The city changed mayors in mid-year. Bud Tims, mayor since 1966, resigned on July 11, and that November won a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission. The council made Vice Mayor Bill Jenkins, a Scottsdale High School government teacher, mayor on July 18 and appointed Planning Commissioner Charlie Smith to his seat. In November the publisher of the city’s daily, Jonathan Marshall, lost a race for the U.S. Senate to Barry Goldwater, and the Legislature amended the state’s open meetings law, a cause his paper had campaigned for.
The city’s citizen-planning program met twice. On January 8, with Governor Jack Williams as lunch speaker, a STEP forum studied state proposals on regional planning, gas-tax sharing, local tax limits and compulsory arbitration for public employees; on June 11, 44 residents debated freeways, and one group concluded that “freeways are not so bad.” In August the council adopted the ordinance requiring old signs to come down, the law a merchants’ group would overturn in 1978 (see the sign fight). The Corps of Engineers approved the greenbelt’s design that spring, the city’s historic context says, and the landscaped Civic Center mall was dedicated on land cleared from the old barrio.
A resort town can rent culture by the evening; a real city commissions its own. In 1974 the Scottsdale Symphony formed under Irving Fleming, and the Center for the Arts would open on the mall in 1975 to give it and much else a home. The decade is told in the 1970s chapter and the 1970s politics chapter.