The year’s fights were about who decides. A year after the Supreme Court threw out a referendum petition carried by paid out-of-state circulators, the council required circulators to be Scottsdale residents, and on March 10 voters kept the rule, 10,778 to 6,943, over opponents who called it “a blatant City Council effort to limit citizens ability to exercise their constitutional rights.” In November they wrote into the charter that Preserve land could not be sold without a public vote, 39,429 to 9,340. In between, on July 15, the city took title to 4,603 acres at DC Ranch, the first big block of the Preserve. And on September 4 the Safari Hotel, the 1956 glamour address of the Sinatra era, shut its doors on Scottsdale Road after 42 years.
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.