Readers of the Sedona Red Rock News, The Camp Verde Journal and the Cottonwood Journal Extra know that our newspapers are among the best in the state. Our reporters, photojournalists, advertising representatives and graphic designers regularly win a slew of awards at the annual Arizona Newspapers Association convention. This year, our three newspapers won a total of 21 awards in everything from our copy editing to the design of our editorial page and classifieds section to individual awards for our newswriting and photography.
This year, one of our top achievements was winning first place for Best Investigative Reporting, an award shared between myself and Assistant Managing Editor Ron Eland.
We won the award for a series of stories exposing how a state legislator’s complaint against the city of Sedona came about and then for investigating the fundamental flaws in the complaint which eventually led to it being withdrawn and the Arizona Attorney General exonerating the city.
The Arizona State Legislature passed Senate Bill 1487 in 2016. The bill allowed any legislator anywhere in the state to file a complaint against any city in the state if they felt a municipality’s ordinance or code violated state law. Filing such a complaint would force the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to investigate the complaint and, if the town’s ordinance was in violation, the state could withhold all funding — including tax revenue it was owed under state law — to that city until the ordinance was changed.
We wrote a scathing editorial in October 2016, as did scores of other newspapers and columnists around Arizona, because the bill was ripe for abuse. Our warning bore fruit on July 17, 2018, when Eland reported that then-Arizona Rep. Judy Burges [R-District 22], filed an SB 1487 complaint against Sedona. Burges represented Peoria and had no ties whatsoever to Sedona nor any town in the Verde Valley.
Under the state’s open records laws, we requested the email correspondence from Burges and the three representatives of our district: Arizona Sen. Sylvia Allen [R-District 6], Arizona Rep. Bob Thorpe [R-District 6] and then-Arizona Rep. Brenda Barton [R-District 6]. While Barton and Allen showed no correspondence with Burges and little communication with Sedona residents during the time window, we did find that Thorpe met with a handful of Sedona residents shortly before Burges’ complaint was filed. Thorpe did not reveal any correspondence with Burges.
However, Burges’ records revealed emails from Thorpe. These emails were missing in his records, meaning he possibly deleted them, which could have violated the state’s mandatory record-keeping requirements, simply refused to provide them to us as he was legally required to do under open records law, or was so inept that he could not find them in his email records. Burges’ records revealed that Thorpe drafted the complaint against the city he represents, then asked Burges to file it. Burges did so without changing a single word in the complaint Thorpe had written.
We called Thorpe, who claimed to have no knowledge of the complaint. When we revealed we already had Burges’ records of Thorpe’s emails to her and his authorship of the complaint, he refused to comment further. We posted the audio recording of that phone call on our website for readers to hear. We also discovered the official complaint sent by Burges to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, regarding a city contract, was missing several pages. We contacted Sedona City Attorney Robert Pickels, who was drafting a response to the AG’s Office, working with the full contract the city had on hand. When he looked through the contract Burges filed, he too found that Burges omitted these pages. The pages contained language that would have nullified the issues she made in her complaint.
With these pages in hand, Pickels’ response to the AG called the complaint “grossly deficient,” an “egregious abuse” and “It can only be inferred that this was an intentional omission done to misrepresent the facts and mislead the investigation.” Burges withdrew her complaint before the AG’s Office investigation got underway. Months later, the AG’s Office found no wrongdoing whatsoever by the city of Sedona.
Larson Newspapers General Manager Kyle Larson, Eland and I are profoundly proud that our investigative work exposed this abuse of SB 1487 and were elated that fellow journalists from the Nevada Press Association, who judged the entries, awarded us with the Best Investigative Reporting award.
Christopher Fox Graham – Managing Editor
