The short version
Scottsdale’s famous lack of billboards did not come from a single bold vote. In September 1962, five months after the first council elected under the charter took office, the city stopped allowing new billboards. The ones already standing were allowed to stay. No record of any objection to that rule survives, perhaps because it cost no one anything yet.
The fight came later, when the city tried to make the old signs come down. In 1973 voters amended the charter to require removal of nonconforming signs after a grace period, and in 1974 the council set the periods. A merchants’ group sued, and in 1978 the Arizona Supreme Court held that state law let a city remove such signs only by paying for them. The city got rid of its billboards anyway, by making their removal a condition of approving new development, until by 2020 one was left.
1962: no new billboards
The city’s own account of the start is a single line in a 1973 list of findings: “the erection of new billboards in Scottsdale has been prohibited since September 13, 1962.” The city’s historic context and the Historical Society both date the rule to 1962, and the Historical Society calls it the forerunner of a 1965 ordinance on the size and placement of signs. On December 7, 1965 the council created a Design Review Board to judge new buildings against “those structures in the neighboring environment.”
The rule was narrower than its legend. A 1978 court opinion describes it exactly: existing billboards “are valid non-conforming uses, but once removed or destroyed, cannot be replaced within Scottsdale city limits.” In November 1973 one company, Eller Outdoor Advertising, still owned 33 billboards inside the city.
The campaign against the old signs
The only narrative of what came next is by Bill Jenkins, a councilman from 1966 and later mayor, writing in 2002. He says “the City Council under the leadership of Mayor B.L. Tims … launched a campaign to rid the city of what many considered to be the visual blight of billboards,” that it met “staunch opposition from the outdoor advertising industry,” and that Jonathan Marshall’s Scottsdale Progress backed it. No other source confirms Tims’s or Marshall’s part, so they are his account.
The legal steps are on the record. On June 17, 1969 the council adopted Ordinance 455, which set the standards for deciding which signs did not conform. On April 10, 1973 voters approved, 7,425 to 795, a charter amendment “to require removal of all signs not conforming to the zoning ordinance,” with a period “of amortization as determined by ordinance.” A STEP forum that September worked out how, under the heading “We are not discussing whether or not to amortize but how to amortize signs.” The architect Vernon Swaback supplied the argument from design: signs should be “a means of identification, not … competitive bombardment of the senses,” and “Enormous dinosaurs and plaster cowboys twenty feet tall are historical abuses.” On August 20, 1974 the council adopted Ordinance 823: a commercial sign more than five years old had one or two more years to come down or be brought into line.
Three lawsuits
The sign side fought in court, three times, and the same Snell & Wilmer lawyer, Guy Gelbron, argued all three cases:
- Eller Outdoor Advertising. In 1971 the city bought land on the south side of McDowell Road for a federally funded redevelopment project and told Eller to remove six billboards. Eller won an injunction in 1973 requiring compensation, so the city condemned the billboards. A jury awarded Eller $15,600 for the signs and $31,400 more in “severance” damages; on May 4, 1978 the Court of Appeals threw out the extra damages and sent the case back. Eller’s expert had told the jury that Scottsdale was valuable to advertisers “because of the higher than average income of its inhabitants, its reputation as a tourist attraction, and its desirability as a shopping area.”
- The Arizona Sign Association. The sign makers’ trade group challenged the design-review standards in Ordinance 455 as too vague. On March 10, 1977 the Court of Appeals ruled for the city: no permit had been denied, so there was nothing yet to decide.
- Scottsdale Associated Merchants, Inc. This nonprofit challenged Ordinance 823 itself, and won.
July 13, 1978: the city loses
The Arizona Supreme Court decided the merchants’ case on a statute. Arizona’s zoning law said a city “may acquire by purchase or condemnation private property for the removal of nonconforming uses and structures,” and that nothing in a zoning ordinance “shall affect existing property or the right to its continued use.” Ordinance 823 gave owners time instead of money. The city argued that as a charter city it had its own power over zoning, and that amortization over a reasonable period was legal without special authority. The court disagreed on both counts: “Zoning regulation is a matter of statewide concern,” and “Ordinance 823 conflicts with A.R.S. § 9-462.02, and it is therefore void.”
The ruling outlived Scottsdale’s fight. Two years later the court applied it to Phoenix’s sign ordinance, and it became the rule across the state. Jenkins’s verdict, “The outdoor advertising industry carried the day in court,” is half right: the decisive case was brought by local merchants, and in the two cases the sign industry itself brought, the city won.
Getting rid of them anyway
After 1978 the city used a lever the court had left it. Whenever land with a billboard on it was redeveloped, the city made removal a condition of approval, and, Jenkins wrote, it drew “little or no developer objection.” By his count fewer than six billboards were left in 2002. In 2020 a city planner told KJZZ that one was left, on McDowell Road at Miller Road in the south of the city.
The 1962 rule, the 1965 Design Review Board and the 1973 amendment are the roots of the sign codes the general plan and zoning guide describes. The 1978 case is also an early lesson in how far a charter city’s home rule reaches, a subject the state preemption guide takes up. The 1960s politics chapter sets the 1962 rule beside the decade’s other arguments.