By Victoria Kauzlarich, Chair, LD3 Dems
Are you itching to do SOMETHING? To fight back and make a lasting difference? If you live in Scottsdale, I have just the ticket, er, two tickets.
Rough Road Ahead: A Plan & A Commission
Scottsdale’s first Sustainability Plan is up for a city council vote on Tuesday, December 3rd. Yeah, I know, soon. But the timing of this COULD be just about perfect.
The opposition to the Plan has already formed thanks to two new council members who will be seated in January. The current council remains in place until January 14th.
Cue the incoming council, trumpeting its populist presence with faux outrage. These far-right members of the Council will have a 5-2 majority come January and they’ve already previewed their intent to kill the Sustainability Plan and maybe the Environmental Advisory Commission along with it.
They’re deriding the plan as “Scottsdale’s Green New Deal”. They claim it is too radical and also claim to have email from 300 residents (1.5% of the city’s total voters) who support killing the plan, too.
Not so fast. Scottsdale residents support sustainability, bigly. Yep. Prop 490 (protect the preserve & city parks) passed in every single Scottsdale precinct. Not one voted against it. THIS is the base of support for the city’s Sustainability Plan.
Time to put our shoulders to the wheel. If every Scottsdale resident who reads this newsletter would send an email in support of the Sustainability Plan to citycouncil@scottsdaleaz.gov BEFORE Tuesday, our voices will be heard, too, and OURS are the voices of reason.
Some important things to know before you dash off an email. The Sustainability Plan is not a mandate. It has goals, not requirements for action. It was developed by the citizens who serve on the Environmental Advisory Commission with involvement and support from city staff and the Council.
Any Scottsdale citizen can attend the commission’s meetings and read the plan in her op-ed link. There is simply no excuse for being as uninformed (or misinformed) about this as is Councilwoman-elect Jan Dubauskas. Read her op-ed on the subject here. Then read the Sustainability Plan here. You’ll see pretty quickly that the Dubauskas criticisms bear little resemblance to the plan itself.
AXON or Amazon?
Next up on the far right’s council agenda is killing the AXON plan, just approved on November 19th by the current council on a 5-2 vote.
The party of NO is dead set against apartments and they’ve taken complaints from nearby residents (who don’t want apartments nearby either) and turned both into a cause célèbre. Here’s the problem.
If Axon doesn’t build on that site, Amazon or FedEx is likely to do so. These sprawling facilities wouldn’t have apartments. What they WOULD have is round-the-clock 18-wheeler traffic.
How do you kill the AXON project? You mount a petition drive which freezes the project in its tracks, collect 15,000 signatures and put the whole thing on the ballot in 2026. Meanwhile, AXON takes its $38B in economic impact and all its high paying jobs and leaves Scottsdale with a sprawling warehouse.
In the link above, Jan Dubauskas closes her op-ed in the Arizona Progress Gazette without a hint of irony, by concluding “…Scottsdale is such a vibrant city, together we have the opportunity to keep it that way!” With a mega warehouse at the 101 and Hayden? I don’t think so.
If you want to learn more about the history of the Axon project, read the coverage in the Arizona Republic in the order each of these pieces appeared -here (10/25/24), here (11/13/24), here (11/15/24) and here (11/20/24).
If you try to compare the economic benefit of the Axon project which offers high paying jobs and engenders employee retention with an Amazon Warehouse where pay rates are low and annual employee turnover is 150% (not a typo) there just is no comparison.
I’m told the petition against Axon has already started circulating. Don’t sign it. Get the facts first. Don’t be fooled. At best, this petition is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Victoria Kauzlarich
Chair, LD3 Dems
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