The year’s politics ran through the ballot and the council chamber. On May 20 voters rejected two initiatives, backed by the state firefighters’ association, to replace the Rural/Metro contract with a city fire department, 20,581 to 11,917 (see the fire-department initiatives). In November Rural/Metro, the company Lou Witzeman founded in 1948 and under contract to the city since the early 1950s, gave notice anyway that it would not renew, leaving the city nineteen months to build a fire department from scratch. On July 2 the council voted 4 to 3 to share the sales taxes from a Walmart, Sam’s Club and Lowe’s center on the old Los Arcos mall site with its developer for forty years; a committee called STOP’EM forced a referendum (see the Los Arcos referendum). Councilwoman Cynthia Lukas resigned her seat to run for mayor, and Market Street at DC Ranch opened as the village center of the McDowells’ west slope. Metro Phoenix was building one of America’s most leveraged housing economies, and Scottsdale rode the front of it — construction and finance payrolls quietly growing as important as tourism, values climbing, everything for sale and everything selling.
The counterweight was also gathering. Preserve advocates were preparing to go back to the voters, and in 2004 they would win an additional 0.15 percent sales tax to accelerate McDowell Sonoran Preserve purchases — the same electorate funding both the boom and the permanent refuge from it. That double instinct, buy the land and save the mountains, is the whole era in miniature; see the resort metropolis for the long version.