The census takers counted 67,823 people, by the city’s historic context, in a city that had been about 2,000 at incorporation nineteen years before. Scottsdale Community College welcomed its first students on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land (they would vote in the “Artichokes” as mascot in 1972, a protest joke that outlived the protest), and up Scottsdale Road Rawhide, a re-created 1880s town, opened this year or the next (the Historical Society says 1970, Joan Fudala 1971).
The politics turned on how the city would grow. In April voters elected Billie Gentry and Herb Drinkwater to the council; citizens formed a Committee Against Bisecting Scottsdale to fight a freeway along McDowell Road, the city’s context says; and in November the council set a 60-foot height limit, 6 to 1, with Mayor Bud Tims wanting 120 feet. Sixty feet became the city’s benchmark.
Then came September. Over Labor Day weekend the remnants of Tropical Storm Norma killed 23 people across central Arizona, still the state’s deadliest storm. In Scottsdale the overloaded Arizona Canal broke near Pima Road at about 8 p.m., water poured into a subdivision built in the wash, and Indian Bend Wash flooded homes, trailer parks and businesses; more than 250 homes were evacuated, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The flood did not settle the argument over the wash by itself, but it helped: the new Eldorado Park came through with minor damage, and the city’s context says the Corps of Engineers agreed the next year that a grass floodway would work. That story, and the decade’s politics, are in the 1970s chapter and the 1970s politics chapter.