Leading taser company Axon was ready to build a $1.3 billion campus. After they refused unionization, they hit a roadblock.
Taser stun gun manufacturer Axon is looking to bring thousands of jobs to Scottsdale, Ariz., by building a massive, Google-like campus in the area — but not if a California union can help it.
Axon has proposed a $1.3 billion development that would include a new headquarters for the company, along with some 1,900 apartments and condominiums, a 425-room hotel, and seven restaurant spaces.
The new HQ would bring up to 5,500 new jobs to Arizona, drive $38 billion of economic impact over the next ten years, and generate more than $2 billion in tax revenue, according to an independent analysis cited by Axon.
But Unite Here Local 11 and local anti-development advocates have stepped in to send the city council-approved plan to a ballot referendum after Axon refused to be forced into unionization, the company says. Unite Here Local 11 represents tens of thousands of hotel, restaurant and airport workers in California and Arizona.
After the city council approved the plan in November, a group called Taxpayers Against Awful Zoning Exemptions (TAAZE) began working to collect signatures to put the matter up for a referendum. The group, which claims to have no affiliation with Unite Here Local 11, has successfully collected more than the 19,000 signatures required to put the issue on the November 2026 ballot.
“Everyone I have talked to, even our staunchest opponents, say, ‘We love Axon and we want you to stay here,’” CEO Rick Smith told National Review. “But there’s this sort of weird consortium that has developed to kill our project.”
TAAZE is led by former Scottsdale City Councilmember Bob Littlefield, who tells NR the opposition to the Axon project is the natural conclusion of several years of backlash against the city council approving too many apartments. In November, all of the pro-apartment city council members were voted out, but during a lame duck session, the council approved the Axon project.
The citizens of Scottsdale spoke up during that election and it is those same residents who are now outraged by the Axon project, he says. TAAZE was able to collect 27,000 signatures despite Axon “running around trying to prevent people from signing our petitions,” he claimed.
He further alleged the opposition to the headquarters has been organic and the idea that a California union is behind the referendum is a “big lie” spread by Axon. He pointed to a poll from Data Orbital that found 65.2 percent of Scottsdale residents oppose the zoning change on Axon’s behalf, with just 29.1 percent of respondents supporting the change that would allow Axon’s campus to include apartments, a hotel and retail-use space. Another 5.6 percent of respondents were neutral or undecided.
Littlefield previously told the Arizona Republic the union had not given his PAC any money, but acknowledged he would “not necessarily” know if canvassers from Unite Here were circulating petitions on behalf of TAAZE.
Union Muscle
Data shows the union has supplied muscle to the small but vocal contingent that opposes the project. Unite Here’s political arm, Worker Power, has contributed more than $21,000 to TAAZE, city campaign finance reports show.
Ninety-five percent of the funding for the anti-development effort came from a dark money group called Public Integrity Alliance, 90 percent of which was donated labor, in the form of signature gatherers.
Just 7 percent of signatures for the referendum were gathered by volunteers, while the remaining 93 percent were collected by paid signature gatherers. Two-thirds of the signature gatherers came from out of state.
In Arizona, which is a right to work state, unions see an opportunity to go to major employers looking to get a big project through the zoning and approvals process and essentially force employers into unionization agreements via a weaponization of the referendum process.
If the union can kill the Axon project and replicate the pattern several more times, “people are going to have to sign off on these unionization agreements or take the high probability that the weaponization of this process will kill their project,” Smith said.
Axon first came in contact with Worker Power when the company learned the group was involved in the petitioning process. In response to an inquiry from Axon, Unite Local sent over a neutrality agreement that would have given them the power to unionize on the job site. The agreement would have required arbitration under the union’s arbitrator of choice in California.
Axon asked why they would sign the agreement. “And they basically said, ‘Well, you know, maybe it would be a good idea for you to sign it, so these petitioners stop and we don’t really have anything to do with that,’” Smith said.
Worker power announced in a press release on the day the signatures were submitted that it had been involved in collecting signatures in Scottsdale. The group’s press release also claimed credit for advocating against the Coyotes Arena development proposal in Tempe.
A union spokesperson told the Arizona Republic it has “not had any contact with” Axon. Both the union and Worker Power did not respond to requests for comment from National Review.
An Eleventh Hour Intervention
After two years of intensive reviews and negotiations with the city council, members of Worker Power showed up at the city council vote to object to the headquarters, arguing against the size of the project and claiming it would increase traffic in Scottsdale.
“It just made no sense,” Smith said. “Why would the union care about traffic in Scottsdale?” And under the current proposal, many of the workers would be able to live on campus and walk to work, addressing the question of traffic.
The argument from most opponents is against building more apartments in Scottsdale.
“My retort is, I can’t build a campus without housing for the people we’re going to bring in and we do have a housing shortage in Arizona,” he said. “So what you’re really saying is, you don’t want to be bringing new people here and new jobs here because those people have to live somewhere.”
Solange Whitehead, a city councilmember who worked for two years with Axon to negotiate a deal for the proposal that would work for both the company and local residents, said that while she and others ultimately wished the plan would have fewer for-rent apartments and more for-sale condominiums, that both she and residents she spoke with agreed that it was more important to keep Axon in the area than to have the additional condominiums.
That opinion was so prevalent, she said, that residents she has spoken to have said they would never have signed the petition to get the matter on the ballot.
“I think something’s going to have to change and that actually might be a good thing for all parties,” she said, adding that while Scottsdale has quite a few other apartments in the pipeline — other projects that have been approved but haven’t broken ground yet — the city is in need of more condominiums.
“I would say what is organic is general opposition by my constituents to large apartment approvals. That’s organic. What is not organic is a referendum that is clearly funded by deep pockets,” she said.
“I can tell you personally when I was at the farmers’ market, a paid petitioner gave me misinformation when trying to get my signature,” she said.
Others were less welcoming to the union-backed opposition.
“Big Unions from California shouldn’t be able to chase critical employers out of Arizona simply because a company won’t meet specific demands,” former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey told National Review. “Axon has only ever called Arizona home and the focus should be on helping our employers create more high-wage jobs and increase economic revenue, not derailing projects already approved by the Scottsdale City Council.”
It appears to be part of a playbook run by the union; in 2019, the union supported a ballot measure in West Hollywood to block the development of a new building for a private social club, retail and office space after the developer told the union it was planning to staff the club with non-union workers.
That referendum ultimately failed after more than a million dollars was spent.
Smith pointed to four other examples of referenda being weaponized by special interests: the development of the Mesa Riverview project, a new QuickTrip development, and Worker Power’s own efforts to tank the Tempe Coyotes project and the Glendale VAI.
“It’s frankly sort of cute, this idea of direct democracy, that people rise up and spontaneously organize. . . . But that is by far the exception,” Smith said.
Arizona and California are two of only ten states that explicitly allow similar zoning challenges by referendum — unlike red states associated with rapid growth in recent years, like Florida and Texas.
Axon Won’t Wait Around Forever
Florida has already approached Axon, inviting the company to set up its campus in the Sunshine State and in fact its officials can offer tax incentives to entice businesses to the state. But Smith says Axon is not looking for incentives in Arizona, they just want to build their campus to continue growing the company that began in a Scottsdale garage in 1993 and has since exploded to more than 4,000 employees globally.
For now, Axon is trying to avoid the referendum with a pair of bills in the state legislature, SB 1352 and HB 2925, which would reclassify a rezoning action taken by a city council from a “legislative” decision to an “administrative” decision.
This would effectively allow officials to make zoning decisions without being subject to a referendum, because legislative decisions can be put up for a vote, but administrative decisions cannot.
At a rally on behalf of Axon and the bills, State Senator David Gowan, the sponsor for the Senate version of the bill, argued, like Smith, that the referendum process has been taken over by out-of-state interest groups.
Leaders in the state legislature have said the bills do not have enough support from lawmakers to advance.
Democratic State Senator Mitzi Epstein said in February that the bill “feels like a case of Goliath gets a nuclear weapon and David gets nothing.”
“It feels like the billionaires and the developers are just steamrolling everyone else,” she said.
Littlefield was equally outraged by the proposals.
“They are going to literally take the right of referendum away from every citizen of the state of Arizona in every city and town in Arizona,” Littlefield said, calling it an “outrage.”
But Smith rejected claims that the bills would take power out of the hands of Arizonans.
“I think that’s just a false equivalence to say that this is disempowering voters. The current situation empowers special interests and especially, I’d say some special interests that are not consistent with Arizona’s kind of history and general political leanings,” he said.
Axon warns the company won’t hang around until November 2026 and will bring its headquarters to another state.
“It is currently a very frustrating process. There’s also some real mud-slinging coming from a small number of public officials toward me and the company,” Smith said. “I’m pretty thick-skinned, but we are a public company and boards don’t like negative controversy, especially coming from public officials.”
The company’s board of directors has given him a directive to get the situation in Scottsdale sorted out in the current legislative session or to sell the plot of land and take up an offer from a more business-friendly jurisdiction.
“Businesses don’t like chaos and unpredictability, and I can tell you that’s exactly what this process has become for us,” he said, adding that his preference is to fix the broken referendum system not just for Axon, but for Arizona to be able to attract other rising companies to the state.