Ten years from crossroads to charter
The town that voted on Halloween 1961 was barely ten years old as a legal fact. Scottsdale had incorporated in 1951 on about six-tenths of a square mile, with Malcolm White as mayor and “The West’s Most Western Town” as the pitch, after sixty-odd years as an unincorporated crossroads run by the county, the school board and social pressure. The fifties then delivered the fastest sustained growth in the town’s history: the Motorola plant, spring training, the Parada del Sol, the Valley Ho, and a 1960 census count of 10,026 on 3.8 square miles.
This was the town’s second try at a charter. Voters had approved a first one on February 23, 1960 and elected a mayor directly under it, but the election had come 33 days after the charter was published, three days past the constitutional limit, and when the state attorney general challenged two Scottsdale annexations a court declared the charter void. So the town started over. A 14-member board of freeholders, chaired by Charles Christakis and including former mayor Malcolm White, signed a new council-manager charter on September 5, 1961. Mayor Mort Kimsey certified that voters ratified it on October 31. The Scottsdale Progress later reported that just 269 people voted in the charter election, 260 of them yes, though the report does not make clear which of the two elections it meant.
Governor Paul Fannin approved the charter on November 16, and the first mayor and council elected under it, with Bill Schrader as mayor, took office on April 3, 1962, which is why some summaries date the charter city to 1962. The constitution ratified that Halloween, council-manager government under a home-rule charter, is the one Scottsdale operates under still.
What the charter unleashed
The measure of the vote is what the charter council did in its first year: from September 1962 it stopped new billboards, on the theory that the town’s product was the view and the view was not for rent. No objection to that rule is on record; removing the billboards already standing took a sixteen-year sign fight. The rule founded the design-review culture — sign codes, dark-sky rules, eventually desert preservation — that still distinguishes Scottsdale’s roadsides from its neighbors’. Home rule made that kind of self-assertion possible; it is hard to imagine a county-default town pulling it off.
The charter government went on to steer the wildest decade the city ever had: the STEP citizen committees and Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center, the annexation race with Phoenix, McCormick Ranch and the airport in 1967, the first general plan, and the charter amendments of 1967 that gave the city four-year terms. By 1970 the city held 67,841 people — nearly seven times the number that had voted itself home rule on this day. The full account is at 1961 and in the 1960s chapter.