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 on July 2, 1951 — one square mile, about 2,000 people, 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: Motorola plants, spring training, the Parada del Sol, the Valley Ho, and a 1960 census count of 10,026 on 3.8 square miles.
A general-law town running on county defaults could not steer that curve, and the curve was still steepening — a special census in 1965 would find 54,504 people. Home rule was the obvious answer, and the voters took it. Governor Paul Fannin signed the charter on November 16, and the new government organized in the months that followed, which is why some summaries date the charter city to 1962. The constitution adopted 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 first: in 1962 it banned billboards, over the furious objection of the outdoor-advertising industry, on the theory that the town’s product was the view and the view was not for rent. The ban held permanently and 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 forums and Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center, the annexation race with Phoenix, McCormick Ranch and the Airpark in 1967, the first General Plan. 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.