Thacker v. City of Phoenix
Statutory special action testing whether Phoenix can pre-approve a year of executive sessions in a single November vote and notice them only as "Community Citizen Comment." Trial-court judgment for the City; appeal filed.
Arizona's Open Meeting Law exists so residents can know, in advance, when and why their government is meeting behind closed doors. A Phoenix resident who wanted to know what two City Council executive sessions in early 2025 actually discussed was pointed to the agenda that had authorized them a year earlier, in a single vote, and given nothing else — a public-records request for clarity was met with a blanket privilege denial and no privilege log.
On November 13, 2024, the Phoenix City Council adopted a single agenda item pre-approving seventeen executive-session dates for all of 2025 — treating a year of closed-door meetings as one procedural formality. Two of those sessions, held January 28 and February 11, 2025, were noticed only as "Community Citizen Comment," even though the same agendas identified other items by name and matter number. Jeremy Thacker filed a statutory special action under A.R.S. § 38-431.07 on July 28, 2025. The trial court granted summary judgment for the City on February 27, 2026, and final judgment was entered April 7, 2026 — but along the way, Judge Scott Minder noted he was "not endorsing the City's occasionally shifting justification for withholding documents," and suggested the City could adopt the plaintiff's proposed voting process "to avoid future questions about secrecy from its residents." A notice of appeal was filed May 6, 2026, and the case now moves to the Arizona Court of Appeals.
The same case includes a second episode from the same council term. A $415,000 employment contract to rehire Ed Zuercher as City Manager was authored less than twenty-four hours before the Council voted on it. and put before the Council for a vote at 2:30 p.m. the next day — less than twenty-four hours between the document's creation and its approval, with the public agenda itself revised twice in between to add it. The trial court denied emergency relief. The document's authorship metadata remains on the public docket, undisputed by either side.
Thacker v. City of Phoenix is Jeremy Thacker's individual lawsuit, filed before GOOD|GOAT existed. GOOD|GOAT supports it by publishing the docket, the filings, and the timeline — including the parts a ruling for the City still didn't dispute — so anyone can see how a single November vote became a year of closed doors.
Read the filings, or follow the appeal — the opening brief is next on the docket.
1 Matter