After the trifecta of 1987 the city turned to its own rules. On February 16 voters adopted twelve of fifteen charter amendments, among them three-term limits for the mayor and council, and handed Herb Drinkwater, unopposed on the ballot, a third term. In March they elected Ross Dean and Susan Bitter Smith to the council. On October 17, the city’s board records say, the council voted 4 to 3 to let the nonprofit Cultural Council choose the city’s public art, and on November 8, with the presidential election, voters raised the hotel bed tax from 2 to 3 percent, 30,337 to 13,786, with two-thirds earmarked for “hospitality development.” The 1980s politics chapter has the details. Horseman’s Park became HorseWorld.
There was one more monument. In October Charles Keating opened The Phoenician below Camelback, the most opulent resort Arizona had seen, on the grounds of the old Jokake and Paradise Inns; the opening has its own page. Downtown, the arts institutions launched Sunday A’Fair, free concerts on the Civic Center lawn. In 1988 the Mayo Clinic worked through its first full year of Scottsdale patients, Colorado River water ran through the new CAP plant, and the Phoenix Open played its stadium course by the Princess — three brand-new institutions settling into being simply how the city worked.
The background hum was growth itself. The Airpark around Scottsdale Airport was becoming one of Arizona’s fastest-growing job centers, construction pushed on up the McDowell foothills across the desert annexed earlier in the decade, and downtown’s gallery district kept its Thursday-night ArtWalk rhythm. The population was climbing toward the 130,069 the next census would record. The decade’s last flourishes — bronze Arabians on 5th Avenue among them — arrived in 1989.