By 1978 the decade’s verdicts were mostly in. The Greenbelt was demonstrably working — floods passed through on schedule and the parks went back to being parks — and engineers from other cities had begun making pilgrimages to study flood control you could picnic in. McCormick Ranch had proven a master-planned community could sell in the desert, lakes and all. A new group of businessmen, the Scottsdale Men’s League, started a food event that year to raise money for the Center for the Arts — the first Scottsdale Culinary Festival, by the League’s count. It ran each spring until 2019. The question hanging over the late seventies was no longer whether Scottsdale’s wagers would pay, but at what scale.
The answer was already assembling: a resort corridor reaching north along Scottsdale Road, an airpark on its way to becoming a jobs engine, a population somewhere on the climb between the 78,000 of 1975 and the 88,412 the 1980 census would find. Scottsdale closed 1978 one census away from the next boom.
The year’s politics tested what the decade had built. In February the council created a Human Services Commission. In March floods tested the Greenbelt, and Mayor Bill Jenkins wrote to Congressman John Rhodes that “it worked beautifully!” On July 13 the Arizona Supreme Court voided the city’s ordinance requiring old signs to come down (see the sign fight), and the council, the city’s historic context says, declined to annex Pinnacle Peak for lack of support. In the spring election Diane Cusack joined the council and Herb Drinkwater stepped away. The politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.