The county inside the city
Living in Scottsdale doesn’t take you out of Maricopa County. The city handles the everyday municipal services, but Arizona gives counties a set of jobs everywhere, inside city limits and out, and most of them share a trait: the problem crosses city lines. Smoke from a thousand fireplaces settles over the whole Valley. A mosquito breeding in a neglected pool in one town bites people in the next. A storm over the mountains sends water through half a dozen jurisdictions. So the county does the work once, for everyone, and the Board of Supervisors sets the budget.
Health, food and pests
Public Health tracks and investigates disease, runs immunization clinics, publishes the annual count of heat deaths, and through its Office of Vital Registration issues certified birth and death certificates for events anywhere in Arizona.
Environmental Services inspects the restaurants, bars and food trucks of every city, Scottsdale included, and posts results online. Its Vector Control division traps and tests mosquitoes for West Nile virus and fogs neighborhoods where it finds them; residents can call in swarms or a green pool.
Air, animals and records
The Air Quality Department enforces the county’s air rules: dust-control permits on construction sites, and the No Burn Days it declares when wood smoke is forecast to push pollution to unhealthy levels. The state environmental agency issues the pollution forecasts and advisories; the county turns them into rules.
Animal Care and Control licenses dogs for Scottsdale and most of the county’s cities, and runs the county shelters.
The Clerk of the Superior Court issues marriage licenses and keeps the records of the county’s trial court.
The districts on your tax bill
Several county services are run as separate special districts with their own property tax, all governed by the Board of Supervisors sitting under a different name. The property tax guide shows their lines on a Scottsdale bill.
The Flood Control District, created in 1959, builds and maintains dams, basins and channels and maps floodplains across the county. Scottsdale’s own answer to flooding, the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, is a city park and floodway, but the storms that fill it start in the hills, where regional flood planning is a county job. The monsoon field manual is the practical side.
The Library District runs county branches, mostly in unincorporated areas and smaller towns such as Fountain Hills. Scottsdale runs its own public library, but every Scottsdale homeowner still pays the small countywide library tax.
Parks and courts
The county’s regional parks, 12 of them covering about 120,000 acres, are the big desert parks on the Valley’s edges. The nearest to Scottsdale is McDowell Mountain Regional Park, 21,099 acres on the Fountain Hills side of the range, with campgrounds and paid entry.
The county also pays for the Superior Court, where felonies, divorces, probate and major civil suits are heard, and the justice courts; the judges belong to the state system described in the courts guide. The Medical Examiner investigates sudden, violent and unexplained deaths in every city in the county.
Why Arizona leans on its counties
Arizona’s counties are the state’s administrative arms, created to carry out state law everywhere, and in a county the size of Maricopa that design has a regional logic. Cities incorporate for local control of zoning, police and water. Counties exist to cover what’s left, and what’s left includes the problems that ignore boundaries. An air-quality rule that applied in Scottsdale but not in Tempe would do almost nothing; a flood channel that stopped at the city line would move the water onto a neighbor. The county can act at the scale of the airshed and the watershed.
That is also why the county’s public-health role grew so visible in the 2020s. The Medical Examiner and Public Health together count and study heat deaths, and the numbers turned the county’s summer into a public-health issue: 645 confirmed heat-associated deaths in 2023, the highest on record, then fewer in each of the next two years as the county expanded its heat-relief efforts.
Services the county sells to cities
Some of what the county does inside Scottsdale is less a mandate than a bargain. Scottsdale could in principle run its own animal control, but it uses the county’s licensing and shelters instead, a little the way it relied on a private company for fire protection until 2005 (see Lou Witzeman). Small towns go further, and the Library District’s partnerships with towns like Fountain Hills are one example.
What the county doesn’t do in Scottsdale
Inside the city, the county doesn’t patrol the streets, fight fires, pave roads, deliver water or decide zoning. Those belong to the city, and past its limits they fall to the county itself. The unincorporated county guide covers that other role, where the county is the only local government there is. The elected officers who run the county’s other big functions, from the Sheriff’s jails to the Recorder’s voter rolls, are in the county officers guide.