Lisa Borowsky was sworn in that January promising a slower, lower Scottsdale — limits on high-rise apartment growth, restraint on city spending — the platform that had carried her past David Ortega in November. She took office as the city’s third mayor of the decade so far, plain evidence that growth-versus-character had become the axis on which Scottsdale elections turn.
The Axon fight ended somewhere stranger. With the referendum looming, the company paused its groundbreaking and warned it might leave Arizona altogether; then state lawmakers intervened, passing legislation that let the expanded headquarters — apartments, hotel and all — proceed without the local vote. Whatever one’s side, the outcome redrew the map of who governs Scottsdale growth: the city that settled its mountains by referendum learned that a referendum can be preempted from the Capitol.
That collision — local control against state economic policy — is the note the decade is still holding, and the one a slow-growth city hall now has to govern under. The running account is in the 2020s chapter.