The short version
Scottsdale runs like a small company with a very public board. Seven elected officials, the mayor and six council members, meet in the round council chamber at City Hall called the Kiva. They pass the budget, adopt the zoning and set the rules. Then they hand the running of the place to a professional city manager they hire and can fire, who oversees the police and fire departments, Scottsdale Water, the streets, the parks and the rest of the payroll.
That arrangement is written into the city charter, the local constitution voters approved on October 31, 1961. Everything the council does has to fit inside it, and the charter in turn has to fit inside Arizona law. Knowing that nesting (charter inside state law) is most of what you need to follow a Scottsdale political fight.
Who does what
The council is the legislature. It adopts ordinances, the annual budget, tax rates, the General Plan and zoning cases, and appoints residents to boards and commissions. Each of the seven members, the mayor included, has one vote. See the mayor and council guide for how they are elected.
The charter officers are the six people the council hires directly: the city manager, city attorney, city clerk, city treasurer, city auditor and presiding city judge. They report to the council rather than to each other, which keeps the auditor and the judge independent of the manager whose work they check.
The city manager is the chief executive. The departments, from the police to solid waste, report here, and the manager proposes the budget the council amends and adopts.
Why a charter, and why 1961
Arizona’s 1912 constitution lets any city of more than 3,500 people write its own charter. Without one, a town is a “general law” city that can do only what state statutes spell out. With one, it gets home rule over purely municipal affairs, the freedom to organize its government and handle local matters its own way.
Scottsdale needed that freedom fast. The town of about 2,000 that incorporated in 1951 had grown roughly fivefold by 1960 and was racing Phoenix to annex the land around it. The 1960s chapter shows what the new charter council did with its power: it banned billboards, wrote the sign and design-review codes that still give the city its low, tidy look, and in 1968 opened Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center, with City Hall and the Kiva at its heart.
The limits
Home rule is narrower than it sounds. When a city ordinance conflicts with a state law on something the courts consider a matter of statewide concern, the state wins, and the legislature decides a great deal is statewide. Short-term rentals and, in 2025, the fight over Axon’s headquarters are the recent Scottsdale examples; the preemption guide walks through both. The charter also can’t escape the state’s rules on taxes and spending, which is why the budget guide starts in the Arizona constitution.
How the council-manager idea arrived
Council-manager government was a Progressive Era invention, meant to take patronage out of city hall by putting a trained administrator in charge of the payroll and leaving elected officials to set policy. It spread across the fast-growing Sun Belt after World War II, and it fit postwar Scottsdale well. The early town was run by its boosters: Malcolm White, owner of Whitey’s cafe, was appointed its first mayor, and the Chamber’s slogan, “The West’s Most Western Town,” became the town’s official identity. By 1961 the place was too big to run from a cafe counter, and the charter handed the payroll to professionals while keeping the politics in public.
Citywide and nonpartisan
The charter’s electoral choices shaped Scottsdale’s politics as much as its administration. Every seat is at large, so every member answers to the whole city rather than to a district. Every race is nonpartisan, so no party label appears on the ballot. And terms are four years, staggered, so three council seats (and, every four years, the mayor’s) are on the ballot in a given cycle, with a limit of three consecutive terms. The result is a council whose campaigns are about citywide questions: building heights in Old Town, apartments, the Preserve, water. The mayors who lasted, like Herb Drinkwater across four terms, were the ones who read the whole city well. The ones who lost, most recently when Lisa Borowsky unseated the incumbent in November 2024, lost on those same citywide arguments.
The voters’ reserve power
The charter also keeps a direct line to the voters, echoing the initiative and referendum in Arizona’s own constitution. Residents can petition a council decision onto the ballot, and the charter itself can be amended only by a public vote. That is how the Preserve got its strongest protection: in 2018 a citizen initiative, Prop 420, amended the charter so that no non-preservation use of Preserve land can happen without voter approval. The voters and ballot measures guide covers that power in full, including the 2025 referendum drive over Axon that the legislature cut short.