The short version
For three decades Scottsdale planned a nature center at the front door of its desert. A 2007 master plan put a visitor center at the Gateway trailhead of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and a 2010 city study priced the full Desert Discovery Center at up to $74 million. In 2016 the council hired a nonprofit led by former Mayor Sam Campana to plan it, with hotel-tax money, and refused, 4 to 3, to start toward a public vote.
Residents who had helped buy the Preserve organized against it. In July 2018 they filed about 37,600 signatures for a charter amendment requiring a public vote for any building in the Preserve. The city’s pamphlet printed 51 arguments against it and 17 for; on November 6, 2018 voters approved it with 71 percent. Five weeks later the council ended the project, 7 to 0.
The plan
City staff traced the idea to the mid-1980s, when Pinnacle Peak was the site under discussion; by the late 1990s it had moved to the Gateway. The 2010 Phase II study, paid for with Preserve tax money, described “roughly 70,000 square feet, a variety of buildings” at up to $74 million, about $62 million of it for buildings and exhibits. After it, the Preserve Commission and the Tourism Development Commission both recommended no more Preserve money, and in 2012 the city sought an operator and got no responses.
Supporters regrouped as a nonprofit, Desert Discovery Center Scottsdale, with a board that included former city manager Dick Bowers and former Preserve commissioners, and Campana as executive director. On January 11, 2016 the council contracted with it, the only bidder, for a business plan and design: $1,696,900 in bed-tax money. Councilwoman Kathy Littlefield had warned the year before: “74 million, I think is a killer. $3 to $5 million, I don’t think anybody would have cared.”
The council says no to a vote
Opponents organized that summer. NoDDC, founded by a computer programmer named Jason Alexander, objected to “how this project has been driven forward from a group of special interests largely out of the public eye.” Protect Our Preserve, led by former Preserve commissioner Howard Myers, put it more simply: “It’s the people’s preserve.” On September 19, 2016 they brought a citizen petition asking the council to require a public vote for any building in the Preserve beyond trails and trailheads. Councilman Guy Phillips moved to start a charter amendment; Mayor Jim Lane moved to draft one too, and got no second. The council voted 4 to 3 to take no action, with Suzanne Klapp, Virginia Korte, Linda Milhaven and David Smith in the majority and Lane, Littlefield and Phillips dissenting.
By September 2017 the project, renamed Desert EDGE, had shrunk to about 47,600 square feet and $61 million to $68 million, and the room had turned bitter. “I’ve never had the kind of reaction and the kind of vitriol and kinds of devastating division that we have with this now,” Lane said. Milhaven gave the opponents a challenge: “All you need to do is go get the signatures.” In November the council agreed to wait for them.
Proposition 420
They got them: about 37,600 filed on July 2, 2018, and more than 30,000 found valid. The measure barred altering any Preserve land “from its natural state unless specifically authorized by a majority of the votes cast,” beyond new trails approved by the Preserve Commission and listed trail and trailhead work, and limited Preserve tax money to land, trails and debt.
The civic establishment lined up against it. Milhaven: “The proposed Charter amendment goes beyond the question of an educational center and restricts our ability to protect our Preserve.” Korte, a founder of the Preserve campaign in 1993: “I helped start our McDowell Sonoran Preserve decades ago and worked on all 5 campaigns.” Former city manager Jan Dolan chaired the opposing committee, and the Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS objected that the amendment empowered the Preserve Commission, “a group of individuals who are not duly elected to office by the citizens of Scottsdale,” and that Preserve tax money could not be used to restore the land “following a flood, a wildfire … without first being approved by a public vote.”
The other side had the electorate. Former Mayor Mary Manross, mayor during the 2004 Preserve tax vote, signed for it, as did both Littlefields, Phillips, Councilwoman Klapp, candidate Solange Whitehead, the Sierra Club and the Coalition of Greater Scottsdale. On November 6, 2018 voters approved it, 78,946 to 31,847. On December 11 the council adopted Resolution 11339, on Korte’s motion and Lane’s second, ending the Desert EDGE project “or other similar projects, such as a nature education center, in the Preserve,” 7 to 0.
The fight settled who decides what happens in the Preserve: the voters, not the council. Whitehead, who the Scottsdale Progress reported was inspired to run by it, was elected that day. The Preserve guide and Prop 420 entry carry the story on, and the 2010s politics chapter sets it beside the decade’s other votes.