Axon CEO Rick Smith at the rally. Photo Credit: Arizona Republic
It’s not a secret that Axon has been pulling every single lever possible in order to force its massive, unwanted apartment megacomplex onto the people of Scottsdale. However, a recent development shows just how much it has been willing to pay up in order to do so; how only one aspect of this push has cost the company half a million dollars, and that it wanted to keep it a secret from you (wittingly or not).
In the attempt to push back against Axon’s absurd apartment megacomplex, the people of Scottsdale banded together and captured 27,000 signatures, exercising their right as an electorate to put it on the November 2026 ballot for a public vote in order to have their voices heard. However, Axon was going to do whatever it could to avoid that since it knows that it does not have the public on its side.
It took a public complaint for Axon to show us all how far it’s willing to go; in a recent campaign finance report, it spent nearly half a million dollars in outreach efforts to mislead voters about the nature of the grassroots effort to oppose it. What’s worse however is that it took a complaint to get that information. Efforts to support or oppose any initiative, so long as money is spent, must be reported in campaign finance reports; this is not unique to Scottsdale, this would be nearly every municipality. And it’s difficult to believe that a firm like Axon wasn’t aware of this.
Also notable is what that late campaign finance report didn’t show: legal resources, consulting spending, and any other number of potential expenses that were almost certainly accrued during this process, probably bringing its overall expenditures closer to $1 million. This would be an additional campaign finance violation, further calling into question the level of transparency and ethics it conducts itself during this process.
Purposeful obfuscation or ignorance? It’s impossible to know. But that’s a lot of money spent knocking on doors to mislead voters. One has to wonder if Axon’s board is growing tired of this fight…
Meanwhile, while TAAZE, the grassroots group that is fighting back against Axon, filed its report on time, and while it did show a large contribution number, nearly all of it was “in-kind” contributions, i.e. products or services of value that were offered without cost. That’s what a real grassroots effort looks like, people willing to give their time and efforts to a cause they believe in.
That stands in stark contrast to Axon’s “rally” at the State Capitol. There was no grassroots effort; they had to get 1,000 employees to go to the Capitol to pressure legislators to eviscerate your right to speak up against awful development, a bill so bad that Laurie Roberts went to town criticizing it. How apropos…once again trying to bully to get their way, but this time strong-arming their employees into doing their bidding.
Rarely has a David vs Goliath matchup so clearly matched the original story, and rarely has the Goliath so consistently looked like the bad guy.