The most important thing to happen to Scottsdale in 1985 was invisible from Scottsdale Road. In November, two six-foot gates opened at Phoenix’s Union Hills treatment plant and Colorado River water — lifted 2,900 feet over 190 miles of desert through the Central Arizona Project’s Granite Reef Aqueduct, which crosses north Scottsdale on its way to the Salt — flowed into the Valley for the first time. The first CAP deliveries anywhere had gone to Harquahala Valley farms on May 22. Scottsdale’s own $25 million CAP treatment plant would come online in 1987, and the Colorado would become the source of roughly two-thirds of the city’s drinking water: the hedge that let the city ride out the shortages of the 2020s.
On the ground, the decade’s civic project finished. The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt flood-control project, launched with the 1973 bond and built park by park — Eldorado, Vista del Camino, Chaparral, Indian School — was declared complete: eleven miles of turf, lakes and golf where the Army Corps had drawn a 170-foot concrete channel. Nothing the city built in the boom years has been copied more.
The year’s quieter arrival aged just as well. United Cable put its headquarters in the old Loloma School, a corporate landing that doubled as adaptive reuse of one of the town’s oldest buildings. The flagship resorts were still to come, the Hyatt at Gainey Ranch in 1986 and the Princess in 1987, though the Historical Society dates both to 1985. The ground for them was being laid: in June the Bureau of Reclamation turned about 400 acres beside the CAP canal over to the city for the golf complex it had leased to the PGA Tour, the TPC land deal that a congressional audit would question in 1991.
City Hall made two decisions with long tails. On June 4, after four and a half hours of testimony, the council required fire sprinklers in every new building, homes included; home builders warned that buyers would not “qualify for a home loan,” by the fire department’s account, and the vote was 6 to 1 by that account or unanimous as Councilman Jim Bruner remembered it (see Rural/Metro). On May 6 the council refused, 4 to 3, to let Fountain Hills incorporate within six miles of the city. Two years later the city would land three permanent institutions in a single season.