Hobbs sides with Axon over Scottsdale voters, signs bill to cancel election challenging HQ project

Gov. Katie Hobbs has signed legislation to give law enforcement technology company Axon a carve-out in state law that will let it avoid voter review of its planned massive headquarters and housing project in north Scottsdale. 

Axon came to the Capitol in 2025 aiming to bar voters in every city and town in Arizona from being able to challenge zoning and development decisions. But that bill failed to garner enough support, so the company and its allies pivoted instead to merely stripping away the right of Scottsdale voters to challenge the police weapons manufacturer’s HQ project near Hayden Road and the Loop 101. 

In addition to the firm’s international headquarters, the project will include a luxury hotel and roughly 1,900 apartments.

With Axon pledging to leave Arizona if the election was allowed to stand — Scottsdale voters are notoriously anti-development — their bill earned support from a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who feared the homegrown firm would leave for another state. 

The Scottsdale City Council and every legislator from the city vociferously opposed the bill — and there are concerns the measure is unconstitutional — but Hobbs signed Senate Bill 1543 late Friday, along with a slew of other bills. 

The Scottsdale City Council had been urging residents to reach out to Hobbs asking her to veto the bill and had previously stated on social media that Hobbs had refused to meet with them after the bill passed out of the Senate. 

The Arizona Constitution gives residents the right to refer matters to the ballot.

“Today marks a defining moment for Axon, for Scottsdale, and for the state of Arizona. I am incredibly grateful to Gov. Katie Hobbs for signing SB1543 into law, and to the many Arizona legislators, business leaders, and community members who stood behind this important measure,” Axon CEO Rick Smith said in a written statement. “The hundreds of Axon team members and Scottsdale residents who made their voices heard played a critical role in shaping this outcome — and I offer my thanks to each of them.”

Axon has been lobbying aggressively for lawmakers to scrap the local election. Last month, the company held a large press conference outside the House of Representatives that included a large number of employees, technology, food and more, as lawmakers rubbed elbows with Axon’s C-suite and team of lobbyists.

Local activists, backed by a signature-gathering effort linked to a California labor union, gathered more than 25,000 signatures to send the rezoning decision made by a lame-duck city council — the votes for the project came from councilors who had been voted out of office — to the ballot in a voter referendum, which must happen by November 2026. 

With the legislation that was signed by Hobbs, even if voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the project, it would be protected by the legislation. 

The measure says that any municipality with between 200,000 and 500,000 residents — Scottsdale had 241,000 residents in the 2020 census — must “allow hotel use and multifamily residential housing” for land zoned like the Axon parcel “without requiring any type of application that will require a public hearing” if certain criteria is met.