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 and NoDDC, filed about 37,600 signatures on July 2, and put Proposition 420 on the November ballot. The Desert Discovery Center page tells the whole fight.
The mountains get a constitution
The city’s pamphlet printed 51 arguments against Prop 420 and 17 for it. On November 6 the voters answered with about 71%, 78,946 to 31,847. The charter amendment requires a public vote before the natural state of Preserve land is altered, beyond trail and trailhead work, and limits how Preserve funds may be spent. It did not name the Discovery Center, but it meant the project could be built only with voters’ approval, and it was never brought to them: on December 11 the council voted 7 to 0 to end it. Whatever the council of any given year might prefer, the Preserve now answers to the electorate that created it.
Voters had funded the Preserve in 1995 and 2004 and backed it in 1996, 1998 and 1999; in 2018 they wrote its protection into the charter. 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. Earlier in the year, on July 2, the council had adopted a new Old Town Character Area Plan, 7 to 0, setting the terms for the height fights still to come. The decade had one victory lap left before the arguments resumed — that, and everything after, starts in the 2010s chapter.