The year’s big build was, of all things, a roof. The Tony Nelssen Equidome upgrade gave WestWorld covered arenas, and the difference was more than shade: an events grounds that had always answered to the desert calendar became a year-round machine. Heat and weather stopped being scheduling problems, and the city’s signature spectacles — Barrett-Jackson’s collector-car auction and the Arabian horse show among them — promptly packed the new space.
It was infrastructure spending in the most Scottsdale register: not a freeway or a sewer plant but a climate-controlled venue for horses and collector cars. And it fit the mid-decade pattern. The recovery had gathered real speed, the Airpark was filling with tech and finance payrolls, and the city was reinvesting in the tourism engine that stayed foundational even as the economy diversified around it.
The covered arenas also helped set up the decade’s late-period records — spring training and the WM Phoenix Open posting attendance highs, WestWorld’s calendar running through summer.
The council race that November was the closest of the decade. Linda Milhaven was re-elected at the top of the field and former city treasurer David Smith won a seat. Kathy Littlefield, who the year before had chaired the campaign against the 2013 bonds, took the third seat by 54 votes over incumbent Dennis Robbins. Councilman Bob Littlefield left the council in January 2015 after three terms.
One year on, the cultural side of the ledger got its own landmark when the Museum of the West opened in Old Town.