Two openings marked 2002 at opposite ends of the north: on April 20 the city opened Pinnacle Peak Park, returning the granite landmark to hikers after seven years locked behind luxury lots (its own page), and the 735-room Westin Kierland opened as the anchor of the new Kierland district. Otherwise the city was busy absorbing what 2001 had built. The newly completed Loop 101 was doing exactly what freeways do: collapsing distances, raising traffic counts, and pulling jobs and rooftops toward its ramps. The Airpark and north Scottsdale, minutes from the metro for the first time, were filling in fast.
Meanwhile the slower machinery ground on. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, created and first funded by the votes of the 1990s, kept buying mountain land — a campaign that would ask voters for a second tax in 2004 and get it. Downtown, the faded Valley Ho still awaited its rescue, and the Los Arcos site still sat empty on McDowell Road. The decade’s signature projects were all in the pipeline; 2002 was the pipeline.
Two council incumbents lost in one cycle. On March 12 voters elected Wayne Ecton and Cynthia Lukas, left Councilman Robert Pettycrew last of six, and ratified the city’s 2001 General Plan, 12,950 to 5,988, its first under the state’s Growing Smarter law; no one filed an argument against it. In the May 21 runoff Bob Littlefield, who had promised to stand “firm against special interests,” beat Councilman George Zraket, 9,637 to 8,696. That September, an advocacy group reported, the council repealed the downtown redevelopment area after a property owners’ petition. The 2000s politics chapter has the decade.