Sixteen years of retail politics
He arrived at City Hall from a wine shop and governed like a man who missed the counter. Elected in 1980, Herb Drinkwater practiced a politics of remembered names and constant presence — dog usually at heel — that voters rewarded four times across sixteen years. The style was easy to underestimate; the record was not. His administrations annexed the vast northern desert between 1981 and 1984, landed the Scottsdale Princess and Hyatt Gainey mega-resorts in a single year (1985), developed WestWorld, and in 1987 pulled off the trifecta: the Mayo Clinic’s first branch anywhere, Colorado River water through the new CAP plant, and the Phoenix Open’s move to TPC Scottsdale.
The trick of the Drinkwater era was that it doubled the city — 88,412 people in 1980, past 190,000 by his 1996 retirement — while somehow making it feel smaller. He ran a boomtown like a small town, and enough of the town believed it that the small town stayed real. His final terms also saw the preserve movement born: the Land Trust of 1991, the founding resolution of 1994, and the tax vote of May 1995 all came while he held the office, and his successors carried the buying program to its more-than-30,000-acre conclusion.
The city says goodbye
Cancer took him on December 28, 1997, at 61 — barely out of office, still the most popular politician the city had ever produced. Flags dropped and thousands paid their respects, a mourning out of proportion to any ordinary ex-mayor because the bond had never been ordinary; no Scottsdale figure before or since has matched it.
The memorials arrived in the city’s own idiom: Drinkwater Boulevard, a Civic Center statue with the dog at heel, and the shorthand that had followed him for years — “Mr. Scottsdale” — settling into permanence. The city he left kept doing what he had watched it learn to do: grow hard and keep the mountains. His build-out decade is the 1980s chapter; the era he did not live to see finished is the 1990s.