Scottsdale has earned a reputation — both across the state and the country — as a beacon for members of a certain wealthy, haughty, upper-middle class with a propensity for drama when things don’t go their way.
So it’s a little surprising that a “Real Housewives” series hasn’t appeared on Bravo yet to capture the spirit of the Phoenix metro’s oasis of decadent shopping centers and luxurious (yet somehow bland) contemporary châteaus.
But might we suggest that in the promised land of Karens, someone would be wise to consider documenting the theater that’s overtaken City Hall during the last few years with such a production.
Maybe call it “The Real Elected Officials of Scottsdale.”1
After all, longshot Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt — himself a former reality star in “The Hills” — has inked a deal to create a TV show about his campaign, which apparently would continue filming even if he were to win and take office.
Things in Scottsdale have been particularly wild since Mayor Lisa Borowsky took office in January 2025, when a right-wing majority took power.
And after this year’s election, Scottsdale City Hall could get a lot more reality-TV-worthy.
But before we get into the drama the next cast could bring, let’s recap the current season.
Previously on “Real Elected Officials of Scottsdale”
Almost immediately after winning her election, the mayor became embroiled in a controversy that’s come to be known as “Parkingate.” While the previous council had approved a plan for two parking garages to be built in Old Town, Borowsky privately and publicly lobbied the council to change course and instead give the contract to David Hovey Jr., one of her campaign donors.
Every single other councilmember rejected Borowsky’s idea in a 6-1 vote, approving the contract with the original builder.
The questionable debacle led other councilmembers and plenty of residents to scrutinize the new mayor; an anonymous complaint was filed with the county attorney, though it was later dismissed.
But it’s clear that from the beginning, Borowsky has felt boxed in and bitter toward her colleagues.
“I was hoping for a honeymoon — I want my honeymoon phase!” Borowsky said with her signature Valley girl lilt during her State of the City speech last year, then continued confidently in phrases rather than complete sentences. “But baptism by fire, we came out of the gate very very — would say, strong.”
Could anything be more quintessentially Scottsdale?
Within the halls of power of the gilded suburb, the word is that Borowsky has spent much of her time engaging in petty squabbles while not having many big-picture ideas for governance.
Borowsky — a lifelong Scottsdale resident who “grew up riding and showing quarter horses competitively,” and then became a commercial litigation lawyer — stays perpetually surrounded by a colorful cast of characters.
Her brother, Todd Borowsky, is the owner of strip clubs with names like Skin Cabaret and Bones Cabaret.
He has a history of getting caught up in controversy, attracting press attention when he:
Made questionable business decisions with a shady pawnbroker
Was investigated by local police for alleged drugging of patrons at his clubs… Todd sued the city in response after no wrongdoing was found
And then there’s the mayor’s staff. Her key advisor and former Chief of Staff R. Lamar Whitmer was fired in March after he attempted to weasel his way out of a parking ticket by pushing his business card on court employees and name-dropping powerful officials.
A city investigation found Whitmer engaged in unprofessional conduct, insubordination, misuse of position, conflict of interest or appearance of conflict of interest, and lack of cooperation with an official investigation, among other misdeeds.
In true dramatic form, he’s filed a notice of claim against the city for $1.5 million.
Susan Wood, another key ally of the mayor’s, was or is a volunteer at City Hall, but still managed to secure a building pass. Years ago, Wood hosted a homecoming celebration for Jacob Chansley, the infamous “QAnon Shaman” and icon of the January 6 insurrection, as he was released from federal prison and sent to a halfway house.
Now, Wood is helping Borowsky try to take out one of the council’s conservative members, Jan Dubauskas, in a recall election. The word is that Dubauskas is considering challenging Borowsky, who isn’t particularly popular among her colleagues or the public, in the next mayoral election.
Borowsky also seems to have it out for Vice Mayor Adam Kwasman, who, before joining the council, was a state lawmaker and congressional candidate best known for mistaking a school bus of YMCA campers for undocumented immigrant children in an intense anti-immigration roadside diatribe.
The mayor called Kwasman out by name in an op-ed published in the Scottsdale Progress last month. Kwasman responded with his own op-ed, which was focused on what he considers his policy wins, including eliminating DEI and sustainability initiatives, raising pay for cops and lowering property taxes.
“Last week, a considerable amount of ink was devoted, both in opinion pages and paid advertisements, to commentary regarding my service on the Scottsdale City Council,” Kwasman wrote. “Rather than indulge personal disparagement or political theater, I believe it far more productive to discuss something of genuine consequence: results.”
Next time on “Real Elected Officials of Scottsdale”
Amid the dramatic behavior coloring City Hall, three council seats are up for grabs in November — with a primary around the corner on July 21.
Incumbent Councilmembers Barry Graham, a MAGA conservative, and Solange Whitehead, who has criticized the right-wing majority bloc on the council, are running for reelection. Kathy Littlefield has hit her term limit and isn’t running again.
Besides the two incumbents, six challengers are running for the three seats: Crystal Carroll, Ethan Knowlden, Raoul Zubia, Bob Littlefield, Eric Sloan and Michelle Ugenti-Rita.
And some of those challengers have well-documented histories of highly questionable behavior.
Sloan, for instance, was fired from his position at the Arizona Department of Gaming in 2016 for creating a “frat party” environment — meaning he’d fit right in the cast of a “Real Elected Officials of Scottsdale” show.
The thorough investigation by the Arizona Department of Administration concluded that he made inappropriate jokes, cursed his way through the day and bullied and intimidated employees to the point that the “entire agency (was) in fear of their jobs.”
Perhaps the most memorable and concerning line in that report detailed how he sang a slavery-related song as he passed by the desk of a Black employee. He claimed the song, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” was just a song he knew from church and denied that it could have racist implications.
Since then, he has run for the Arizona Corporation Commission twice unsuccessfully, while pledging to bring more accountability to the power companies that the Corporation Commission regulates. But before that, he was running a PAC formed and funded by APS, the largest electric provider in Arizona — which also has a history of meddling in the elections of its regulators.
Bob Littlefield is a former three-term councilmember and mayoral candidate who is trying to grab up the seat being vacated by his wife, Kathy Littlefield. While his history on the council was mildly controversial (he was often the lone “no” vote, especially when it came to development projects), Littlefield has more recently come under fire for running a PAC called TAAAZE (Taxpayers Against Awful Apartment Zoning Exemption) that is opposing the Axon campus development.
Basically, an ethics complaint was filed against his wife because she has taken multiple votes against the development while her husband runs the PAC. The Littlefields say there’s no conflict of interest because they never discuss the project, as the Scottsdale Progress reported.
“Bob and I both have kept that subject completely off the table between us,” she said. “We don’t discuss it. I don’t listen in on his conversations on the phone. He does not hold meetings at our house.”
Meanwhile, although candidate Crystal Carroll is a newcomer to Scottsdale politics, she has already attracted an anonymous attack website against her for her social media posts. CrazyCrystal.com is keeping receipts of her “years-long Facebook meltdown” trash-talking MAGA voters, Turning Point USA and Israel.
And finally, Republican former state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita is also on the ballot with her own freaky baggage.
In a 2020 lawsuit, she was accused of sexual harassment by a lobbyist — who said that she and her then-fiancé Brian Townsend (a former chief of staff at the House, where Ugenti-Rita also served) repeatedly propositioned her for a three-way.
The complaint was complete with tales of Ugenti-Rita taking belly shots off the lobbyist at a Scottsdale bar.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is peak Scottsdale!
Anyway, auditions run through the July primary and wrap in November.
Just like on reality TV, the voters will decide who gets renewed for another season and who gets cut from the cast.
Bravo, you know where to find us — we'll even waive our usual finder’s fee.2
Pausing, then piling on: High-profile Republican officials in Arizona didn’t have much to say in the days after the Republic revealed that Mark Lamb, the former Pinal County sheriff who’s running for Congress, sexted with various women and tried to intimidate them into keeping it hush-hush. But now, those GOP officials are starting to weigh in on Lamb’s behavior, per the Republic’s Laura Gersony and Robert Anglen. Congressman (and gubernatorial candidate) Andy Biggs called the sexting “concerning.” U.S. Rep. David Schweikert (also running for governor) said Republicans “hold ourselves out to be moral actors” and shouldn’t accept this type of behavior. Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller (also a Republican) said he assigned an investigator to review the matter, while Lamb’s rival in the GOP primary, business owner Daniel Keenan, seized the opportunity and put out a video ad with screenshots of Lamb’s texts.
Deer Valley Nazis: A Deer Valley Unified School District board member isn’t backing down after she made a Nazi salute and said “Heil! Heil!” at a board meeting, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Board member Kimberly Fisher says she was talking about Board President Paul Carver acting like a dictator as they scheduled an upcoming study session (Fisher’s husband is connected to a white nationalist online account, and Fisher posts pro-Confederacy beliefs online, MacDonald-Evoy noted). The Anti-Defamation League was “appalled,” the local teachers union was “horrified,” and the school district said it “does not condone, support, or endorse gestures” associated with hate.
No end in sight: The battle between Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap and the Republican-controlled board of supervisors for control of the county’s elections took yet another turn, Sasha Hupka reports for Votebeat. Heap asked a judge to hold the supervisors in contempt for not complying with a judge’s April 16 order (which the supervisors are appealing) to return certain election functions to the Recorder’s Office, along with some IT staffers. Two weeks ago, Supervisor Thomas Galvin lamented that the county was “stuck in this hamster wheel of the 2020 election.”
We can’t get you unstuck from that hamster wheel, unfortunately. But we can keep you informed while you’re on it.
Collateral damage: ICE released a 71-year-old great-grandmother who had been in detention for 10 months, per the Republic’s Daniel Gonzalez. ICE dropped off Maria Cristina Tapia Cornejo and 10 other immigrants at a church in Phoenix, the day after the Republic wrote about ICE denying Tapia Cornejo humanitarian parole. She was one of 22 workers swept up in the raid of four Colt Grill restaurants in northern Arizona last year. The targets of the raid were the owners of the restaurants, Robert and Brenda Clouston. They pleaded not guilty to conspiring to smuggle immigrants into the country and pay them less than minimum wage. They were released last July.
In other dystopian immigration news: Tempe eighth-grader Dilan Manay Paredes and his mother are stuck in detention in Texas, the New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. Last week, dozens of students at the Paredes’ school walked out in protest of his detention, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton called for the release of the boy and his mother. The family left Ecuador three years ago and sought asylum in the U.S. The mother skipped an immigration check-in out of fear she’d be arrested. When she was taken into custody in a Walmart parking lot (Border Patrol claims she “failed to yield” and agents thought she was smuggling people), she called the school and said she’d come by with ICE to pick up her son so she wouldn’t leave him behind.
“Just tell them I’m gonna miss you guys,” the boy wrote to a friend in Spanish in an Instagram message. “I love you guys a lot. They’re outside. They might send me back to my country.”
We’re having a hard time narrowing down all the things that made us laugh while watching the Clean Elections debate between former Tucson Vice Mayor and Air Force JAG lawyer Rodney Glassman and Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen.
We’ve narrowed it down to these five exchanges, although the entire debate is worth watching — regardless of who you plan to vote for in the Arizona attorney general race.
Petersen claimed someone filed a FOIA request with Luke Air Force Base and found “no record of Rodney Glassman doing anything.”
Maybe it was a reference to a rumored affair from more than a decade ago, or maybe just a slip of the tongue, but Petersen referred to Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne as “Tom Horny.” The comment drew the ire of Glassman, who repeatedly demanded that Petersen say Horne’s name again. To be fair, that's the sort of debate moment that immediately becomes impossible to ignore.
Petersen also boasted that he had prosecuted nine more cases than his political rival — a statistic we're not nearly motivated enough to fact-check — but Glassman quickly noted those cases were tried when Petersen was an intern with the City of Scottsdale.
Glassman was chided for bringing a prop onto the debate stage: an endorsement he received from Petersen during his unsuccessful 2020 campaign for Maricopa County assessor.
Petersen also claimed that Glassman would never run for office again after the primary and that he “belongs in prison.” He did not elaborate, though we assume he was referencing the seemingly bunk claims that his brother, Jeremy Glassman, accused him of sexual assault. Unfortunately for us, the moderator moved on.
We probably missed something from the debate. Tell us your favorite moment in the comments!
1 Dear Bravo executives: We only ask for a 10% cut.
2 Kidding. We still want our 10%.