The short version
Indian Bend Wash is the dry riverbed that runs north to south through the middle of Scottsdale. For most of the year it carries nothing; in a big storm it carries a river, and the subdivisions of the 1950s had been built across it. The federal answer, worked out by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1960s and authorized by Congress in 1965, was a concrete channel about 170 feet wide.
Scottsdale talked its way out of it. A landscape architect’s 1964 newspaper column proposed making the flood channel a park, the city’s citizen planners took up the idea, a county bond for the concrete failed in 1966, and the city backed an engineer’s alternative of grass and an upstream reservoir. It took two more floods and a 1973 bond to settle, and the greenbelt that resulted is the city’s best-known piece of planning.
The federal plan
The Corps and the county Flood Control District began public meetings about the wash in 1959, Joan Fudala writes. The city’s 2012 historic context dates the Corps’ plan to 1961: “a concrete channel, 23’ deep and 170’ wide, lining Indian Bend Wash.” A 1978 Christian Science Monitor account puts it in 1963 and calls it “a standard solution” of “sterile concrete canals.” The Corps’ report went to Congress as House Document 303 in May 1964, and the Flood Control Act of October 27, 1965 authorized the project “at an estimated cost of $7,250,000.” The council, the city’s context says, had voted to endorse the channel in 1962.
A column in the Progress
On February 8, 1964 Bill Walton, a landscape architect who had moved to Scottsdale the year before, wrote in the Scottsdale Daily Progress: “I would urge city and civic leaders to buy land and begin planning now for recreational purposes, and, to be specific, to consider buying the complete five miles or so of the Indian Bend Wash in which the flood control project is to be placed and to make it into a unique and outstanding park area for Scottsdale.” He did not oppose flood control. “A turfed channel can be designed so as to serve a variety of purposes,” he wrote. “Let’s get bold; let’s plan ahead.”
The idea found a ready audience. The city’s new citizen-planning program, STEP, began that November, and the city’s context says a 1964 STEP committee “opposed the concrete channel and recommended that the city pursue a greenbelt solution instead.” The Monitor’s 1978 account agrees that citizens “meeting in neighborhood groups … decided that flood control precautions could be combined with park and recreational facilities.” In March 1965 the council appointed Walton to the Parks and Recreation Commission, where he chaired its wash committee.
The county bond and the Erickson Plan
In October 1965, the city’s context says, the council hired an engineer, John Erickson, to analyze the Corps plan. In 1966 a bond issue to pay the local share of the concrete channel failed. The context calls it a March county Flood Control District election lost three to one; Fudala says Scottsdale voters defeated it; the Monitor says city officials “voted the idea down by a resounding margin.” The same year the city acquired 55 acres on Miller Road that opened in 1967 as Eldorado Park, the first green piece of the wash.
Erickson’s design is described in the city’s 1969 STEP report: “the City Council proposed the upstream construction of a reservoir which could be drained slowly by a relatively small earth and grass-lined channel. This later design is the so-called Erickson Plan.” The committee recommended “That the Erickson Plan be adopted by the City Council,” with a lake and park of at least 40 acres at the Arizona Canal and green strips the length of the wash, keeping “a 170’ flood control channel” easement inside them. In 1968, the context says, the Corps had received money to study the alternative.
Settling it
The floods made the argument for the greenbelt side. The Labor Day flood of 1970 and the June 22, 1972 flood, which destroyed seventeen homes, came before the money did. In April 1973 voters approved a bond for the greenbelt, seven to one by the city’s context. (The same spring voters gave the city charter power to require developers to pay for flood control; no document says whether the bond shared that April 10 ballot.) Part of the price was paid in density: “Generally the Council has been willing to permit increase in the density of developable land in order to give developers incentive to construct the Indian Bend Green Belt Wash Floodway,” the city told its citizens that fall, and developers dug, turfed and deeded stretches of the channel. The context says the Corps had agreed in 1971 that the Erickson alternative would work; the Monitor says the Corps “abandoned its previous position and joined in” once the city was clearly going ahead, and quotes a Corps spokesman calling the result “the nation’s first floodway project to both reduce flood damage and build recreational facilities in the same design.” Its first real test came in the floods of March 1978: “It worked beautifully!” Mayor Bill Jenkins wrote to Congressman John Rhodes, and the areas it protected were “virtually unscathed.” The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt was declared complete in 1985.
Who paid the price
The wash was not empty. Yaqui families who had moved there after the water users closed their last labor camp in 1956 lived in and beside it, and the city’s context says many lost their homes in flooding in September 1966. The 1969 STEP committee described their neighborhood as “deteriorated” by “flood hazards, low-income families, and poor construction techniques” and recommended federal redevelopment money. Houses were removed from the wash and new ones built nearby, and the families moved into them in the early 1970s; Vista del Camino Park took the land along the wash. No statement from the families about the flood plans survives.
The 1960s politics chapter sets the fight beside the decade’s other arguments, and the greenbelt lexicon entry explains the word.