Stop the Californication of Arizona

OPINION:

I live in California, and I work for Arizona. While I’d love to see political change in the Golden State and supported the recent attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, the one-party political machine that owns Sacramento has proved unstoppable. It will continue to pour my tax dollars into the unfinished train to nowhere and “green” energy projects that undermine our once reliable energy grid. They will increase services to illegal aliens, while taxpayers are plagued by chronic homelessness and rampant crime. I feel compelled to encourage Arizona voters to look to the west before they check their state ballots.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs acknowledges that Arizona faces many of these made-in-California challenges but ducks the hard choices required to stop them because she is running as a career politician looking for her next job, not as a change agent.

Ms. Hobbs presumes she will capture the state’s top office by ducking debate and hiding behind a standard menu of vaguely attractive liberal ideas. These include increasing state salaries, expanding immigration staff, funding job retraining programs, handing out diapers, forming commissions, and just spending a whole lot more on everything from child care to water resource management. Basically, all the pleasant-sounding dream-stuffs of which ethereal liberal Camelots are constructed. On the other hand, conservatives, like Ms. Hobbs’ Republican opponent, Kari Lake, must live in the real world. They must pay for visionary agendas with robust economic growth that demands concrete policies, not promises.

Let’s look at one concrete policy example. Working for Arizona State University in downtown LA has brought homelessness to my mind. Walking to dinner on a recent Saturday evening involved stepping into traffic to get around sidewalk encampments while avoiding the human feces and urine-soaked addicts asleep in the gutters. Phoenix isn’t nearly as bad, but its homeless population is obviously growing, and a few years of Democratic good intentions will surely bring it up to LA standards. Oddly, I don’t find any plan for homelessness on the Hobbs website.

However, when the Pinewood News asked the secretary of state about homelessness, Ms. Hobbs had a lot more questions than answers: “I think it’s figuring out what the needs are and then what services we can put in place to address those needs. Is it because they just got priced out of housing, and how do we make housing more affordable? Is it that they have these chronic needs that we’re not providing services for, and those services would help them?”

Seriously? This list of “I think” and “Gee, I don’t know, but let’s find out” responses is a shocking response from a career social worker who brags about starting her career by working with the homeless. She is currently the secretary of state. What has she been doing?

Ms. Lake, on the other hand, does actually have a detailed and well-articulated plan for addressing homelessness detailed in an Arizona Sun Times op-ed and backed up with a ten-page policy document on her website.

Ms. Lake’s plan isn’t callous, as Ms. Hobbs and her captive media would have you believe. It is compassionate where possible, and where needed it offers the tough love that has always been required to deal with vagrancy. It addresses housing for those who are ready for that. More importantly, it tackles the root problems of substance abuse and mental health by replacing enabling policies with an active approach to moving those in need into treatment via a ban on “urban camping.” Leaving the homeless in sidewalk squalor is neither kind to them nor acceptable in a civilized society. Ms. Lake also has the courage to call out a system where Democratic-supporting housing interests are building a thriving industry, which is dependent on ever-increasing homelessness.

True to form when the Blog for Arizona asked Ms. Hobbs about Ms. Lake’s homeless plan, the Democrat declared it “empty promises” and highlighted her own job experience as a social worker in the system that has nurtured the current homeless disaster. Ms. Hobbs blames sidewalks filled with addicts and mentally disturbed on housing prices and “corporate bad actors” while offering those wretched souls no path out of misery other than to subsidize housing. As though the fentanyl problem or schizophrenia might go away if only her “home improvement tax credit” were available to them.

Ms. Hobbs’ Californication agenda will take your state down a well-worn road to you know where paved with the best of liberal good intentions. As she is refusing to debate Ms. Lake, I urge you to look carefully at the policy pages of the two candidates.

• Greg Autry is a clinical professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. These opinions expressed here are his own.