Scottsdale ended 1997 in mourning. Herb Drinkwater died on December 28, at 61 — cancer, less than two years after leaving office. Flags dropped, thousands paid their respects, and the shorthand the town had used for years — “Mr. Scottsdale” — hardened into an epitaph. No local politician before or since has matched the personal bond he built with the city, one handshake and one remembered name at a time, dog usually at heel.
The ledger of his sixteen years (1980–96) reads like the modern city’s origin story: the Scottsdale Princess and Hyatt Gainey resorts, the Mayo Clinic’s Arizona campus, WestWorld, Colorado River water, the TPC and its Open, and the annexations that carried the city to 185 square miles. His final terms also incubated the preserve movement — the Land Trust, the 1994 resolution, the 1995 tax vote all came on his watch — which his successors carried to its more-than-30,000-acre conclusion. He ran a boomtown like a small town, and enough people believed it that the small town stayed real.
The year’s politics ran through the courts and the ballot. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the city’s water development fee in January, threw a Coyotes-rink referendum off the ballot in May because paid circulators from out of state were not qualified electors, and in October ordered the governor to sign the Salt River Community’s gaming compact. In September voters rejected Mayor Campana’s “Transit Plus” bus tax in every district; former councilman Ross Dean’s argument against it began “HERE WE GO AGAIN! 97% of Scottsdale bus seats run EMPTY.”
The memorials arrived in the city’s own idiom: Drinkwater Boulevard, and at the Civic Center a statue with the dog at heel, naturally. Around the grief, the city he built kept moving — the Preserve closings continued, the north kept filling in, and the decade rolled toward Loop 101 and the century’s end. His build-out years have their own chapter: the 1980s.