The road to the ballot
The question had been narrowing for years. The 2010s closed with cranes back in Old Town and every proposed tower re-fighting the eternal argument — western character versus urban future — while Prop 420 (2018) proved how hard voters would push back when they believed the city had broken faith with its own plans. David Ortega had taken office in 2021 amid that mood; four years later the mood had a name and a parcel. The council’s approval of Axon’s expanded headquarters campus — nearly 2,000 apartments and a hotel near Loop 101 — handed the campaign its defining issue, and opponents spent the season gathering the 20,000-plus signatures that would force a referendum.
Borowsky ran squarely at it: against high-density apartment development, against city spending, for a slower and lower Scottsdale. Ortega, the architect who had presided over the boom years and the Rio Verde resolution, defended the record. About 54 percent of the electorate chose the challenger.
What the night set in motion
The result made 2024 the second consecutive mayoral election decided on growth-versus-character ground — a pattern now, not a fluke. Borowsky was sworn in that January pledging limits on high-rise apartment growth, giving the slow-growth side both the mayor’s office and, seemingly, the referendum as leverage.
Then the election’s biggest issue escaped the city’s hands entirely. With the vote pending, Axon paused its groundbreaking and warned it might leave Arizona; in 2025, state lawmakers passed legislation that let the project proceed without the local vote. In the space of twelve months, Scottsdale’s voters had chosen a slow-growth mayor and lost the decade’s marquee growth fight — a collision of local control and state economic policy that now defines the city’s politics, and the note on which the 2020s chapter is still being written.