For the second time, Prescott Valley voters win again as the Arizona Court of Appeals has rejected the effort by Citizens for Sensible Development and its attorney, Max Hathaway, to overturn the voice of the people.
On July 10, a three judge panel denied the committee’s motion to reconsider its earlier ruling on Ordinance No. 2025-954. Nothing new was presented. The ruling stands. Add it up and the tally is impossible to ignore: four judges have now reviewed this matter, and three of the four have said, twice, that the committee is wrong.
That is worth repeating, because the activists refuse to hear it. A Yavapai County Superior Court judge said the referendum was legally insufficient. The Court of Appeals agreed. Then, when asked to reconsider, the same appellate panel said it again. You are wrong. You are still wrong.
The reason is not a technicality of timing or a clerical slip. As the court itself stated, the committee “never filed the Ordinance” with its application for a referendum petition serial number, a basic requirement under Arizona law. The court found that attaching a copy of the ordinance was a simple step that placed no unreasonable burden on the organizers. They simply did not do it. Under Arizona law, referendum efforts must strictly comply with the required procedures. This one did not.
Now Hathaway says he will take the case to the Arizona Supreme Court. And this is where the true motive shows. By his own admission, the burden is on him to convince the court to even hear the case, a court that accepts only a fraction of what comes before it. Think about what he is really asking. Hathaway made his living as an attorney enforcing the letter of the law. Now he is asking the state’s highest court to rule that the letter of the law should not apply to him or to Citizens for Sensible Development.
Bruce Evans, the Prescott Valley resident whose court challenge stopped the flawed petition, has watched this pattern up close and describes it without illusion. “It’s not about being right or wrong,” Evans said. “It’s about their point and gumming up the system, delays, extra cost, pain, and hopefully some of these projects get killed.”
That is exactly what is happening now. After four judges and two rejections, this can no longer be a fight about being right. It is a fight about obstruction, plain and simple, and the cost falls on you. Every motion, every appeal, every reconsideration burns taxpayer dollars and forces judges to hand down the same decision again and again.
Understand what this fight is really about. It was never about letting the people speak at the ballot box. The people already spoke. As Evans put it, “It’s not a democracy. It’s a representative democracy, and we elect people to represent us.”
Voters elected a Town Council to make these decisions, and that Council did its job. This referendum effort seeks to strip that voice away, to override our system of representative government through procedural warfare. It is an attack on the very soul of a community that seeks opportunity, jobs, retail, and a future for us and for our children.
Here is the hard part. These activists look like your grandmother or your grandfather. They are your neighbors, familiar faces at the petition booth. Do not let that fool you. This is not friendly disagreement. It is a relentless campaign of “no, no, no” at all costs. As Evans said of the community he loves, “I just don’t want to see it ruined by people that are just being negative for the sake of being negative.”
The activists will not stop on their own. They have been told they are wrong four times over and they continue anyway. The courts have upheld the integrity of our local process. The people win, again. The only question left is how much more of your money and your patience the activists intend to spend, and whether the people who love this community will show up and say enough is enough.
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