Action
Ballot Argument Submission

The Public Resources Protection Act

✅ We Support This Measure

HCR 2040 - School Districts; Labor Organizations; Resources

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Background

Why This Matters

Arizona is one of only a handful of states that still allows taxpayers to subsidize public union activity through government infrastructure: collecting union dues through government payroll systems, providing paid release time for union business, and allowing unions to recruit through district email and communications systems. This proposition would constitutionally prohibit those practices, ensuring ALL public resources are used for ONLY public purposes. School districts could no longer deduct union dues from paychecks, allow union materials through district systems, host union recruiting meetings on school property while students are present, or grant paid leave for union activities.

Click here to read the full measure.

Key Points:
  • ✓Public Resources for Public Purposes ONLY: Tax dollars should pay for educating kids, not for running a private organization's business. When a school district processes union dues through payroll, hands over email access for recruiting, or pays an employee's full salary while they spend the day on union activities instead of in the classroom or office, that is a public resource being redirected away from its intended purpose. This measure simply says: if it's a union's business, the union should pay for it, not the taxpayer.
  • ✓Preserve the Minority Workers’ Voices: Every employee keeps the right to speak for themselves. This measure guarantees every school district employee the individual right to negotiate their own wages, benefits, and working conditions directly with their employer and ensures that only one organization has the exclusive, taxpayer-subsidized channel to speak on behalf of every employee, including those who never asked for that representation and may disagree with it. This measure protects the minority government employee’s voice.
  • ✓No Taxpayer Subsidies for Big Unions: Paid release time means a public employee draws a full government salary while doing union work instead of their job. Across the country, this practice costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. It is one of the clearest, most quantifiable examples of public money being spent on something other than what the public actually voted to fund.
  • ✓Keep the Right to Work Promise: Arizona already settled this question for individual workers; this measure settles it for the systems they work in. Under Article XXV of the Arizona Constitution, Arizona is a right-to-work state: no one can be forced to join or pay dues to a union as a condition of employment. This measure makes sure the everyday machinery of school administration, payroll, email, paid time, isn't quietly doing on the institution's side what voters already said couldn't be done on the worker's side.
  • ✓Arizona Isn't an Outlier, It's Catching Up: This isn't a fringe idea; other states already separate union business from public payroll. Arizona is one of roughly a dozen states where school districts still blend the two, processing dues, granting email access, and paying release time at taxpayer expense. Cutting that cord puts Arizona in line with places that have already drawn a clear, common-sense line between public institutions and private organizations.
  • ✓A Principle That Applies Evenly: Some of the most politically active organizations in Arizona have had parts of their operations supported by public school administrative systems. Whatever one thinks of any particular organization's politics, most people agree on a simple principle: taxpayer-funded infrastructure shouldn't be used to fund political activity, regardless of which side that activity favors. This measure applies that principle evenly.
Sample Argument

Vote YES on Prop XXX!

When you pay your taxes to fund Arizona's public schools, you expect that money to educate children, not to run the internal operations of a private organization. This measure draws a simple, common-sense line: if it's union business, the union pays for it.

Right now, Arizona school districts process union dues through government payroll systems, hand over district email networks for union recruiting, and, most strikingly, pay employees their full government salaries while they spend the workday doing union business instead of serving students. These aren't minor administrative conveniences. They are quantifiable taxpayer subsidies flowing to a private organization that taxpayers never voted to fund.

This measure ends those practices constitutionally, ensuring they can't quietly return through legislative backsliding or administrative workarounds.

Importantly, this measure empowers the individual. Every school district employee retains their right to negotiate their own wages, benefits, and working conditions directly with their employer. But it eliminates the taxpayer-subsidized advantage that gives one private organization exclusive use of public infrastructure to conduct its business.

Arizona is already a right-to-work state. Voters long ago decided no worker should be forced to fund a union. This measure applies that same principle to the institutions themselves, ensuring the machinery of government payroll, email, and paid time isn't quietly doing what voters already said couldn't be done.

Protect public resources for public purposes! Vote YES on Prop XXX!

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