Legal challenges to Dominium’s Truman Ranch Marketplace affordable housing project in Surprise have not been extinguished, but a recent Arizona Supreme Court ruling only bolstered Voice of Surprise’s case for a referendum a bit.
In a ruling filed Aug. 14, Arizona Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice Ann Timmer wrote that the court decided that since-retired Surprise City Clerk Sherry Aguilar “could only exercise the authority expressly granted by the constitution and the election statutes, and nothing authorized her to reject petition sheets due to an application error,” with regards to Voice of Surprise not including the text of a to-be-referred city ordinance for its referendum petition.
“In sum,” Timmer later writes, “neither the constitution nor our statutes authorized the city clerk to reject VOS’s circulated and signed petition sheets because the application for a serial number was deficient. The city clerk was required to strictly apply and enforce the referendum statutes, which confined her authority to processing the petition sheets as statutorily prescribed.” However, this does not necessarily allow Voice of Surprise to re-file its petition signatures.
