This was the year the map mostly stopped moving. The annexation campaign begun in 1981 was nearly done, leaving Scottsdale in command of the northern desert it had spent four years collecting, the tracts toward Pinnacle Peak and the McDowell foothills that would define every growth fight for a generation. By the city’s chart it covered about 182 square miles by 1985, twice its 1980 size. Carefree incorporated in 1984, and in November Phoenix annexed more than nine square miles and began collecting petitions for nearly 13 more north of Bell Road, across Scottsdale Road. The annexation page tells how the city got there.
The voters kept the mayor. On February 21 Herb Drinkwater beat Bob Field 9,200 to 2,466, and Jim Bruner and landscape architect Bill Walton won council seats; Rene Wendell took the third in a March runoff by 219 votes. In December the city signed the lease that brought the PGA Tour to a golf complex it would build on federal land beside the CAP canal, the start of the TPC land deal.
The city was hardly idle elsewhere. Construction was climbing the bajadas at Desert Highlands, Gainey Ranch was taking shape and Scottsdale Ranch broke ground around its 42-acre Lake Serena. The flagship resorts were two and three years away, and civic leaders were deep in the courtship that would land the Mayo Clinic. The decade’s politics are in the 1980s politics chapter.