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Landmark day • Monday, October 3, 1994

October 3, 1994: The McDowell Sonoran Preserve Is Established

With one resolution, the city commits to buying its own mountains — the paper birth certificate of America's largest urban preserve.

What happened

Acting on years of advocacy by the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust and overwhelming public sentiment, the City Council adopted Resolution No. 4103 on October 3, 1994, formally establishing the McDowell Sonoran Preserve and committing the city to protecting the McDowell Mountains and surrounding desert.

Why it matters

The resolution turned a citizens' movement into city policy. The funding followed at the ballot box — the 0.2% sales tax of May 1995 and a second tax in 2004 — and the Preserve ultimately grew past 30,000 acres, about a third of the city, permanently shielded by 2018's Prop 420.

The road to the resolution

The council chamber was the last stop of a journey that began on the mountainside. Scottsdale’s early-1980s annexations had swept the McDowell foothills into the city, and by 1990 development was visibly climbing the bajadas — graded pads appearing higher each season, the leading edge of the luxury-golf push north. The range itself was no park: it was a checkerboard of private holdings and Arizona State Trust land, the latter legally required to be sold or leased for the benefit of schools, generally to the highest bidder. Left alone, the mountains’ fate was luxury lots with a view of each other.

In 1991 a band of residents — hikers, scientists, retirees with stubborn streaks — founded the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust to argue for a different ending. Their pitch reframed the range as the city’s shared infrastructure: skyline, watershed, wildlife corridor, and the scenery underwriting every resort rate and home price in town. Polling showed the town overwhelmingly agreed. By the fall of 1994 the question was not whether Scottsdale wanted its mountains kept, but whether city government would commit to keeping them.

On October 3, it did. Resolution No. 4103 established the Preserve on paper — deliberately incomplete, because the plan was ownership rather than zoning. A zoning map can be amended by any future council; land the city owns is settled. Ownership, though, takes money no resolution can conjure.

What followed

The funding question went to the voters, who answered on May 23, 1995 by approving a dedicated 0.2% sales tax running thirty years — and again in 2004 with a further 0.15%. The purchases were real market transactions, not condemnations: ranch parcels, failed subdivisions, and State Trust sections bid away from developers at auction. Acre by acre the Preserve grew past 10,000, then 20,000, ultimately beyond 30,000 acres — about one-third of the entire city, the largest urban preserve in the United States, managed with an army of volunteer stewards descended from the original Trust. In 2018, Prop 420 locked the door, requiring a public vote for any change.

The resolution’s genius was its modesty. It promised nothing it could not deliver; it created the vessel and trusted the voters to fill it, which they did for decades. The rest of the year sits at 1994, and the campaign’s full story runs through the 1990s chapter.