The Cottonwood City Council is at an impasse over selecting a seventh member to fill a vacant council seat. Normally, such a seat would be easily filled by a consensus candidate, but that may not be the case this time around.
Council rejected one candidate by a 2-4 vote and two other applicants by 3-3 votes — ties are automatic failures. This could be the case for weeks, perhaps months. There is nothing to mandate that council pick any particular candidate by any particular date.
Council has an ideological split still stemming from the discussion of a drag show that took place in a city-owned building in April. Drag shows are common in Cottonwood and the Verde Valley; we’ve published plenty of announcements for them as press releases and photographed them for our three newspapers. Rarely have they ever caused any stir in any of our communities.
For some reason, perhaps due to an uptick in culture war vitriol on cable punditry shows and social media platforms, one otherwise innocuous event led to members of a few conservative churches to show up and speak during the call to the public about their opposition to the performance.
After all, events for the Sedona/Verde Valley Pride Festival have taken place at public and private venues all over the Verde Valley, including at the city of Cottonwood-owned activities field in Old Town Cottonwood directly behind the building where the April drag show took place
File photo/Larson Newspapers
From an outside perspective, it’s interesting that folks who would explosively bristle at any suggestion from a government body about how to live or raise their own children would want to use the tools of government to tell other people how to live their lives or where to take their children. The ability to understand hypocrisy is a measure of social intelligence, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there when culture war rhetoric drowns out everything else.
In any event, the drag show organizers applied to rent the building for a night, just as any community club or wedding organizer would. It wasn’t a special item that went before council for approval, just like your niece’s wedding wouldn’t, either. Demanding council “act” would be like council weighing in about whether your niece should be marrying that person she’s engaged to.
Cottonwood City Councilwoman Tosca Henry resigned from council back in March. As a lawyer and someone who knew the ins and outs of state law and local ordinances, she was one of the wisest members of council who understood legal nuances. Henry was replaced by Councilman Derek Palosaari in May.
Councilwoman Jackie Nairn resigned last month. Catholic Charities of Arizona, who employed her as the community manager for the Supportive Services for Veteran Families program, moved her to Buckeye. It’s Nairn’s seat that remains open.
With council effectively split by those who want to introduce a drag show ban ordinance and those who know such an ordinance would face a court challenge that would presumably fail on First Amendment grounds, candidates will likely be rejected by 3-3 votes until one side blinks.
The 2024 election is only 10 months away, so council could remain in a stalemate until then.
On another front, an ad hoc group of residents are working on a possible recall of current Cottonwood Mayor Tim Elinski over the drag show. Not the rest of council, who voted 4-3 against an ordinance, but just Elinski for some reason.
Recalls are not common in many U.S. states and are even harder to accomplish. A recall against Elinski will be an uphill battle. He has been on council since 2005 and mayor since 2016, handily defeating two opponents in 2016 and running unopposed in 2020.
Though his action infuriated both liberals and conservatives who opposed masks for their own reasons, a recall attempt in 2020 never collected enough signatures to make the ballot.
Fixating on a niche complaint like a drag show from months ago that the mayor had nothing to do with seems even less likely to succeed. Petitioners would also have to float a candidate who could challenge an otherwise popular mayor on an anti-drag show platform, which seems doomed to fail given Cottonwood’s culture of acceptance and openness.
Secondly, the soonest recall election would be in March. If Elinski runs for reelection as mayor in August, this means he’d have extra months to campaign, raise money and put out signs, first against a recall challenger, then against a general election candidate. Given the election timing, a recall will only help his double bid.
In any event, Cottonwood City Council meetings are going to be an interesting show to watch in the months to come.
