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 McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, the volunteer group founded in 1991, ran the campaign the way it had run everything, by refusing to treat the mountains as mere scenery. 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.
On May 23, 1995, Scottsdale agreed, overwhelmingly. 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.