The year began with a ballot. On April 10 voters approved seven charter amendments, and four of them gave the city the tools it used to manage growth for the next twenty years: the power to make developers provide or pay for utilities, parks, school sites, drainage and flood control; architectural and site-plan review of every building except a house; specific plans to refine the general plan; and the removal of nonconforming signs after an amortization period. Each passed by better than seven to one. In January the Development Review Board had replaced the Design Review Board of 1965.
The bulldozers arrived that spring, and, this being Scottsdale, they came to build a park. In April voters approved $10 million in bonds for the Indian Bend Wash greenbelt, seven to one by the city’s own account, after the floods of 1970 and 1972, and work began on the Greenbelt, the grass-and-parks floodway the city had argued for since 1964 against the Army Corps of Engineers’ concrete channel. Part of the bill was paid in density: the council let developers build more homes in exchange for digging, turfing and deeding stretches of the channel. The greenbelt fight page tells the whole argument.
The same year the Senior Center was built, by the Historical Society’s timeline (the city’s historic context dates its opening to 1976), a signal that the boomtown was aging into a full-service city. In September a STEP forum at the Safari Hotel began working out how to take down nonconforming signs, the start of the city’s losing sign fight in court. The decade is told in the 1970s chapter and the 1970s politics chapter.