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Landmark day • Wednesday, August 1, 1984

August 1, 1984: The City Reaches the National Forest

Four years of annexation ordinances end with a city of 181.6 square miles stretching from the Salt River to the Tonto — most of it empty desert that Scottsdale would spend the next forty years deciding what to do with.

Desert hills and saguaros in north Scottsdale
The northern desert the 1984 annexation brought inside the city: creosote, saguaro and the McDowells, most of it since preserved. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened

In the summer of 1984 the Scottsdale City Council annexed about 36 square miles of unincorporated desert north of the existing limits, running to the Tonto National Forest boundary; the annexation took effect on August 1, 1984 and brought the city to 181.6 square miles. It was the last of the great annexations of 1981–84, which together added nearly 80 square miles and roughly doubled the city's area.

Why it matters

The 1984 annexation fixed Scottsdale's modern shape — about 185 square miles, 31 miles long — and set up every northern argument since: the golf communities of Desert Highlands and Desert Mountain, the Preserve votes of 1995 and 2004 that bought a third of the annexed land back from development, and Prop 420. The city that had incorporated on one square mile in 1951 now controlled more desert than it could water or police, and the next four decades were spent deciding how much of it to leave alone.

The Drinkwater map

Herb Drinkwater took office as mayor in 1980 with a city of 88.6 square miles and a conviction that Scottsdale should own its own horizon. Phoenix had been boxed out to the west by the 1964 truce and the Salt River community lay to the east; north lay tens of thousands of acres of state and private desert running to the Tonto National Forest, with Cave Creek and Carefree the only towns in the way. Between 1981 and 1984 the council annexed it in a series of ordinances — nearly 80 square miles in four years, the city doubling in size — as developers like Lyle Anderson planned golf communities at Desert Highlands and Pinnacle Peak and the state planned the CAP canal across the middle of it.

The last and largest piece was the northernmost. In the summer of 1984 the council annexed about 36 square miles running up to the Tonto National Forest line, and on August 1, 1984 the annexation took effect. Scottsdale measured 181.6 square miles: a city 31 miles long from the Salt River to the forest, larger than Philadelphia, with about 100,000 people living in its southern third.

What the empty two-thirds became

The annexed desert was the subject of the next forty years of city politics. Some of it became the golf-and-gate communities of the north — Desert Mountain, Troon, DC Ranch — that the 1980s chapter follows. A great deal of it became the McDowell Sonoran Preserve: the 1994 council vote that established it, the 1995 and 2004 sales taxes that bought it, and the 2018 charter amendment that locked it, all concern land inside the 1984 line. About a third of the city is now preserve, which is only possible because the city annexed the land before it was subdivided.

The line has barely moved since. Scottsdale today lists 184.5 square miles, the difference a handful of small annexations and one de-annexation. The annexation guide explains how the 1984 map still governs what the city can and cannot do.