From resolution to referendum
Seven months separated the promise from the payment. The council’s Resolution No. 4103 of October 1994 had established the McDowell Sonoran Preserve on paper, but the plan behind it — buy the mountains outright rather than merely zone them open — needed a funding source no resolution could provide. So the question went where the movement had always drawn its strength: to the voters.
The volunteers of the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, founded in 1991, joined business leaders in a committee called Save Our McDowells, co-chaired by Ben Benedict and Wendy Springborn, and ran the campaign by refusing to treat the mountains as mere scenery. “Well-founded estimates indicate it will require $241 million to acquire these vital 4,000 acres over the next 30 years,” they wrote in the city’s pamphlet. “This amounts to $0.08 per day for the average family.” The McDowells, the argument went, were infrastructure: the city’s skyline, its watershed and wildlife corridor, and the backdrop underwriting every resort rate and home price in town. Losing them to rooftops would not just change the view — it would spend down the city’s principal asset. Barry Goldwater signed on: “It would be a sin to build on those mountains.” So did the Chamber of Commerce: “No one likes taxes. But what shall our legacy be?”
The other side was organized too. Citizens Against Constant Tax Increases, chaired by former councilman Ross Dean, argued that “72% of the designated area within Scottsdale has already been protected, without any taxes” and that “this tax could raise over $1 billion.” Former council members Bill Walton and Bill Soderquist objected that none of it would go to transportation; Susan Bitter Smith and Myron Deibel called it “a blank check with no safeguards, except to say, ‘Trust Us.’” A residents’ group asked whether “independent and certified land appraisals” would be required.
On May 23, 1995, Scottsdale sided with the mountains, 12,873 to 7,204. The special election approved a 0.2% sales tax dedicated to Preserve land purchases and running thirty years — a long-horizon commitment from a boomtown with a reputation for tax aversion. A fraction of a penny at a time, the city began buying its view.
Where the money went
The mechanics were unromantic, and that was the point. The tax financed hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases at market price — ranch parcels, failed subdivisions, and, at state auctions, Trust sections bid away from developers. The closings began within a year or so of the vote, and voters doubled down in 2004 with an additional 0.15% tax to extend the buying power. The Preserve ultimately passed 30,000 acres, roughly a third of the entire city — the largest urban preserve in the United States — and in 2018 Prop 420 sealed it against development by requiring a public vote for any change.
The context makes the day stranger and better. The same year’s special census counted 167,277 people, up nearly 40,000 in five years: the tax passed not in a town circling its wagons against growth but in one growing as fast as any large city in America, which chose to steer the boom rather than pretend it could stop it. See 1995 for the rest of the year, and the 1990s chapter for the campaign entire.