL decide what I can and cannot say on my own property. That's not right," said Bramley Paulin, the owner of two properties affected by the signage restrictions. This week, Paulin filed a lawsuit against the city in state court, claiming those restrictions have cost him advertising business and violate his free speech rights.
The Super Bowl is being held next month in neighboring Glendale, Arizona, and Phoenix is hosting a running outdoor festival in its downtown in the run-up to the game. To prepare for the festivities, the city government passed a resolution in October 2022 that requires all temporary signage in a designated "clean zone" to receive preapproval from the NFL and the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee.
City officials have said that censorship is necessary to prevent Super Bowl revelers from being scammed and to protect the investments of the NFL and its partners from competing advertisements.
"The NFL sponsors are making a huge financial commitment to be one of those designated sponsors, and we need to provide that protection to those sponsors in the downtown area where a lot of the Super Bowl events are happening," said a staffer.
Thanks to the city's signage restrictions, Paulin says he's effectively been robbed of his ability to rent lucrative ad space on his properties to clients.
"It's a blanket prior restraint on speech," John Thorpe, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, told Reason last month. "There are no guidelines, no criteria they give for what the NFL or the [Arizona Super Bowl Host] Committee are allowed to base their decisions on."
In December, Thorpe sent a letter to the Phoenix city government outlining the constitutional problems he saw with its signage restrictions and asking that it affirm in writing Paulin's right to host advertisements on his property without unreasonable restrictions.
With no such assurances coming from the city, Paulin and Goldwater filed their lawsuit in the Superior Court of the State of Arizona in and for the County of Maricopa.
Paulin's complaint argues that signage restrictions violate the Arizona Constitution's protections of free speech and due process. The lawsuit also says that the city's policy unconstitutionally delegates authority to private parties—in this case, the NFL and the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the city's signage restrictions unconstitutional and the city barred from enforcing them.
The post Phoenix Sued After Giving the NFL Power To Censor Signs on Private Property appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Akeem Terrell had been behaving peculiarly at a party on New Year's Day in 2021, and did not cooperate with Phoenix, Arizona, police trying to arrest him after they ordered him to leave. He died in custody later that day.
Now surviving family members of Terrell's are suing Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, the county itself, the city of Phoenix, and various officers involved in causing Terrell's death. The suit was filed last week in federal court in Arizona, suing over various alleged constitutional rights violations, and seeking compensatory and punitive damages and court costs.
As the suit describes the events, Terrell at the party "was expressing paranoid thoughts and making statements that did not make sense." When Terrell did not leave as ordered, officers handcuffed and arrested him. Terrell was over six feet tall and weighed 433 pounds, so "Officers handcuffed his arms behind his back with two sets of handcuffs linked together. The handcuffs forced [Terrell's] hands behind his back in a strange, painful, and unnatural way."
While Terrell did not strike at the police or try to escape, he was uncooperative in the sense of going limp; so he was arrested for both trespassing and "passively resisting arrest."
The police shoved him "in a face-down position in the back of the SUV" and told the Maricopa County Jail they had a "combative prisoner." His lawyers describe him as more accurately at the time "a mentally ill man in the midst of a mental health crisis." His speech made it clear he didn't quite understand where he was, and yelled, "They're trying to kill me, they're trying to kill me" and "This is just a game. This is just a show."
Officers shoved Terrell into an isolation cell, where they "pulled [his] ankles and swept his legs out from under him causing him to fall into the wall and then the ground." With his hands behind his back, his "fall into the hard concrete was broken by his face and head."
Terrell was forced onto his stomach by four officers, even though "[p]lacing handcuffed people in a prone position creates an immediate risk of death or serious bodily injury. This is especially true for heavyset, obese, or barrel-chested people. This position is known to cause positional asphyxia." Officers "forcibly bent [Terrell's] legs backwards at the knee so that [his] heels were facing [his] buttocks" and an officer "placed his bodyweight on [his] back bent legs….placing [Terrell] in a 'hogtie' position that is known to compromise an individual's ability to breathe and to cause death and serious bodily injury."
More physical abuse of this man who did not leave a party when asked commenced, including knees on lower backs and other body parts, also making it harder for him to breath. His final words were "killing me, killing me." Officers "ignored [his] lack of movement and labored shallow breathing and continued to hold [Terrell] down in the forced hogtie position."
"When [Terrell's] body spasmed, the Officer Defendants took this as a sign of 'non-compliance' and applied additional pressure and bodyweight," the lawsuit charges.
They left him prone and face-down alone, seeking no medical attention for him. The officer "did not move [him] to the 'recovery position' (on his side) to lessen the risks of serious bodily injury or death that are created by being left in the prone position."
Officers came back to the face-down cuffed prisoner about 6 minutes later and found him with no pulse.
This was all, police said, so that they could re-cuff him with Maricopa handcuffs instead of the city of Phoenix ones he came in wearing. They re-cuffed him as well in front after turning over his pulseless body. About a half hour he was taken to a medical center and pronounced dead. As of this suit being filed last week, no officer had been disciplined for their role in Terrell's in-custody death.
The suit accuses the Phoenix police department of, in general, "Adopting a policy, custom, or practice of delaying and slowing down the release of information relating to incidents involving Officer uses of force in order to prevent the public and the victims of police violence from learning about the real facts involved in police uses of force" and "of 'purging' Officer discipline records so that Officers who are the subject of repeated complaints and investigations cannot be identified and the victims of police violence will have difficulty demonstrating the City of Phoenix's custom, pattern, and practice of using excessive force" and having a "practice of failing to fully investigate incidents involving Officer uses of force and in-custody deaths."
The suit lists at least five other specific cases of handcuffed, face-down people in police custody in Phoenix dying.
The misdeeds of Phoenix's police department, which is currently under federal Justice Department investigation, are all too frequently reported here at Reason. The national Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in fiscal year 2020 there were, in federal custody alone, "65 arrest-related deaths and 614 deaths in custody." The Marshall Project collates numerous reports on deaths in police custody from across the nation.
The post Phoenix Police Sued Over Death of Mentally Ill Man in Their Custody appeared first on Reason.com.
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