The decade went out at full volume. In September Great Wolf Lodge opened its indoor waterpark on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land beside the 101, and at the other end of the city the pueblo-style Papago Plaza — south Scottsdale’s gateway landmark since the 1960s — came down for redevelopment. The WM Phoenix Open cemented its standing as golf’s biggest-attended event, the cranes were back over Old Town — every proposed hotel and condo tower re-fighting the western-character-versus-urban-future question block by block — and the economy had finished its transformation, with medicine, tech, finance, and hospitality all pulling at once as the city closed the decade at roughly 241,361 residents.
At City Hall the decade’s long run of no ended. On November 5 voters approved $319 million in bonds for 58 projects, after every council member, including the onetime bond opponent Guy Phillips, signed an argument for them. A month later, on December 4, the council approved Southbridge Two, a canal-front project with buildings up to 150 feet, by 4 to 3. Old Town property owners filed for a referendum the next day, and the Southbridge Two referendum carried the height fight into 2020.
In hindsight the year reads like a held breath. The recovery decade had delivered what it promised — a museum, an aquarium, diversified payrolls, a constitutionally protected Preserve — and the arguments left standing, from tower heights to short-term rentals to water, were queued up for the next one. Nobody knew the pandemic was months away from rewriting the terms of every question. That story begins in the 2020s chapter.