Nothing in the record singles out 1998, which mostly means the town was busy doing what it had already voted to do. The preserve tax approved in 1995 was quietly turning into land: the closings begun under Mayor Campana kept adding acres to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, ranch parcel by trust section — the unglamorous middle chapters of the decade’s grand project.
Everything else was momentum. The city was climbing from the 167,277 counted in the 1995 special census toward the 202,705 the 2000 census would find, with the growth stacking up in the north along the route of the coming Loop 101. Fashion Square kept expanding; Los Arcos kept fading; the Airpark kept hiring. And the first full year without Herb Drinkwater — dead in December 1997 — passed with the preservation consensus he had seen born still holding firm. The decade’s full arc is in the 1990s chapter.