Scottsdale settles its biggest questions at the ballot box, and 2018 produced the most emphatic settlement yet. The fight had been building for years: the city’s proposed Desert Discovery Center, an interpretive attraction planned for the McDowell Sonoran Preserve’s Gateway Trailhead, struck supporters as a world-class educational campus and struck a huge share of residents as commercial development inside land they had taxed themselves to buy. The opposition organized as Protect Our Preserve, gathered signatures, and put Proposition 420 on the November ballot.
The mountains get a constitution
On November 6 the voters answered with about 71%. The charter amendment is short and absolute: no Preserve land may be developed or repurposed without a public vote. The Discovery Center was dead — and more than that, the whole category of future discovery centers moved permanently out of city hall’s reach. Whatever the council of any given year might prefer, the Preserve now answers only to the electorate that created it.
The vote completed the most consistent referendum record in Arizona: 1994, 1995, 2004, and now 2018, four elections pointing the same direction. Whatever else Scottsdale argues about — height, nightlife, water, growth — the Preserve is settled law because the people keep making it so. Prop 420 became the modern benchmark for how strongly the city feels about its desert, the measure against which every later growth fight would be taken. The decade had one victory lap left before the arguments resumed — that, and everything after, starts in the 2010s chapter.