Special elections are usually sleepy affairs. The one Scottsdale held on May 23, 1995 decided the city’s shape for the next century. Voters approved a dedicated 0.2% sales tax, running thirty years, to buy land for the McDowell Sonoran Preserve — converting the previous October’s founding resolution into real acquisition money. A boomtown with a reputation for tax aversion had voted, 12,873 to 7,204, to tax itself to buy a mountain range at retail. The yes committee, Save Our McDowells, had framed the McDowells as shared infrastructure, the scenery underwriting every resort rate and home price, half of it paid for by visitors. The other side was organized too: Citizens Against Constant Tax Increases, chaired by former councilman Ross Dean, warned the tax “could raise over $1 billion,” and four other former council members called it “a blank check.” The town sided with the mountains.
The same year produced a portrait of the city doing the buying. A special census counted 167,277 people, up nearly 40,000 in just five years, with the boom concentrated in the very north where the purchases would happen. The tax passed not in a community circling its wagons against growth but in one growing as fast as any large city in America — one that chose to steer the boom rather than pretend it could be stopped.
An era was also quietly ending at City Hall: Herb Drinkwater’s final term was winding down, closing sixteen years of handshake government that had built the resort city now paying for its view. His successor would be elected in 1996, and the land closings that turned tax receipts into Preserve acres began soon after. The money’s long journey into mountainside runs through the 1990s chapter.