The year’s landmark attraction wasn’t technically in Scottsdale at all. OdySea Aquarium opened over Labor Day weekend — September 3 — on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s land just across Loop 101: 200,000 square feet, more than two million gallons of water, the largest aquarium in the Southwest, rising improbably from the Sonoran Desert floor.
The address was the point. OdySea joined Butterfly Wonderland, Talking Stick Resort, and Salt River Fields in the Community’s fast-growing entertainment corridor along the freeway — a stretch that wove the two governments’ visitor economies together more tightly than at any point since wagons tied up at Pima Plaza. Scottsdale’s resorts sent guests across the 101; the corridor sent visitors back toward Old Town; the boundary between the two economies mattered a little less every year.
For Scottsdale the opening confirmed a pattern the decade kept repeating: a visitor economy growing not just bigger but stranger and more varied — a solar bridge, a western museum, now an ocean beside the freeway. The city itself was busy with offices and cranes, and two years later its voters would take up the opposite question, what must never be built. That story lands in 2018.
City Hall had a hard year. City Manager Fritz Behring fell ill at a June 2015 council meeting and did not return; the council ended his contract 7 to 0 on March 1. In May the state barred cities from banning short-term rentals. In September the council voted 4 to 3 not to act on a citizen petition for a public vote on any building in the Preserve, the start of the Desert Discovery Center fight. In November Mayor Jim Lane won a third term over Bob Littlefield, who had campaigned against the Discovery Center, with 63.67% of the vote.