Opponents of Axon’s Scottsdale project take fight over voter rights to appeals court

A group of Scottsdale residents fighting a massive development project by law enforcement technology company Axon filed an appeal Monday in their bid to overturn a state law  that now bars voters from weighing in on the project, arguing that it is unconstitutional. 

The group behind the appeal, Taxpayers Against Awful Apartment Zoning Exemptions, claims the law violates the state’s constitution prohibition against “special legislation” because it benefits only Axon. TAAAZE is asking the Arizona Court of Appeals to reverse the lower court’s decision and issue an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced. 

The 2025 law, which a trial court upheld earlier this year, says that any city 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.

In its appeal, TAAAZE argues that the law fails one part of a three-part test that is meant to determine if legislation is “special” or not. Specifically, the group alleges  that the population thresholds in the law, which exclude cities like Phoenix and Tempe, show that the legislation is not addressing a statewide problem but is narrowly tailored for Axon, which pushed for the law and threatened to leave Arizona if lawmakers didn’t meet its demands. 

“Conspicuously absent from this purportedly statewide initiative are cities like Tucson, home of the University of Arizona, and Flagstaff, where Northern Arizona University is located. These cities and others across Arizona, large and small, already support important corporate headquarters,” TAAAZE attorney Jean-Jacques Cabou wrote in the appeal. “And yet almost the entire state was surgically removed from the Axon Bill’s reach, with no conceivably reasonable or legitimate justification for the omission.”  

Axon lobbied state lawmakers to strip away the constitutional right of Scottsdale voters to challenge the police weapons manufacturer’s headquarters project near Hayden Road and the Loop 101. The effort to change the law was in direct response to a referendum campaign that successfully put the initial development plan on the ballot.

In addition to the firm’s international headquarters, the project is set to include a luxury hotel and apartments, many of which — but not all — will be reserved for the company’s employees. After the bill was signed into law last year, the Scottsdale City Council approved a memorandum of understanding with Axon to revise the project and fast-track its development. Among the changes, Axon agreed to decrease the number of apartments from 1,900 to 600, along with 600 condominium units. 

The council also voted to repeal the original zoning decision, made by a lame-duck city council in 2024, that approved Axon’s HQ project and was the catalyst for TAAAZE, backed by a signature-gathering effort linked to a California labor union, to gather more than 25,000 signatures for a voter referendum. Repealing that zoning action means the referendum cannot happen.

Even without the council’s decision to repeal the rezoning decision, the new law protects the project. 

Although Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Herrod concluded that the law was “clearly triggered by the zoning situation” with Axon, he rejected TAAAZE’s bid to block it. He ruled that the population thresholds in the law apply to cities that are likely prime candidates for “attracting international headquarters,” and apply beyond Axon’s specific case, so it wasn’t unconstitutional. 

In its appeal, TAAAZE noted that the law applies to only five cities — out of 91 incorporated municipalities in Arizona — making it “unvarnished legislative favoritism.” That limited scope, the Axon critics argued, flies in the face of the legislature’s written intent for the law that it claims is needed to create “uniform law governing international headquarters campuses.” 

“A zoning law that applies to only five municipalities in the state is not uniform, and it certainly does not reasonably encourage the relocation of corporate headquarters to Arizona,” Cabou wrote. “The Axon Bill is an unconstitutional special law, and Plaintiffs respectfully request that this Court reverse the Superior Court and preliminarily and permanently enjoin the legislation’s enforcement.” 

Axon did not respond to a request for comment.