Anita ChristyAFP-Arizona 2011 Grassroots Activist of the Year:

Anita Christy of Gilbert, AZ

Anita Christy of Gilbert, Arizona has demonstrated the power of blogging combined with grassroots activism. In April of 2009, Anita learned that the Gilbert Town Council planned to raise the local sales tax. She sent emails to the Council Members, but to no avail. She met members of the Gilbert TEA Party and other conservatives, gradually growing an email list to continually inform and encourage citizens to fight the tax increase. She and other citizens spoke out at Council meetings. The Council ignored their concerns about the economic issues they were facing, even though large numbers turned out to speak against the increase. By the end of June, the Council voted to pass three taxes: a quarter-cent sales tax increase, a Use Tax, and removal of a renters tax exemption.

Anita and many other concerned citizens joined longtime local activists Kevin Ross and Jan Hibbard to help them circulate three petitions to force the Council to rescind the tax increases. Under this pressure, and with the help of an opinion from the Goldwater Institute, the Council rescinded the increases in mid-August 2009.

Later that fall, the Council formed a Citizens Budget Committee (CBC) to help balance the Town’s budget. Anita was one of 54 citizens who offered $20 million in cost-cutting and revenue-generating ideas. The Council accepted some recommendations, but left about $14 million on the table. An example was their refusal to consolidate municipal elections from spring in odd years, to fall in even years, which would have saved the taxpayers $180,000 per year. Also rejected was a citizen’s offer of one year of his professional services for free. He was an expert in organizational efficiency and had served on the Steering Committee of the CBC.

In early 2010, the Council sent Prop 406--a quarter-cent tax increase “dedicated to public safety”--to the May 2010 ballot. The Council threatened that 96 public safety personnel could be laid off if the proposition was defeated.

At a time when state voters were being duped into supporting Gov. Jan Brewer’s sales tax increase, Anita joined a group of concerned citizens to fight Prop 406. She started the GilbertWatch.com blog site and began broadcasting her posts and updates via weekly email alerts. She monitored the actions of the Town Council, attending their meetings.

At one point, the Council announced that citizens could no longer speak at Council meetings either for or against Prop 406. Anita appealed to the Goldwater Institute for help, and notified citizens to send emails to the Institute. Goldwater offered a written opinion that the Council had violated “the right of the people to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” The Council changed their policy to allow citizens to speak.

Anita kept residents informed through GilbertWatch.com whenever a concerned citizen dug through the Town’s budget and discovered pockets of money. Another citizen discovered that the Town had a history of crying wolf about huge multi-million dollar deficits that actually resulted in surpluses, or in small deficits.

In the Prop 406 fight, Anita posted Letters to the Editor sent to her by citizens, and she featured photos of many of the homemade street signs made by Gilbert families in opposition to Prop 406. (Examples of sign slogans: “No on Prop 406, The Money is There!” “If Public Safety is Your First Priority, Why are You Funding it Last?” “Born Free; Taxed to Death!”)

On May 18, 2010, the citizens of Gilbert defeated Prop 406 by a solid 20,391 votes to 15,750. It was a large turn-out for an off-cycle election. The Yes on Prop 406 campaign had been funded by $33,000 from government employee unions in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, and Tempe. The No on Prop 406 campaign took in $3,500 in funds from Gilbert families.

Since the defeat of Prop 406, not a single public safety employee has been laid off.

Most recently, in the municipal election on May 17 of this year, the citizens who had fought against Prop 406 came together again to successfully elect three new conservative grassroots Council members.

The most significant issue concerned the discovery that the incumbents had gone on a $90 million spending spree in early 2009. Part of this spree was a $50 million purchase of parkland--for which they paid $300,000 per acre. A citizen found appraisals from 2008 valuing the land at $45,000 to $67,000 per acre. GilbertWatch.com featured 14 articles about this scandal, and the land purchase is currently being investigated by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

The citizens of Gilbert achieved their victory despite the fact that unionized government workers benefit greatly from having municipal elections take place in low-turnout springtime elections in odd-numbered years.

Even though the Gilbert Council has a solid majority of conservatives, the citizens of Gilbert must work to keep them true to their promises. Anita will continue attending Council meetings and reporting their actions on GilbertWatch.

AFP-Arizona produces an annual Local Government Scorecard to gauge the performance of city council members and county supervisors across the state. (For links to Scorecards from 2007 to 2010, visit www.aztaxpayers.org.) The Scorecard is a useful tool for grassroots taxpayer activists, but its main limitation is that it is necessarily a “forest-level” analysis of local government finances: it compares the annual rate of growth of the districts’ approved budgets and property tax levies with the rate of economic growth of the local private economy.

Even if all of the city council members and county supervisors in Arizona were to cut their budgets and levies by five percent this year (and thereby get good scores on our Scorecard), there would still be hundreds of wasteful line-items--including scandalous boondoggles--in their budgets that would need to be scrutinized and exposed. The Scorecard’s forest-level analysis is greatly enhanced by the research done at the “tree level” by local blogs such as GilbertWatch.com.

As we fight to make Arizona more prosperous and free, AFP-Arizona and all of Arizona’s grassroots taxpayer activists depend heavily upon the hard work of citizen leaders such as Anita Christy.

(A printable pdf version of this post is available
here.)

For Liberty, Tom

Tom Jenney
Arizona Director
Americans for Prosperity
www.aztaxpayers.org
tjenney@afphq.org
(602) 478-0146