Marana residents sue town over rejected data center referendum petitions

This article was originally published by AZPM.

Marana residents have filed a lawsuit against the Town of Marana for rejecting petitions that could put a proposed data center on a ballot.

On Wednesday, March 4, a Pima County judge will hear from attorneys representing Marana residents and the town for a status conference.

The town states that the petitions didn’t include accurate legal descriptions of the involved properties.

Vic Hathaway, spokesperson for Marana told AZPM this refers to “written explanation defining the exact boundaries and location of a piece of property. It is not prepared by a PAC as part of a referendum but is prepared at the direction of the Town as part of the rezoning ordinance process.”

PAC stands for political action committee.

“If they don’t have that then every signature that doesn’t have that attached, every sheet that doesn’t have that attached can’t be counted,” said Terry Rozema, Town Manager.

But residents say they didn’t have those descriptions because the town itself failed to provide them.

Jackie McGuire, a Marana resident who is a plaintiff in the case, argues that this responsibility falls on the Town Clerk to provide complete information to petitioners.

“She’s the one who records the ordinance with the county recorder and that’s where we think we have good legal standing to continue to have these petitions processed, because it’s not up to the petitioner to know what the legal copy of the law is,” McGuire said.

McGuire believes Marana residents might have a case.

“The Arizona Court of Appeals has expressly held that the legal description, for the purposes of the statute, does not need a quote, hyper technical recitation of property boundaries that would have no meaning or relevance to the citizens considering the petition,” McGuire said.

Marana officials say the legal descriptions of the involved properties have been publicly available since December 2025, and that the responsibility is solely on the petitioners to have included them with the referendum paperwork.

The town does acknowledge, however, that it made an inadvertent mistake: that they didn’t provide the legal descriptions for the referendum petitions to the Pima County Recorder’s Office.

Marana officials told AZPM that once the Town Clerk’s Office realized that this documentation was missing on, the Town re-submitted it with the Pima County Recorder’s Office and re-uploaded the documents to the Town’s website.

Officials also said that the 30-day deadline for the Town Clerk to review the process for the petitions has passed and that the Town has no authority to reopen or revisit its decision.

Rui Wang is an attorney representing McGuire, Sue Ritz, Matthew Rohen-Trapp and the Marana Citizens for Ethical and Transparent Government – the plaintiffs in the complaint against Marana. She says that the clerk has a duty to provide a full and correct copy of the ordinances to the petitioners under Arizona law.

The residents established the new PAC in order to file the lawsuit and after Arizonans for Responsible Development – the political action committee sponsored by Worker Power who filed the referendum petition paperwork attempted to withdraw those petitions containing nearly 3,000 signatures before town officials formally denied them.

“There’s no other way to get the official documents, they have to come from the clerk, Wang said.

Adriane Hofmeyr, who is also representing Marana residents, says it doesn’t matter that it was available online.

“When they found out that they made an error, they never told anyone else about it,” she said. “You just need to have sufficient information to show the prospective signatories on a petition where the property was.”

On Friday, Feb. 27, McGuire declared her interest as a Marana Town Council candidate, now running alongside Ritz and Rohen-Trapp.