With an ordinary sales tax what you're taxed is scaled to what you pay for what you buy.
With a franchise fee the taxing is even more regressive than a sales tax.
And with sales taxes essential survival things are exempt. The franchise fee proposal FOCUSES upon family essentials. If like the more established Ramsey families, your well needs electricity or you lack running water, making a home uninhabitable.
Last, everybody likely is paying some indirectly charged franchise fee already. ACE Solid Waste is a utility, and - guessing now, but something to be pinned down for the Charter Commission hearing - the expectation is ACE pays a hefty amount to the city for its trash/recycle franchise, and all costs are passed through to where revenue exceeds costs, yielding profit.
Simple stuff. Already there, but that's not justification at all for more of the same.
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A hopeful thing for those liking decent and charitably-responsible public policy, is low income housing subsidy and food stamps, along with Medicaid. The poor suffer enough, so the government policy of not dragging them over the rocks even more, that is nice.
A franchise fee would presumably - certainly as so far proposed - hammer hardest on the folks needing a housing subsidy, needing help, to avoid homelessness of families in our generally prosperous community.
Why do that? It is really, really unkind.
That seems the best word for it, polemics not needed, simply: "unkind."