Resolution No. 4103 is not a phrase built for bronze, but it turned out to be the most consequential paperwork in modern Scottsdale history. On October 3, 1994, the City Council adopted it, formally establishing the McDowell Sonoran Preserve and committing the city to protect the McDowells and the desert around them. Three years of advocacy by the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, a 1993 council task force chaired by Virginia Korte and a Preserve Commission created that January had turned a volunteer cause into official city policy. The boundary fight became a buying program.
What made the moment remarkable was what it wasn’t: zoning. Any future council can amend a zoning map. The Preserve was conceived instead as ownership — the city would buy the mountains outright, at market price, from private holders and at State Trust land auctions where it would have to outbid developers. That approach required money no resolution could conjure, which is why 1994’s act was deliberately incomplete: the council created the vessel, and the funding question went to the voters.
They answered the following May, 64 percent to 36, approving a dedicated 0.2% sales tax that turned promise into purchasing power — the start of hundreds of millions of dollars in land purchases that would carry the Preserve past 30,000 acres, about a third of the entire city. Ask a planner which Scottsdale decade mattered most and you’ll usually hear this one; ask which year, and it’s 1994 — the year the city decided what it would not become. The funding vote is at 1995; the whole campaign is in the 1990s chapter.