What it means
Three words, three ways around City Hall. An initiative is a law or charter amendment that residents write themselves, gather signatures for and put on the ballot whether the council likes it or not. A referendum is a veto: if the council passes something residents object to, a petition filed within 30 days freezes it until voters decide. A recall removes an elected officer before the term ends. All three live in Arizona’s constitution and are copied into Scottsdale’s charter, and the City Clerk’s office on Drinkwater Boulevard is where the petitions are picked up and turned in.
You hear the words most in the weeks after a contentious council vote. “They’re going to refer it” means a referendum drive is forming and the clock is running. “It’s going to initiative” means the council has declined to act and someone plans to write the law for it, the way the Prop 420 campaign did in 2018. The voters and ballot measures guide covers the votes themselves; this page is about the tools.
Where you’ll meet it
At the clerk’s counter and on the city’s elections page, which lists the current signature requirements. Outside grocery stores, where circulators work. At the Kiva, where the threat of a referendum shapes how the council writes a motion. And in the 2025 Axon fight, which turned a Scottsdale referendum into a statewide argument about preemption.
Where the word came from
Arizona’s constitutional convention of 1910 was a Progressive document written by people who had watched railroads and mines run the territory, and it gave voters ways around their own government. Article 4 reserved the initiative and referendum to the people of the state and, in the same section, to the voters of every city, town and county, with local thresholds of 15 percent for an initiative and 10 percent for a referendum. Article 8 added the recall, at 25 percent of the votes cast for the office. Judicial recall was the clause President Taft refused; Arizona dropped it long enough to become a state on February 14, 1912, then restored it. The Arizona Constitution guide tells that story in full.
Scottsdale inherited the tools when it incorporated in 1951 and wrote them into its own law when voters adopted the charter on October 31, 1961. Article 10, Section 1 of the charter says simply that “there is hereby reserved to the electors of the city the powers of the initiative and referendum and of the recall of elective officers,” and leaves the mechanics to state law. That is why the signature numbers move: they are percentages of a base tied to city election turnout, recalculated by the clerk, not fixed figures.
The habit took hold with the Preserve. The 1995 and 2004 sales taxes were council referrals, but the Desert Discovery Center fight showed residents they could write the charter themselves, and the initiative that became Prop 420 passed on November 6, 2018 with about 71 percent. Scottsdale has been a petition town ever since.
What it is not
A referendum is not a recall and a recall is not a referendum, though angry people reach for both words at once. A referendum challenges a decision; a recall challenges a person, cannot begin until the officer has served six months, and gives the officer five days to resign once the petition is filed. Nor is a council “referral,” when the council itself sends a tax or bond to the ballot, a citizen referendum; most Scottsdale ballot questions are referrals.
The fine print
The numbers as of 2026: 25,887 valid signatures for an initiative, 15,353 for a referendum, 32,747 to recall Mayor Lisa Borowsky, and between 12,837 and 23,172 for individual council members, depending on the turnout in the election that seated each one. Only registered Scottsdale voters count. The referendum petition is due within 30 days of the council action, and a qualified petition suspends the ordinance until the election; a recall committee has 120 days to circulate. At the state level the same constitution sets 10 percent of the last governor’s vote for a statute, 15 percent for a constitutional amendment and 5 percent for a referendum, filed within 90 days of the session’s end.
The 2025 Axon episode is the cautionary tale. The council approved the headquarters campus, with about 1,900 homes and a hotel, 5 to 2 on November 19, 2024. Opponents filed more than 20,000 signatures in December, well past the threshold, and the rezoning was headed for the 2026 ballot. On April 18, 2025 Governor Katie Hobbs signed SB 1543, which required cities of Scottsdale’s size to allow such a campus without a rezoning or a hearing. Nothing was left to refer. The council later approved a 4 to 3 compromise with fewer homes, and in May 2026 a Superior Court judge upheld the law against a claim that it was special legislation. The lesson, spelled out in the preemption guide, is that the referendum is a power the state can take off the table.
One more wrinkle: a charter initiative is the strongest form, because the council cannot amend the charter on its own, which is exactly why Prop 420 was written as one.