The year opened with two refusals. On March 9 voters rejected the Los Arcos redevelopment agreement, a 40-year sales-tax share for a Walmart center, 29,444 to 5,856, though the developer had already withdrawn, and a charter amendment for six council districts, 21,345 to 13,684 (see the Los Arcos referendum). In May the developer sold the land to the ASU Foundation, which sold it to the city for what became SkySong.
For the second time in a decade, Scottsdale voters reached for their own wallets to buy a mountain range. The council had created the McDowell Sonoran Preserve in 1994 and voters had first funded it in 1995; on May 18, 2004, in the fifth Preserve funding vote since 1995, the electorate added another 0.15 percent sales tax, 17,196 to 14,339, the narrowest margin of any Preserve tax. Land prices were climbing with everything else in the mid-2000s boom, and the logic was blunt: buy the desert now, at retail, or watch it become somebody’s gated view lots. The vote has its own page.
The timing looks even better in hindsight. The same economy that made preserve land expensive was inflating the condo towers, the club district, and the housing leverage that would all come apart in 2008 — but a sales tax dedicated to buying mountains kept right on collecting through the bust. While cranes stopped across the city, the Preserve kept growing, and the Gateway Trailhead would open to crowds in 2009, in the teeth of the recession.
The 2004 vote settled something about the city’s character. Scottsdale would build almost anything — waterfront condos in a desert, a nightlife district with velvet ropes — but it had now taxed itself twice, and voted to borrow against those taxes, to guarantee that the McDowells themselves stayed empty. The largest urban preserve in the United States was bought on exactly that bargain; the campaign’s origins are in the 1990s chapter.