Merissa Hamilton on City of Phoenix Policy
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Welcome back to Broken Potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone. In the studio with me today, Marissa Hamilton, former mayoral candidate for the city of Phoenix, had the unique experience of running against our

Our illustrious Mayor Kate Gallego. Also here with us today, Erin Morris. She's going to be bringing our sunshine moment and also can fill in a little bit on the city of Phoenix because she works with me in Sal DeCiccio's office. And full disclosure, Marissa did as well, which actually I think was one of the things that set you up well to run for that seat and something a lot of Republicans have not done very well.

in the past is learn about the job first. What was it that brought you to the city of Phoenix to trying to get into one of the toughest jobs in Arizona politics and one of the toughest races, Marissa?

Well, as you know, I had been advocating for a lot of policy that is related to City of Phoenix issues like homelessness and child welfare reform. And I did this just as a private citizen trying to help people, help people navigate government, navigate the way legislation works, navigate city government, and advocate.

At times, I just felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall. And so when the opportunity came up to work in Sal's office, I took it because I wanted to be better at what I was doing and understand the way government works from the inside.

I think that's one of the things that Republicans have been missing the most in a lot of these local elections and local races. And it's something that I was really pleased with your campaign as opposed to, for instance, a very good guy. I don't want to knock him, but Moses Sanchez, who ran a couple of years earlier against Kate, never really learned about the city. He didn't know enough to run for that seat.

And it's different. You're not talking national politics. The stuff that is consuming CNN and Fox News doesn't matter, does it? No, not really. There there was there were some elements that I needed to be aware of of what was happening in national politics. Trump was a personality, a huge personality. And so that definitely impacted the race versus other local races in the past.

But really, it comes down to the nuts and bolts of we don't want to have a tent city in Phoenix. We don't want to have potholes. We want to be able to have clean water. Just the basics. And with Kate Gallego, because of just how awful of a mayor she was,

was and continues to be, lockdowns were a huge theme and not defunding our police. I mean, Kate has been very pro-BLM, very pro-Antifa. She protected them through the riots. And so those were some of the most compelling issues that we had during the race. Yeah. One of the things that I thought was really, frankly,

an unbelievable development to me. Because I grew up in Arizona, the Arizona Republic was always a reasonably good paper. They might have leaned a little left, but it has been over the years a fairly honest arbiter of the news. They'll at least tell you the who, what, when, where, and why. In the last two years or four years, I really think since Trump,

They have gone completely downhill. And the record of Kate Gallego from day one is beyond awful. I mean, she has accomplished absolutely nothing of substance in two years, two plus years now as mayor. And on top of that, the things that she has done have actively hurt most of our residents, are not supported by most of our residents, like you're talking about supporting BLM. You know, I can easily say Black Lives Matter.

Absolutely. But if you ask me to support BLM, the organization, that's a dead no. Those are two very different things. Kate supported the organization. Her very first step out of the gate, you talk about all those potholes and welcome to broken potholes. If you've driven around the city of Phoenix, you know where we got the name for this show. As a matter of fact, her first move out of the gate was to try to pass within 24 hours of becoming mayor.

Or maybe it was 48. I forget. Vision Zero. Zero Vision is really what it should be called. Yes. Yeah, it's a mess. I mean, can you tell us a little bit about that program and what it means? Oh, my goodness. So it basically means, as far as the way it was applied in Boston especially, which is where I used to work, by the way. I would travel to Boston to work. It makes the roads go to 25 miles per hour.

So if you think about our standard speed limit on our Arizona highways, which is truthfully 80 miles per hour.

Unless you're on the 101, in which case you better be doing 100 or get out of the way. Exactly. And our roads, which is typically around 50 to 60 miles per hour. Open roads, city of Phoenix, we're at 40, 45 for a lot of them, 35 if it's a heavy, you know. Correct, if you're driving the speed limit. Yeah. But traffic goes much faster than that. Yes. And so to take that and bring it down to 25 miles per hour means you're crippling traffic.

And the way they enforce this, by the way, is with automated cameras. Correct, which have been terribly unpopular in Arizona and Phoenix. The program ended when someone thought they were shooting into an empty vehicle, an empty camera, and they ended up killing an officer. And I'm not laughing at the death of an officer out there. I think this is one of the things that people don't realize is

So Mayor Gallego was elected a couple of years ago. Literally within 48 hours, she threw this program out there with no notice to any of the other council members of the public. And you're talking about an incredibly sweeping change to the city of Phoenix, 25 miles an hour max on any street. Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, the cities that have done this, a lot of their streets, 15 miles an hour.

And then on top of that, they take away road lanes. They want to make these multimodal, they call it multimodal. It sounds very good, right? Multimodal. Well, who wouldn't want that? But what does that mean? It means you take away driving lanes and you add in bike lanes that people don't use. You add in pedestrian separators and barriers, islands in the middle of streets so you can no longer make left turns. It cripples traffic.

your city. And that's what it's done in those cities. 10 years ago, you could drive around all those cities, right? I mean, you visited all of them.

You could get around. It was traffic-y. I traveled for business. And yes, in the beginning of my business travel career, yes, you could get around the cities, navigate quite easily. By the end of the career, I no longer rented cars because it was just so annoying to drive that I would just take Ubers everywhere. And as a matter of fact, if you go on the Vision Zero, they have a website where the people who founded this promoted. If you go on their website, they're really clear. Their goal is to make it as inconvenient as possible to drive.

Which, of course, in turn increases pedestrian deaths and injuries. And pollution, right? Because you've got cars idling sitting there all day. Correct. Every single thing that Kate said she was for this program makes worse. But what it does is allow the Democrat politicians who passed it to say, I passed a program that will lead to Vision Zero zero deaths on our streets. As it escalates, like COVID.

Yeah, their programs always seem to sound really good, don't they? Absolutely. And then they work out really badly. But one of the things I think has been, I thought the Arizona Republic, which is the only news outlet that has a reporter assigned full-time or near full-time, now they're actually half-time, to City Hall. The Republic used to have two reporters assigned full-time to City Hall, and you had about four or five others who were there every day. Now there's no coverage of it.

And you ran what I thought was an intelligent race. You worked hard. You gathered a lot of support from volunteers. You had a lot of grassroots momentum. But the two things you didn't have were an honest media and Kate Gallego's financial network. Correct. But we did cause her to spend a million dollars on my three-month race. That's a pretty impressive thing. I mean, honestly, so whoever she's running against for governor...

in a year when she leaves this office because she doesn't care about the city of Phoenix. This is all about ambition. Correct. When that happens, whoever runs against her for governor, I think owes you a big thank you because that's a million dollars she won't have in her campaign kitty to spend against them. Yeah, not only that, but they have a whole lot of talking points to borrow from, too. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think you brought up a lot of good issues, but one of them and I bring up the coverage of the republic for a reason.

When you have only one news outlet, essentially, that covers a major city, the fifth largest city in America, on a daily basis, and that outlet not merely slants the news, but refuses entirely to cover news that might be seen as negative for Kate Gallego because for some reason they have a serious affinity love affair with our current mayor. When that happens, how does somebody get the truth out?

I mean, it makes it really difficult, right? It makes it very expensive. Yeah. Because in that case, you have to reach out to voters directly with texting, mailing. And so it's an extremely expensive campaign to run. 90% of my money was spent on direct voter contact. And one of the things that, you know, the Gallego network has changed is

is where a lot of that money comes from. In other words, it used to be that the Republican or the two Democrats in the race would have a relatively even opportunity for fundraising, right? You have essentially the same people that are interested in the city of Phoenix on either side. Some are left, some are right, but there's a fair balance. But she's thrown that entirely out of whack with a D.C.-based fundraising network of lobbyists and lawyers and environmental activists who

that she got connected with through Rubin and through Harvard and these kind of things. And that has really changed the dynamic in the city of Phoenix races, hasn't it? 100%. 24% of her last quarter of fundraising was from out of state. 24% is a big number when you're talking about...

Huge.

And that was essentially all out-of-state money, wasn't it? Yes. It was tremendous out-of-state effort. Yeah. And it changes everything. I mean, it really makes it unbelievably difficult. Folks, I do campaigns for a living. In addition to sales office, I've been a partner in September Group, which is a national consulting firm. We do turnout operations all over the United States and key Senate swing states.

Folks, you can't – it's almost impossible for $100,000, $200,000, a half-a-million-dollar campaign to beat a $2, $3, $5, $10 million campaign, especially in this environment, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're looking at, again, a million dollars in three months against a candidate, myself, that's not even an incumbent. Right. That's an incredible amount of money. Think about if we spent that million dollars on homelessness. Right.

Yeah, we're going to get to that in just a moment because I want to talk about some of the other things the city of Phoenix has done or rather has not done under Mayor Gallego's leadership. And some of the announcements that have been made, the things that are said aren't matching the reality. Absolutely. Broken potholes. We'll be right back. It's the new year and time for a new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.

Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain. This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today.

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Rocking in the free world with broken potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone. This week, my co-host, Chuck Warren, and the lovely ladies, Mackenzie and Kylie, are not with us. They are on their way to the Super Bowl. I'm a little jealous. I got to admit, I'm a little jealous. Not about not having to wear a mask on a plane.

But going to the Super Bowl, I'm jealous about that. Sure. Yeah. Marissa, during the break, we were talking a little bit about one of the things you experienced, which is we've had a lot of people who moved here. We've talked about this on the show before. We've had a lot of people who moved here from California, from Illinois, from New York. And there's an assumption that those folks are Democrat voters for life. Right. I don't believe that's true at all. It's not. What was your experience in talking to some of these folks?

So when I in the very beginning, when I was getting my signatures, I specifically focused on Ahwatukee because that is a district that's become a tough district to win for Republicans. And so I wanted to understand where they were at. And about 100 doors in, I get to the door and we're again, we're in the middle of the covid pandemic. And again,

The guy answers the door, and I say, hi, I'm running for Phoenix mayor. And he goes, I know we're in a pandemic, but do you mind if I hug you? And I was just like, okay. So he comes out and he gives me this huge hug, and he was emotionally overwhelmed. And he said his family had just spent their life savings moving from Chicago to come to Phoenix to flee the lockdowns because they were losing everything.

And he was so upset to find out that Phoenix policies under Kate were worse than what he was fleeing from. It's really amazing. And I don't I don't think a lot of people understand this. In watching your campaign, I really felt like had you had exposure that was equivalent to Kate Gallego, that that would have been either a very close race or frankly, I think you would have won.

Absolutely. We had when I post campaign, we had 67,000 new voters register to vote right before the election. And she only needed to win by 60,000 to avoid a runoff. And so if we had had that extra exposure, those extra 67,000 voters would have known what they were voting for.

And we would have won outright. Yeah, I really do believe that this was a case because, frankly, you know, I've seen a lot of what I would call long shot campaigns over the years. And folks, I think out there, you've seen them also. A lot of times they are, frankly, kind of embarrassing. But you took on a long shot campaign in a way that was very strong, very legitimate, very compassionate. You were utilizing your experience working hard.

to protect women from having their children taken away, from being families torn apart by the system through CPS. Your work on homelessness, your work on intelligent and actually effective things we could do to reform police community relations and how we engage police in our communities. And there are things we can do, folks, but they're not the things the left is preaching. No.

I mean, what they're preaching is a disaster. Absolutely. And I think people have been, frankly, had the blinds pulled on them on this by our local news, by the nightly news, which didn't cover it, by a paper which has made a clear determination to support Kate Gallego throughout her political career, regardless of what she has or hasn't done. And I want to go through this.

Real quickly, and I'm going to pull Erin Morris, who also works in the office there, into this part of the conversation, because you both have been there in the office to see different portions of this. And Marissa, while you were running, started out with Vision Zero. Six Democrats on the council. She can't get five votes for that. Why? Because when people learned what it was, when there was pushback...

They didn't want it. And people started calling in like crazy, right? It was hilarious, not to interrupt you, but it was hilarious watching 45 minutes of them trying to explain that the roads won't go to 25 miles per hour, even though they did everywhere else. Right. That was the most hilarious session ever. I mean, they were straight up lying. And Erin, we see this all the time, right, with City Hall. Right. Is if you're on the inside, the mayor, staff will sit there and kind of try to back you up.

Even if it's kind of nonsensical. And I love a lot of our city staff. I think there's a lot of really great, well-intentioned people. But when you have a mayor leading you down ridiculous, dangerous paths, you know, that was really kind of embarrassing, I thought. Oh, absolutely. I remember the meeting where the city where they're talking about her anti-police committee, which really is a backdoor to defund the police, which she was never honest about. And the media was never honest about that.

And the city manager there is trying to say, OK, but you're you're not going to. But really. And he kept trying to hand her an olive branch constantly and she would just smack him down. And I just saw just so frustrated. I actually felt bad for him. You know, there's a story I'll tell you in a moment about Kate and something she did right after the covid outbreak began.

But this leads us to kind of her second thing, because police oversight was her second big effort.

And just like Vision Zero, she's pushing an unbelievably leftist position that is not in line with most of our citizens. Only 12, 15 percent of the citizenry supports anything like this. Turns it into a giant jobs program for activists to go after the police on the city dime. Three million dollars a year in funding for average, you know, like 15 people with ninety thousand dollar salaries.

We don't have that many police shootings and incidents here, period. I mean, what are those 15 people going to do? They're going to be sitting around all day playing Yahtzee. Correct. Well, I guess. No, they're actually likely going to be registering voters like what we saw happened with a lot of the covid money. Right. That brings me to yet another point. And we'll get there in a moment. But so, again, six Democrats on a nine person council. She can't get the votes for that.

Then we go into the winter and what happens? COVID hits. Yep. And she panics. I mean, you could see it in her face, dead pale white, her voice throat tight. I had the same experience, by the way, with one of the opinion columnists for the Arizona Republic who called. And Erin, you were there. I had her on speaker. Yep. And you could hear the panic, right? She was terrified. And, and...

And so, yeah, you know, when I have seen what's come out of Kate, what has come out of the Republic on this, on COVID, you have to understand it's driven by panic, by fear. We had an expert on last week who was talking about how fear impacts your ability to make rational decisions. Absolutely. Well, it's just another example of how Kate is a bad mayor, because if you're the leader of the fifth largest city, you need to be complacent.

composed and confident at all times, even if the world is ending. And when COVID hit, the things she was coming out saying in her posts on Facebook and her videos, she wasn't being a leader. She was causing more panic.

and causing more chaos in her city. And she couldn't even hold it together for five minutes to say, City of Phoenix, we will get through this. She just fed into the fear. She was being pushed by, I mean, she was being pushed by Kirsten. Kirsten was trying to do a state takeover. Kate,

Kate didn't know how to handle the situation, so she just buckled under it. But she I mean, when we saw up close that she was really driven by fear, I think cinema was not. I think cinema was driven by pure political ambition. Well, cinema. I think cinema saw Kate and was like, she's going to be easy to control. Yeah.

Right. 30 seconds before we go to break here. But when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about your experience on the campaign trail, some of what's going on in the city of Phoenix and what the future looks like here in the Valley of the Sun. Broken potholes. We'll be right back. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.

Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain. This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today.

The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone. In the studio with me today, former Phoenix mayoral candidate Marissa Hamilton and my fellow friend and co-worker Aaron Morris. Aaron Morris, we call the cat woman. We'll get to that here in a minute, too. But I wanted to touch on one thing. I don't think people, this is what bothered me most about

our current mayor, about the coverage of her tenure, about the current council. It's an entire litany of either failure or empty grandstanding statements. We talked about some of the things that she's really fallen down on. For instance, COVID. This is a bad time to be a Phoenician because if you have a kid who wants to go run around on a soccer field, well, they do that in Scottsdale today. They do it in Peoria, Glendale.

the other cities around the valley. You can't do it if you're a kid in Phoenix. Our fields are closed. Why? Well, interestingly enough, it is a good time to be one certain class of Phoenix citizen, what I call the FOKs, friends of Kate. Yes. Because we have a COVID expert who is medical expert theoretically, who is not a medical doctor, who is a PhD in biodefense,

and who has provided nothing, and I do mean nothing, to the city of Phoenix that could not be cut and pasted from the CDC, WHO, or one of those other organizations. And we've so far, I think it's through next month, paid them $300,000 to do this. And the one time she came and spoke at council, this expert, Saskia Popescu,

Dr. Popescu, although I don't like calling PhDs doctors, but she came and she gave bad information. Now, either she lied or she didn't know what she was talking about, but it was bad information. And then immediately after her testimony, she started squawking on social media about how she was, quote, physically and sexually threatened for her testimony. Now, that's a pretty big accusation, right? Ladies, you're both women. Huge.

This is kind of an important thing when you say these things, that you be honest. And I'm a survivor, so yes. False accusations are the biggest enemy of those that want to try to get help. So we actually, our office actually reported that to the police. And they dug in. You know what they found? Of course you don't, because the Arizona Republic didn't report it. They didn't report the story at all. There was nothing. There was one email from a father who called her an idiot.

That's it. I mean, as far as social media attacks go, this was milk toast. This wasn't even milk toast. That's like Monday morning. Yeah. I mean, seriously, I have not woken up one day in the last five years when I didn't have people say worse things to me on my social media than that. Have you? I don't think so. No. But yet she claimed it was all this. And it was not. We have the email, the only email.

There's no threat. There's certainly no threat of sexual violence. And yet, there's no story done about this. There's no commentary about this. The fact that we have a non-medical doctor who's our COVID expert, who has lied to the public at a council meeting, and when called on it, made up a story. Now that's news, folks. That is news. But it wasn't covered. And when I look at the city of Phoenix going forward, I think one of the most important things for people to realize is that

So far, under Democrat leadership, Kate Gallego, their track record is nothing but failures and grandstanding. And when they're called on it, that's the kind of thing you get. When Kate was called on her COVID disaster and the fact she is the only big city mayor in America whose great emergency and dictatorial powers were taken away by the rest of the city council, she went storming into one of the other council members' office and said that this was because she was a woman.

And was literally stomping her feet saying, I am trained to govern. You need to listen to me. I am trained to govern. So Queen Kate was the appropriate model for her. Absolutely unbelievable. I mean, that is the kind of lack of leadership that is only possible with someone who has been in a cocoon their entire life. She's absolutely pathetic.

Our streets are broken. Our city is cracking apart. Our mayor, frankly, kind of a crack up. Broken potholes. We'll be right back. The 2020 political field was intense. So don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote domain from GoDaddy. Get yours now. GoDaddy.

The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken.

So I bowed my head and I cried. Oh boy, have I cried. You are my sunshine. But we are still going to bring a little bit of sunshine into the studio today. I know this has been, you know, kind of a rough podcast. We generally like to be pretty fair. Unfortunately, I think we have been, and it's still pretty rough. But to bring a ray of sunshine into the studio right now, Aaron Morris...

She has our sunshine moment for this week's show. So in Thurston County in Washington on January 14th, the deputies and state patrol were actually trying to stop an armed suspect in

And in the midst of that, a canine officer, his name's Arlo, he was shot two times. So obviously he was rushed to the hospital, took huge surgery. He has six screws in him, fractured his vertebrae. He recovered. He walked out of the hospital. When he walked out, he had all the first responders there. Everybody was cheering him on. He had the police escort home.

on all the highways he had all the first responders up there waving and then when he got home his community had put a welcome home Arlo sign in his yard and the whole neighborhood was full of first responders cheering him on and so if you fast forward to today Arlo is happy he can play he can walk so this is just an example of

Life is rough. COVID is rough right now. You have these Democrats taking over. They're making our lives miserable. But if Arlo can get through this, we can get through Democrats. If Arlo the dog can come back from being shot twice and be out in the yard playing, we can find a little ray of sunshine in our lives. Love to hear that story. Now, I introduced Erin earlier as the cat woman. It is not because she's not a beautiful woman who would look good in a cat suit, although I'm not supposed to say that according to our HR department.

I won't tell. She's also the only woman I know and have ever known who gets peed on by cats.

Okay, so I... At least several times a week. Well, I didn't tell you what happened the other night. Two nights ago, I was walking, holding one of my dogs and my cat, and my one dog is special needs, so you can't just set her down. You have to physically prop her up when you set her down or she falls over. So I'm holding the two, and I'm like, oh, gosh, my shirt is really warm. What's happening? And then I realized my cat is literally peeing all over me. And because I was holding this special dog, I just had to like...

slunk down in the hallway and just sit there and wait for my cat to finish. And then she just went on with her day. So you literally stayed and gave time for your shirt to soak up the pee. I didn't have any other choice. You win some, you lose some, you know? Okay. See, this is why we love having Erin Morris in the office and why we love having her in the studio because you get stories like this which you can get nowhere else. And I'm not mad about it. Yeah.

But but on an honest note and a serious note, you and your mother actually do take in a you have a shelter operation where you take in pets that are terminally ill, that have serious disabilities, many of whom are not going to live very long.

Correct. And who would be abandoned or killed in the shelters. And you take them in and you give them a real life. You treat them as pets until the end. Yeah, we actually have a sanctuary. It's called Fiona's Family. And we're a cage-free sanctuary. So we go out to the county shelter or the Humane Society or the streets.

and pick up dogs and cats who are either on the E-list or were born with a disease that is very expensive, so their odds aren't very high of surviving. And we just give them the best life, the top medical care, and there's no rules in our house. It's whatever makes them happy makes us happy. Actually, last night was my dog's first birthday, so we had a unicorn birthday party and we had a unicorn cake. Hang on. I've got to stop because when you say my dog, which one of how many?

So I still don't know how many dogs I have. I think we're at 20. I think it's 20. It could be 21, though, right? Or 19. I'm not quite sure. Okay. You know, you just kind of go with the flow. So she turned one. She has cerebellar hypoplasia, so she can't really walk.

She, you know, if she gets too excited, she can't breathe. It's quite sad, but she is one years old and she loves unicorns. And so we had a great party. Everybody got cake.

So our goal in life is to save all the unwanted animals and give them the best life possible. And do you have a website or some way people can actually support your efforts in this? Yeah. So we have social media. It's Fiona's Family. And then we also have a website. It's Fiona'sFamilyRescue.com. We have PayPal where people can actually donate. We are a nonprofit, so obviously you can write it off on your taxes.

And all the funds go directly towards either medicine or medical care just because we are at the vet every day. Occasionally laundry? Well, sometimes. I mean, it seems like it might be necessary. Well, we wash their clothes, not so much human clothes. Oh. Yeah. You know, I would have called this a hoarding situation, except unbelievably I have seen Erin in the office with the nanny cam, the internet nanny cam. My Furbo. Oh.

The furball. Yeah. Yes. Watching the house and watching the pets during the day to make sure they are not, you know, all dying on the spot or something. Keep in mind, my mom is also home 24-7, so I'm just extra neurotic. Good to know. Good to know, folks. Fair warning. But in addition, so 20-ish dogs. How many cats? 20. So 40. 40-ish. 40-ish. Yep. Okay. Well, folks, that's a lot of sunshine for a lot of pets. Yeah.

And we're going to make fun of Aaron for it for a long time.

Thank you. Because we enjoy it. Perfect. Okay. Getting back to the more serious side of this, though, you know, I wanted to talk and part of the reason we created this show, we named it Broken Potholes, was to talk about what's going on in our inner cities and the fact that these programs, the liberal progressive programs that have swept over our coastal cities and are being pushed in Phoenix and Atlanta and Dallas and all these other places now are a failure. Right.

I mean, there really is not one of them that you can point to as a great success. Their transportation programs have tied cities in gridlock. Their homelessness programs have increased the number of homeless people on the streets. San Francisco spends nine times per homeless person what Phoenix does. Their problem is massively out of control. Seattle spends 11 times. Their problem is even worse. You look at these programs one after another.

And what you realize is that other than throwing money at their liberal ally friends who are in these businesses that theoretically help these people, all they're really doing is grandstanding. I mean, our mayor passed a climate action plan that is basically just a copycat of what other cities are doing and frankly is essentially irrelevant on the scale of global climate change. They passed a housing plan.

that is pie in the sky with no real metrics, no real way to succeed. The roadmap for it is ridiculous. It would require billions upon billions of dollars that we do not have. Then we just passed a homelessness plan. Now, our office pushed really hard for city staff to be required by our vote to go out and seek IGA's intergovernmental agreements with the state, the county, and the other cities.

This is not a problem Phoenix can or should be dealing with alone, right? Correct. You will not solve it alone with just Phoenix. And you've dug in on this issue for quite a long time, Marissa, right? Considerably. I traveled the country looking for the best solutions that we could find, not just within the United States, even globally. And what we have today is not even close to what would be called comprehensive solutions.

And it's not. In fact, homelessness is guaranteed to increase under her plan. As it has everywhere, these plans have been implemented, right? Because they are not designed to get people healthy, to treat their drug addictions, their mental disorders, and put them in a position to succeed in life. These are programs meant to fund a bunch of organizations who essentially are enabling these programs

these behaviors that are causing the problem in the first place, right? Yeah, 100%. Absolutely 100%. And it is amazing at the pushback when you have a program that's successful, that's evidence-based, such as Elizabeth Singleton's Tiny Home Program for Veterans that has been hugely successful. That they will push and fight evidence

Against to their last dying breath. And then they will put in some milquetoast plan that they know doesn't work, that they know will increase homelessness. And then the media cheers. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think there's a level of ignorance in the media. There is a level of ideological belief.

In the left and their solutions, regardless of any history. I mean, there's no history of any of these programs succeeding in the United States, is there? No, absolutely not. I mean, you can even look at you mentioned her climate change.

programs. California cities have the highest climate issues in the country. They have the highest air pollution in the country. And so for us to continue to adopt failed programs and just radicalize failed programs, it's going to send Phoenix down to keep decreasing as a bad city. Yeah. All these things that we see that people are fleeing, whether it's the gridlock, the crushing traffic, pollution, homelessness, drug use, rampant drug use on the streets.

I, folks, I have been fighting the battle as a smoker for a number of years and quit a number of times. And unfortunately, one time when I had not quit or was back on the habit was when I was last in San Francisco. And I went outside my hotel and I walked down to the edge of a park and I was standing on the edge of this park smoking a cigarette. There was a guy sitting on the rock next to me who was cooking, I don't know if it's heroin or meth on his spoon.

You know, soaking it up with a cotton ball and whatever, and then into his syringe and injecting it. Now, he's sitting right there doing this. And I'm standing there smoking a cigarette about five, six feet away from him. A police officer comes up. Which one of us do you think the police officer addressed? He came to me. Of course. Sir, you cannot smoke a cigarette standing beside a city park. Okay. But what about that guy? Isn't drug use illegal? No.

Well, we don't do anything about that. Right. And that's what we're heading towards. They have this idea of compassion is letting people make mistakes and then just giving them money to allow them to continue making those mistakes. And it's not treatment. Their version of compassion does not involve treatment. It does not involve mental health, real mental health services. It doesn't involve drug addiction treatment.

How do you solve these problems unless you address those problems? Yeah. If we don't have a comprehensive program that includes helping people to thrive, getting people on the path to thrive, then it's just a waste of tax dollars. And that's what we see here in Phoenix.

Yeah. And so once again, we are facing folks and I encourage people to look, pay attention, dig in on social media. You're not going to get the coverage out of the Republic. You're not going to get the coverage from the local TV and news stations. You get it a little bit on talk radio. But this is really the only forum that you get a lot of information from.

about what goes on in our big cities, right? Well, on social media, when I tried to talk about it, Facebook threatened to take down my entire page. Yeah, they don't like it when you threaten Democrat control of their inner cities, do they? No, but when Kate completely lied about hospitals and freezers, they were totally fine with that. Yeah, and I'm still waiting for the 747, that's 800 people, by the way,

worth of Phoenicians, not Arizonans, Phoenicians alone who would be dying from COVID throughout this last year, according to our mayor. And so, yeah, they don't call out any of that. And they don't give you the information you need, folks, out there. And that is why, and this isn't true in pretty much all of our major cities, they are ignoring, the local press is ignoring what's really going on. They're ignoring the failures of liberal policy and politics. And

As we end our show here with one minute left, I'm really urging listeners out there to start digging in and paying attention to these things because as your big city goes, the rest of your state, the rest of this country will go. And it's critically important that we all start paying attention to these things and start demanding solutions that are solutions that are not just grandstanding and that are not the repetition of the failures of the past.

Marissa Hamilton, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. Erin Morris, always a pleasure. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been Broken Potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone. We will see you right back here next week.