Axon CEO Rick Smith. Photo Credit: Jim Poulin, Phoenix Business Journal
Anyone who has ever lived through their teenage years and had any sort of wise guidance from an elder knows the answer to the above question. When you are being pushed around and you want it to stop, do you say “Thank you sir, may I have another”? No, of course not, you stand up to them and take a swing back.
That bully is, of course, Axon. It wanted its egregious nearly 1,900 apartment megacomplex so badly that first it pushed around the city of Scottsdale, and when it showed some backbone and after citizens banded together to stop it via public referendum, it took its bullying to the state legislature to attempt to take away your right to public referendum (read our updates **here**).
It would seem as though a good portion of the Arizona legislature never learned the lesson of how to stand up to a bully, or perhaps were too busy being wined and dined by them and largely avoided their ire by capitulation. They weren’t directly in the crosshairs like Scottsdale.
But Scottsdale isn’t going to back down; even after the legislature decided that it was ok to strip away your right to a public vote, our city council is standing up for us. Now it will be using the legal process to consider options and is putting its money where its mouth is with legal exploration. And not just any legal exploration, but they are set to hire a bad-ass attorney, Dom Draye; Dom won’t simply be standing up for the city’s rights but for the rights of every person in our city and every other city that wishes to preserve their constitutional rights to challenge their government.
The rezoning process that set the stage for Axon’s push for their apartment megacomplex singlehandedly robbed Arizona’s schools of tens of millions of dollars, which was bad enough as it was. But its conduct afterward was somehow worse and set the stage for something even more nefarious.
Had our city council simply caved, what would it have done? It would have shown that Scottsdale is the city where developers can simply push the city around to get whatever it wants. It would have been open season for the largest, most inappropriate, traffic gridlock-inducing megacomplexes around, and due to Axon’s actions at the state capitol, there would be nothing that you could do about it.
In short, it would have been open season for bully developers.
It should never have gotten this far. But thank you to our city council for showing how it should be done, and to send a message that it should never be open season for developers to use these sorts of tactics to get their way. Do it the right way or don’t do it at all.
Scottsdale elected a city council that isn’t afraid to punch a bully back, and for that we’re grateful.