They just don’t seem to get it. 

High-profile government officials – public employees who draw a taxpayer-funded salary – are griping amid public scrutiny of where, exactly, Arizonans’ hard-earned dollars are going. One Phoenix union boss, technically a full-time “city employee” even though he doesn’t actually work for the city, complained that he has to go back to his job as an emergency dispatcher and somehow carry out his union duties outside of city hours. A Phoenix-area public school district superintendent said he was “proud” of taking taxpayer-funded luxury getaways to four-star resorts.  

Here’s what they’re missing: our tax dollars are not a slush fund to squander on the whims of bureaucrats and their taxpayer-funded perks – because it’s not their money. 

It’s ours. 

Unfortunately, many officials don’t see it that way. 

Late last month in a case brought by the Goldwater Institute, where I work, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a practice called “release time,” which “releases” government workers from the jobs they were hired to perform to work full-time for their public sector union instead – on the taxpayers’ dime. 

While on release time, government workers engage in recruiting, political lobbying, and other practices that don’t benefit the public, but that benefit their union, at an estimated $3.7 million in yearly costs to taxpayers just in Phoenix alone. That means the practice violates the Arizona Constitution Gift Clause’s ban on taxpayer-funded gifts to private entities. “The costs and benefits here are so one-sided,” the justices declared, that the arrangement “represents an impermissible subsidy to a private entity.”

Within days of the ruling, Frank Piccioli, president of Phoenix’s chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told The Arizona Republic the decision could put him back to work as an emergency dispatcher, forcing him to do his union work at night. 

For Arizona taxpayers, it’s worth asking whether we’d prefer more 911 dispatchers on the lines ready to take our calls, or more union bosses using our money to advance their union’s interests. 

Of course, Piccioli doesn’t even have to work as an emergency dispatcher. If he wants to quit his city job and work for the union full-time, then no one’s trying to stop him. We just shouldn’t have to pay for him to do it. Unions collect dues from their members, after all – shouldn’t union bosses draw salaries from their own union coffers, rather than from our tax dollars? 

It’s not just union officials. Earlier this month, Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles lashed out after Goldwater obtained public records revealing that school administrators and school board members treated themselves to multi-day summer “retreats” at four-star resorts in Sedona and Tucson in 2023 and 2024. Calles curiously claimed that taking the trips actually saved the taxpayers money. In reality, most school districts do hold retreats at the district office, where the cost is minimal. 

Calles’ reason for hitting up four-star resorts instead? It would be “too easy to get distracted” at the district office. 

School district bureaucrats and union bosses aren’t the only ones who play fast and loose with the public’s tax dollars. With a devastating homelessness crisis overrunning the streets in Arizona’s two largest cities, Phoenix and Tucson have allocated at least $200 million since 2021 attempting to make things better — only for the crisis to get significantly worse over the past three years. As a Goldwater investigation further revealed, officials in both cities have even failed to accurately report to taxpayers exactly how much they’re spending, where it’s coming from, and where it’s going. (This is just one of the reasons why Goldwater Institute designed Proposition 312, a reform that will be on the 2024 general election ballot in Arizona, to compensate — via a refund for damages — the residents, businesses, and property owners whose livelihoods are being destroyed as municipalities refuse to enforce the law.)

Arizonans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize luxury vacations, no-show jobs, or blank checks for endless government spending. Nor should high-ranking public employees be surprised that taxpayers aren’t a fan of their wasteful expenditures. 

Perhaps they’re bristling under the eye of public scrutiny, after years and decades of doing as they pleased. 

They should get used to it. 

Joe Setyon is the senior communications manager at the Goldwater Institute.