Prescott Unanimously Approves $311.5M Budget, Airport Eminent Domain Authority, and Five Charter Amendments Reshaping Development Liability
PRESCOTT, ARIZONA — June 11, 2026

Prescott Unanimously Approves $311.5M Budget, Airport Eminent Domain Authority, and Five Charter Amendments Reshaping Development Liability

Prescott city council unanimously approved FY27 tentative budget ($311.5M), airport land purchase with eminent domain authorization, and five charter amendments addressing development infrastructure costs, open space preservation, and property acquisition transparency.

Prescott Unanimously Approves $311.5M Budget, Airport Eminent Domain Authority, and Five Charter Amendments Reshaping Development Liability

Prescott city council convened on June 9th to advance a tentative fiscal year 2027 budget of $311.5 million—a 2.6% increase year-over-year—and approved a series of charter amendments designed to shift infrastructure construction costs to developers, mandate environmental preservation for large annexations, and establish transparent property-acquisition standards. All seven major votes passed unanimously. The airport land purchase, authorized at $620,000 with explicit eminent domain backup authority, reflects council's willingness to exercise aggressive public-purpose doctrine to acquire land critical to a $3.5 million state-funded firefighting expansion serving northern Arizona.

Key Speeches

"From this point forward, that number can go down, but it cannot go up any further." — Mayor Lois Fruhwirth, describing the binding nature of tentative budget authority

"If the property is needed for a public purpose, then eminent domain is a legal option available to local and municipal governments to be able to exercise those plans." — City Attorney, as paraphrased by Lois Fruhwirth, justifying eminent domain authorization

"Making sure that the taxpayers are not getting shortchanged, that we are making sure that growth is fully going to help pay for the growth and actually execute the growth that the council would ever agree to in the future." — Mayor (reference to Mayor Rousin's remarks on developer infrastructure obligations), articulating the charter amendment's rationale

Timeline

Opposition

Not applicable; no organized opposition or public comment documented in transcript. All votes were unanimous.

Support

All seven council members voted in favor of the tentative budget, airport ordinance, and approved charter amendments. State Legislators and Congressional Representatives toured the airport site and supported the $3.5M state grant securing. The charter amendments reflect council consensus on developer accountability and environmental preservation standards.

Project Details

FY27 Tentative Budget:

Airport Land Purchase Ordinance:

Charter Amendment 1 — City Judge Operations:

Charter Amendment 2 — Real Estate Appraisal Requirements:

Charter Amendment 3 — Development Agreement Prohibitions:

Charter Amendment 4 — Developer Infrastructure Payment Requirements:

Charter Amendment 5 — Open Space Requirements for Large Annexations:

Vote Breakdown

Tentative FY27 Budget ($311.5M):

Airport Land Purchase & Eminent Domain Ordinance ($620,000):

Charter Amendment 2 — Real Estate Appraisal Requirements:

Charter Amendment 3 — Development Agreement Prohibitions:

Charter Amendment 4 — Developer Infrastructure Payment Requirements:

Charter Amendment 5 — Open Space Requirements for Large Annexations:

Charter Amendment 1 — City Judge Operations:

Outcome & Next Steps

Budget: Tentative FY27 budget of $311.5M approved as maximum authority. Public hearing scheduled for June 23rd at 3 p.m., where council will accept public comment and vote on final FY27 budget adoption. Property tax increase ($3/month on $500K home) to be considered for approval at July 14th meeting, contingent on budget passage. Lois Fruhwirth directed staff to publish public safety tax reconciliation (comparing 2024 voter assumptions to current projections) before June 23rd final vote. Property/evidence facility cost-optimization strategies to be developed by staff; council may approve maximum figure now and reduce spending through subsequent council actions and staff-developed alternatives.

Airport Land Purchase: Ordinance authorizing $620,000 purchase and eminent domain authority approved. Negotiations with current owners to continue; eminent domain not to be invoked unless negotiations fail. State $3.5M firefighting-capability grant secured. US Forest Service operations staging and northern Arizona firefighting base operations to proceed contingent on land acquisition.

Charter Amendments: Three amendments (Real Estate Appraisal Requirements, Development Agreement Prohibitions, Open Space Requirements) approved for November ballot. One amendment (Developer Infrastructure Payment Requirements) approved for November ballot. One amendment (City Judge Operations) deferred; revised language due June 23rd for final approval to meet November ballot deadline. All approved amendments will appear on November election ballot for voter decision.

Controversies & Context

Eminent Domain Authority: The airport land purchase ordinance grants eminent domain authority, which council framed as legitimate public-purpose doctrine. Lois Fruhwirth emphasized that State Legislators and Congressional Representatives toured the site and secured $3.5M in state funding, positioning the firefighting base as serving northern Arizona's US Forest Service operations and regional fire suppression—not merely local benefit. City Attorney briefed council that eminent domain is a legal municipal tool when public purpose is demonstrated. However, the characterization of firefighting infrastructure as a "public purpose" sufficient to override private property rights may face scrutiny from property-rights advocates. Council deferred actual eminent domain exercise pending negotiations, suggesting internal comfort with negotiated acquisition but legal backing if needed.

Developer Infrastructure Shifting: The charter amendment requiring developers to "provide, furnish, or pay in-lieu fees" for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, rights-of-way) represents a major policy reversal. Lois Fruhwirth explicitly noted that "in the last 20 years or so in the city of Prescott" the city bore these acquisition and construction costs, resulting in lawsuits and unequal burden-shifting compared to valley jurisdictions. This charter amendment, if approved by voters, would prospectively require developers to internalize expansion costs rather than pass them to taxpayers. This is development-code language that will reshape future pre-annexation development agreements.

State Legislative Revenue Pressure: Lois Fruhwirth extended discussion of state legislative threats—particularly potential elimination of food tax and the 2% property tax cap—frames the $3/month property tax increase as preemptive. She argued that food tax loss would require "43 years of property tax increases" to offset under state legislative constraints, making modest tax increases now essential to maintain service levels in an era of tightening state-imposed revenue restrictions. This reflects broader Arizona municipal fiscal stress.

Open Space Preservation & Environmental Standards: The 25% open space requirement for large annexations (250+ acres) represents an attempt to prevent fragmented, non-functional green space. The charter amendment specifies that space must preserve "wildlife corridors and native habitat," provide "public access" (trails, recreation), and maintain "connectivity and environmental sustainability." This responds to past developments where dedicated open space consisted of isolated drainage swales or scattered parcels, functionally useless to the community. If approved by voters, the standard shifts landscape design expectations significantly.

Real Estate Appraisal Transparency: The requirement for independent appraisals on all city property purchases addresses a documented practice gap. Lois Fruhwirth stated: "right now we have made over previous years of council lots of purchases where we didn't have a real estate appraisal on hand." Requiring certified appraisers with no financial interest in deals reflects governance reform toward transparency and defensibility of public-fund deployment.

Development Agreement Perpetuity: The prohibition on "adjoining or adjacent" property language in development agreements and the requirement for defined expiration dates target an undisciplined practice where agreements created open-ended city obligations or easements/rights-of-way benefiting future properties the original developer might acquire but had not yet annexed. This prevents agreements from functioning as stealth annexation pathways or imposing surprise liabilities on future councils.

Duration

Controversies & Notable Context

The convergence of five charter amendments with a tentative budget increase in a single meeting signals coordinated council effort to address fiscal and growth-management challenges simultaneously. The mayor's extended discussion of state legislative revenue threats (food tax elimination, 2% property tax cap) suggests fiscal desperation informing the property tax increase pitch and charter reforms.

The eminent domain authorization for airport land, while framed as serving public firefighting purposes and supported by state/federal grants, represents an unusual exercise of municipal takings authority and may signal tension between airport expansion and private landowners. The deferral of city judge operations language—despite "conceptual support"—suggests underlying disagreement over the precise scope of judicial authority that required legal redrafting.

The developer infrastructure payment charter amendment is the most transformative item: it prospectively rejects 20 years of Prescott practice where taxpayers subsidized development-related infrastructure. If approved by voters, this will substantially increase development costs for future projects and reshape pre-annexation negotiations.

The charter amendments collectively represent a governance-modernization agenda: transparency (appraisals), environmental stewardship (open space), fiscal discipline (developer cost-shifting), and contract clarity (development agreement expiration dates). The unanimity across all votes suggests no active internal council division or external organized opposition, at least as documented in the meeting record.

View source transcript ▼

Source: In Case You Missed It June 9, 2026 Council Meetings — June 11, 2026. Auto-generated YouTube transcript; may contain transcription errors.

Hello everyone. This is Mayor Prom Lois Furworth here with another episode of In case you missed it, recapping the council voting meeting of June 9th. One of the important things that we did yesterday was approve our tenative budget. This is a step that we have to do as part of state statute. It basically sets the maximum amount with the vote that we did yesterday that the city is willing to go to the state with with what we would have in our budget.

From this point forward, that number can go down, but it cannot go up any further. So, it's one important step in the entire budget process. Some of the things that we discussed yesterday were total fiscal year proposed budget is 311.5 million that is up 2.6% versus year ago. Key to remember that we are still doing a lot of the um spending regarding Prop 478. And so those dollars are starting to flow in in terms of contracts to design and build all the stations that we had talked to you about.

One of the other things that we discussed yesterday was because this is the tenative budget, our next meeting on June 23rd is going to be the public hearing. At the public hearing, we will listen to comments from the public and we will ultimately approve a fisc year 27 budget. We will also talk about the upcoming property tax that council is strongly considering that would be adopted potentially later in the July 14th meeting after the budget passes.

So, let's just talk touch base on this property tax increase that the council is considering. Um, right now when you get your county uh property tax bill, on average, if you had a $500,000 house, the limited property value on your county bill of $500,000, that may not be the market value of your house, but you would end up with the portion of your bill that goes to the city of Prescuit would be $116.

with what we're talking about doing potentially approving on July 14th that would go to $119 or a $3 increase on a $500,000 LPV. So this is not sizable. It it is an impact. But to give you some perspective, if we roll all that up today in this fiscal year, we collect $2.3 million give or take on uh property tax. That will go up to almost 2.5. So it's about a $200,000 max, 190,000 range hit for the city budget improvement. Um so it's not much of a hit for every owner.

Um, and part of the reason we're doing this is because our state legislature keeps coming forward with various bills that are going to limit cities and towns ability to tax and fee increases down the road and give you one sizable piece of impact.

If they do do away with the food tax, which has been in the crosshairs for the past two years, and I can't imagine it's not going to continue to be worked on, it would take this city with the state legislaturator's maximum cap that the cities can towns can put forward on property taxes, only 2% increases. just to make up the dollars for the food tax on our budget, it would take us 43 years of property tax increases to make up that loss that we would get overnight.

So, this is something that would be a real impact to city services and your quality of life. And the city is feeling like we need to begin to pursue those 2% or less increases so that we'd be in a position down the road. So, more to come if that is ultimately decided. this is why we're talking about it. You are more than welcome to come and participate in the public hearing on June 23rd. Okay.

So, the other thing we discussed yesterday as part of the tenative approval of the budget was our 5-year capital improvement plan. We are spending $145 million in fiscal year 27.

And that includes things like, as I mentioned, the construction and renovation of police and fire stations, the runway enhancements that we've gotten grants and fundings to do at the Prescuit Airport, the expansion and rehabilitation of many of our water and wastewater systems across the city, and also investments in parks, trails, library services, and streets as part of our pavement preservation and rehabilitation project.

So we are enhancing our community amenities in this budget and I feel uh very good about those kinds of investments. Um we also discussed the public safety tax initiative and some of the uh assumptions that are built into the beginning of this coming fiscal year and future fiscal years. And um we are working right now on the public safety reconciliation um for the tax what we sold and shared with you back in 2024 versus where we are now.

We will be publishing those reconciliations via various methods over the next few weeks to help you understand where we are at. I've been talking about that in the last few shows and we are going to get that done and we will have that out to the public before we take the final approval of the budget on June 23rd. One of the things that we did discuss yesterday is our property and evidence police facility.

Um we are um pushing hard to see what we could do to come up with some less costly uh plans and so more to come as to whether we'll be able to do that. Worst case, we can still approve the higher number and then through council actions over the course of the next year with our city staff developing plans, we could bring those numbers down. Again, we're approving a maximum budget. we can still choose down the road to to spend less. So overall, it was approved yesterday, seven to zero.

More to come over the next few weeks. you will see more information coming in the newspapers and via the city website about details of the budget and um look for those and please feel free to join us on June 23rd at 3 p.m.

One of the actions council unanimously voted on yesterday was the adoption of an ordinance that basically authorized the purchase of land up at the airport or near the airport with both a purchase price recommendation accepted of $620,000 and the potential use of eminent domain by our city staff if necessary.

One of the things, you know, we we all discussed and uh to paraphrase our mayor um in one of her recaps is, you know, we're all very supportive of private property rights, but as our city attorney explained to us, if the property is needed for a public purpose, then eminent domain is a legal option available to local and municipal all municipal governments to be able to exercise those plans.

This particular piece of land is a critical portion of a map that our airport director went through with us yesterday. And it part of the reason for that particular purchase, which our state legislators as well as our congressional representatives have all toured the area and have been working to get us grants um for for acquiring. We got uh about $3.5 million from the state to uh help with the expansion of our firefighting capabilities up at the Prescuit airport.

It for the public purpose of not only fighting any fires in the Quad City area, but frankly for establishing a base of operations to fight fires in all of northern Arizona. So this is a public purpose and therefore you know we did as a council unanimously agree to approve this ordinance because it is a critical public use of limited land surrounding the immediate airport.

In fact this would be operations that planes would be be able to be staged and moved right into the airport operations to take off if necessary by our US forest service. So we did vote yesterday. We will see how things begin. The other thing we did ask is for negotiations to continue with the current owners and see if we can find solutions uh before we would go after eminent domain.

So more to come on how this develops, but I wanted to assure you that the public purpose was made absolutely clear and the council was unanimous on that point. And finally, we did take a look at several recommendations brought forward to us from the charter review committee. This is all actions that have to be approved by June so that it could be on your November ballot where you will decide whether you want to see these additions added to the charter.

So the first proposal one that we worked on is regarding the city judge and the operations. We had a lot of discussion. We had a lot of input on some wording choices and so we expect that our city clerk and city attorney will be rewriting this and bringing it back for June 23rd. Um, conceptually the council was very supportive. We just wanted to make sure we were had final language before we approved it. That was proposal one.

Proposal two that we approved with some amendments, acquisition of real estate property. We wanted to make sure that we were clear that prior to the purchase of any property by the city that we went out and got a true evaluation and appraisal of the land by a certified qualified real estate appraiser and that had one who had no financial interest in the deal to be able to sure that we had that kind of information.

This is uh something that council unanimously ended up approving because it's important for you as the public that you get to see the public record of transactions that the city makes using your tax dollars. And right now we have made uh over previous years of council lots of purchases where we didn't have a real estate appraisal on hand. So we think that's an important addition to the decision-making process. and uh we again unanimously approved that addition yesterday.

The next uh proposal that we made uh approved yesterday was regarding development agreements. And one of the things that we added that I think is super important is the prohibition of development agreements of using the words adjoining or adjacent properties. We want to make a development agreement with the land that we're talking about.

We don't want to have future incumbrances on us regarding uh restrictions or obligations about uh adjoining or adjacent future properties that the owner may acquire and want to bring in. So we've basically uh put that as one of the prohibitions. And the other prohibition on development agreements is that every development agreement would need to have a defined term with an expiration date. no longer open-ended development agreements. So that is the proposal.

Again, council unanimously approved that and you should see that coming on the November ballot. The third proposal that was brought forward was powers of the city as it relates to revisions that we could make on future negotiations with developments.

I'll read this the starting sentence to you is that the city must require all persons, firms or corporations responsible for new physical developments within the city to provide or furnish or pay inlue fee of for public utilities for water storage transmission for sewage collection and for things like public rights aways roads etc. While we made some minor tweaks to it, overall council unanimously approved this.

And I think that's important because what we've seen in the last 20 years or so in the city of Prescuit is that um as part of the deal, the city is responsible for acquiring those things, building those things like requiring the rights of way and the easements or building the roads, the sewers, the infrastructures, etc. And you've seen that we've ended up with some lawsuits even over these topics.

And when you think of our neighbors, especially in the valley, you'll see developments where they're building the roads, they're building the sewer systems, they're building the police and fire stations to go along to support the size of the community that they're building.

So this is the start of as mayor Rousin says you know making sure that the taxpayers you know are not getting shortch changed that we are making sure that growth is fully going to help pay for the growth and actually execute the growth that the council would ever agree to in the future. So a big uh important change of things to come. Another proposal that we talked about was open space requirements for largecale annexation developments.

And this is about any residential development project that is more than 250 acres in size. So we're talking fairly significant that wants to be annexed into the city. Pursuant to the pre-anexation development agreement, they must dedicate and permanently preserve no less than 25% of the annex project as open space.

We further went on to define what having that open space be meaning and and functional like not just drainage ditches and said to the greatest extent possible we want that 25% to be about preserving wildlife corridors and native habitat that is critical in that area. Providing public access to usable open space, hiking trails, biking trails or other kind of similar recreational amenities.

And then finally that the open space has to be configured in a manner that there's connectivity and environmental sustainability rather than an isolated strip of land in the middle of a road here, a ditch over there, etc. that isn't meaningful and functional to the population of the uh emerging community. So again, something that the council was very aligned and totally unanimous on supporting. So we have three proposals that we approved yesterday for the charter.

We have two proposals that c staff is going to work rework on the wording and bring back to us. And all of those will have to make be approved. The two remaining ones would have to be approved by June 23rd in order to meet the deadline to make your November ballot. Overall, I thought it was a very good meeting. A lot done.

council was verely unanimous and uh more to come as this shows up throughout the months of the budget and other items throughout the rest of rest of June and July and until you see things on your November ballot. Thank you.

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