The record keeps few headlines for 1976, which rather suits a year the whole country spent looking backward. The Bicentennial found Scottsdale — a city built on a manufactured 1880s image — better rehearsed at celebrating frontier history than most places with more of it.
The work of the decade rolled on regardless. Greenbelt construction, begun in 1973, was advancing along Indian Bend Wash section by section; McCormick Ranch, selling since 1972, was filling its lakeside lots and, on September 4, opened the Scottsdale Conference Center — the first purpose-built conference resort in the country — while the Scottsdale Plaza Resort opened its first phase on Scottsdale Road; and the resort corridor kept thickening along Scottsdale Road toward the Camelback and Mummy Mountain foothills. The special census of 1975 had counted 78,000 people, and the arrow still pointed up.
For the shape of what all this settling-in became, see the 1970s chapter.
The year’s politics drew lines. In February, the city’s historic context says, the city signed a cost-sharing contract with the United States for the Indian Bend Wash greenbelt. In the spring election voters kept Bill Jenkins as mayor. In October the council adopted a Northeast Area Plan with a “future development line” north of the Central Arizona Project canal, beyond which development was not to occur for ten years. From June 25 to July 4 the city marked its 25th anniversary alongside the nation’s bicentennial, by Joan Fudala’s account. The politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.