He's so tight he squeaks when he walks. And you have been negotiating with this kind of person? Shame on each and all of you.
Then she finished the thought: “We are not in the business of paying taxes to support private enterprise.”
Greta was challenging a $230M city-backed deal to renovate the Suns’ arena — and calling out owner Robert Sarver by name. The video went viral. ESPN covered it. She was 89 years old and she had been doing this for twenty years.
“One would be wrong
to underestimate Greta.”
— Phoenix City Councilman Greg Stanton, 2004
Greta Rogers was 72 years old when the Arizona Republic first profiled her in 2002 — already a decade into her civic career. Five feet four, gray hair, Easy Spirit sandals, and an absolute certainty that elected officials work for the people who elect them.
She retired from real estate in 1999 and promptly redirected her energy to Phoenix City Council chambers, Village Planning Committee meetings, budget hearings, and any other forum where officials needed to be reminded of that fact. She almost never missed one.
At the council she was a celebrity — both loved and feared. Beloved by the residents she represented. Feared by those who hoped to get through a meeting without being held to account. She was appointed to the City of Phoenix Housing and Neighborhoods Commission. She was called “citizen extraordinaire.” She was also once called “loud and pushy” — and she would have taken that as a partial compliment.
In the last decade and a half of her life, she worked alongside Jerry Van Gasse and Tim Sierakowski on the Phoenix Parks and Preserves Initiative — tracking how voter-approved park funds were being spent, attending every oversight meeting, and building the evidentiary record that would eventually become GOOD|GOAT’s first litigation hold. She never got to see GOOD|GOAT formalized. She died October 16, 2025 — four days after her 96th birthday — as we were drafting the paperwork.
She said what she meant.
I'm a pragmatist. That's a nice way of saying I'm a pain in the ass.
I don't say what will make people feel comfortable just to keep the water calm. I like to stimulate thought.
People are essentially lazy and disinterested. But that ain't my nature.
I feel like I’m sitting inside a women’s prison. We can make this spectacular. We have a beautiful palette here with which to work for the next X number of years, so put the money in the box.
Twenty-five years in Phoenix newspapers.
The Arizona Republic returned to Greta Rogers again and again because she kept showing up. She was a fixture. She was the news. She was the accountability the papers wrote about.
“She is a citizen extraordinaire.”
Said publicly, at a Town Hall with a sitting U.S. Representative and a County Supervisor on stage. Greta Rogers was in the audience. Arizona Republic, June 2007.
She fought the same fight
for fifteen years before we had a name for it.
Greta Rogers, Jerry Van Gasse, and Tim Sierakowski had been tracking the Phoenix Parks and Preserves Initiative together for more than 15 years. She was at the meetings when the Papago Golf Course debt purchase went through. She was reading the oversight committee reports when the attestation-not-audit substitution started. She was asking questions the City preferred not to answer.
She died on October 16, 2025 — four days after her 96th birthday, and four days into the week GOOD|GOAT was being formally organized. She never signed the paperwork. She had been doing the work for two decades.
GOOD|GOAT is the organization she made inevitable.
Activist · Watchdog · Citizen Extraordinaire