The decade announced itself with a number and a name. The number was 88,412 — the census count for a city that had held 67,823 just ten years before. The name was Herb Drinkwater, a liquor-store owner and homebuilder who won the mayor’s office in February 1980 and would keep winning it for sixteen years, long enough that the whole period reads in retrospect as his.
Drinkwater’s method was retail politics of a very literal kind: he greeted nearly everyone, remembered names, and usually had his dog along. Voters found it irresistible, but the friendliness rode on top of a shrewd agenda. His Scottsdale would court exactly the growth that fit the brand — resorts, medicine, horses, golf, corporate aviation — and go get the raw desert needed to control its own northern destiny.
The empty land to the north was on the council’s mind at once. On June 30, the day before a new state law ended “strip annexation,” four council members, Jim Bruner, Jeff Schubert, Charlie Smith and Diane Cusack, called a meeting for 7 a.m., since the mayor would not, and annexed a strip 10 to 25 feet wide ringing about 86 square miles north and west of the city. Drinkwater, Billie Gentry and Heinz Hink had opposed calling it. Carefree-area residents sued, and in 1982 the Court of Appeals voided the ordinance for breaking the open meeting law (see the annexation page).
The downtown trolley that guidebooks sometimes date to this year came later: the city’s own records put the first Molly Trolley in 1987.
What he did with it, from the annexations to the resorts and the trifecta of 1987, is the story of the 1980s chapter and the 1980s politics chapter.