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 more than doubled, from 88,412 people to past the 190,000 it crossed this 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 in earnest. With the 1995 preserve tax generating revenue, land closings started adding thousands of acres to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve — real market transactions with ranch owners and the State Land Department, acre by acre, the unglamorous machinery behind the decade’s grand gesture. 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 smooth handoff proved a point about the town: the preservation consensus was bigger than any one politician. 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.