For the third time in a decade, Scottsdale voters reached for their own wallets to buy a mountain range. The 1994 and 1995 votes had created and first funded the McDowell Sonoran Preserve; in 2004 the electorate added another 0.15 percent sales tax to accelerate the purchases. 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 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 three times 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.