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While I was in the legislature, I had the State Retirement System create a database of all five year continuous workers. If you did that now, it would have all people who worked for government in AZ from before 2016 through 2021. Then, I had them calculate their change in pay for the four most recent years.

City workers averaged 11 percent change in pay for each year. Yes, reclassifications and promotions run rampant.

County workers averaged 6 percent

State workers averaged 4 percent.

In 1995, 55 percent of Chandler citizens rated city government excellent. That dwindled to 38 percent in 2007 and then Chandler quit measuring.

The City of Phoenix varied between 12 percent excellent and 16 percent excellent for forty years before they quit measuring.

The City of Tucson quit measuring when they hit 8%. A special case all their own, Tucson has over 380,000 miles of cracks and potholes in their 2,500 miles of streets, record murders in 2021 and hasn't created a job since March of 2007.

By comparison, the Chandler Unified School district had 38% of their parents rating them excellent in 1998 and they steadily improved this to 72% in 2021. The Stanford Education Project rated Chandler among the top 1% of all school districts in the nation based on their academic gains.

Your average pay for a state worker of $50,000 compares as follows to the City of Chandler:

City of Chandler has 330 salaried employees making an average of $99,000 per year

City of Chandler has 1,000 hourly employees making an average of $62,000 per year before overtime.

For an overall average of $77,000 as compared to your $50,000 for state employees.

Cities are not a good bargain for the taxpayer in AZ.

State government and schools are an excellent bargain. Tell a state employee thanks and give a teacher a special thanks.

The National Assessment is the gold standard for comparing state outcomes. Our 8th grade math scores rank as follows: AZ Blacks rank 3rd just a point out of first with Blacks in only two other states outscoring them. AZ Hispanics rank 14th, Asians 5th and whites 6th. All this nonsense from U.S. News, Scholaroo, WalletHub is just that: scientific nonsense.

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