Anti-Tax Retirees Rule Arizona Politics

Mary Charlesworth leads one of the most politically powerful groups in Arizona, and she knows it.

“We can throw the election, and everybody is aware of it,” says Charlesworth, 61, president of the Sun City Taxpayers Assn.

Like nearly everyone else in this retirement community of golf carts and palm trees, the 20,000 members of the Sun City Taxpayers Assn. can be counted on to vote and to have long memories of politicians who cross them by raising taxes.

Sun City and its sister communities of Sun City West and Sun City Grand--and similar retirement communities across Arizona--are a major reason Republicans rule the state despite having only a slight edge in voter registrations.

Experts say that retiree influence is likely to be felt again this year, with few emerging hot-button issues to bring younger or less reliable voters to the polls come November.

“Here, we’ll get anything from 78% or more [of voters] who will vote in the [September] primary,” says Charlesworth, who is on a first-name basis with most top state leaders. “We can rule the election, and we know that.”

Sun City voters, for example, are credited with swinging the close 1994 governor’s race to former Republican Gov. Fife Symington, said pollster and GOP consultant Bruce Merrill.

“The older population has disproportionate influence because they vote, and we are getting more and more retirement people as we build these retirement communities,” Merrill said. “And that’s going to help the Republicans.”

That influence helps to nudge top Republican leaders to the right, especially on financial issues, while the state electorate as a whole is more moderate on issues ranging from abortion to education to taxes, Merrill says.

Taxes, as Charlesworth will tell you, are foremost in the minds of many Sun City voters. A major selling point for the communities is low property taxes; Sun City and Sun City West are unincorporated and most areas pulled out of local school districts years ago.

Many residents would like to see their taxes lowered even further.

“You’re taxed on everything,” says Carol DeMasi, 76, of Sun City West. “Everything has a tax on it, and you wonder why they just keep asking for more.”

This antipathy toward taxes in general and property taxes in particular was keenly felt in the legislative debate this year over school construction funding, where the mere mention of opposition by the Sun City Taxpayers Assn. could seemingly doom any proposal.

The solution approved by the Legislature this summer would restrict districts’ ability to levy property taxes even further and shift responsibility for nearly all school construction projects to the state. Charlesworth called the plan “as near as they can get to a good solution.”

“We do not want to go through one more battle on the school tax thing,” Charlesworth said. “It’s getting tiresome. It’s getting old.”

The overwhelming Republican majority in Sun City can make Democrats like John Salas feel pretty lonely. Salas, 70, says he’s joked with a neighbor that if they get into a car wreck, there won’t be any more Democrats in Sun City.

“I really feel that Arizona is just too much one-party politics,” Salas said. “The tendency is to ignore social issues and to ignore the people, and it’s too focused on the needs of business.”

Salas, a native of Guam, said living through the Japanese occupation of his native island during World War II--and Guam’s liberation by the Americans--helped make him a believer in the positive force of government.

“I am never unhappy to pay taxes,” Salas said. “I’m glad I can pay taxes and afford it. Under Japanese rule, it was slave labor.”