For the first time since 1980, Scottsdale chose a new mayor. Sam Kathryn Campana was elected in 1996 as Herb Drinkwater retired after sixteen years — a span in which the city had nearly doubled, from 88,412 people to about 170,000 by the city’s estimate that year. Drinkwater had governed the transformation by remembering names, dog usually at heel; Campana inherited a city that no longer resembled the one he had first won, plus a mandate the voters had written themselves: buy the mountains.
That work began. With the 1995 preserve tax generating revenue, the first land purchases closed, a few hundred acres at the Gateway near Bell Road, and in September voters let the city borrow against the tax; the thousands of acres came later, starting with DC Ranch in 1998. Meanwhile the growth the Preserve was steering (not stopping) rolled on: north toward the coming Loop 101 corridor, around the maturing Airpark, up through Fashion Square’s expanding luxury empire.
The handoff was not smooth. Campana led a five-way field in February but fell short of a majority, and won the March runoff against Diana Smith with 54.5 percent. The same voters overturned two council rezonings that year, the start of a decade of referendums. The preservation consensus held all the same. Drinkwater’s goodbye would be short — he died in December 1997, barely out of office, and the citywide grief measured what his era had meant. The changing of the guard sits at the center of the 1990s chapter.