The short version
North of the Central Arizona Project canal, the federal government bought a strip of desert in the 1970s to catch runoff before it reached the canal. In the 1980s Scottsdale turned that strip into two of its signature places. In 1982 the Bureau of Reclamation let the city use 132 acres for a horse park to replace one the airport had displaced; it became WestWorld. In 1985 the Bureau added about 400 acres, and the city built a golf complex there and leased it to the PGA Tour, which moved the Phoenix Open to the new Stadium Course in 1987. The city chose the Princess resort to go next door.
The city paid for the building and kept a share of the revenue. Washington got nothing, and in 1991 a congressman from Oklahoma asked why. Congressional auditors found the agreements legal but called them “prime examples” of an agency acting without rules. The deals stood.
A horse park first
The land deal began with horses, not golf. The city’s equestrian park, Cholla Park, had to close for the airport’s runway extension, Joan Fudala writes, and the city’s 2012 historic context says the same. In July 1982 the city signed a cost-sharing and land-use agreement with the Bureau for 132 acres in the basin, and Horseman’s Park opened in 1983. The federal audit describes the same start: the park “began as the replacement for an equestrian-oriented neighborhood park that was being displaced by expansion of Scottsdale’s municipal airport.” By 1984, Fudala writes, city officials wanted a much bigger park that could hold major shows; Councilman Jim Bruner later said the aim was to keep the Arabian Horse Show from becoming the “Phoenix Arabian Horse Show.” In 1985 the Bureau added 224 acres. The park became HorseWorld in 1988 and WestWorld in 1990.
Phoenix said no
The golf complex came from a rejection. The Thunderbirds, who ran the Phoenix Open, wanted a stadium-style course where crowds could watch, and PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman tried to build one in Phoenix. Both of the participants who have told the story agree that Phoenix turned it down. Vernon Kelly of the Tour’s course division, interviewed in 2007, said a plan for a hotel on a Thunderbird member’s land with the course on adjacent parkland was “supposed to be a mere formality” at the Phoenix council, and the council rejected it. Bruner, speaking in 2020, said the Phoenix course was derailed by worries that it would encroach on the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.
Mayor Herb Drinkwater moved fast, by Kelly’s account: “You just tried it in the wrong place … If Phoenix doesn’t want you, Scottsdale does.” Kelly said Drinkwater wanted “the finest course in Arizona” run by “a first-class operator, like the PGA Tour,” and the city’s project manager, Tom Beat, said Drinkwater made it a condition that the course be paid for “without tax dollars.” Bruner remembered telling Beman, “Scottsdale is different … We have a good council; we have a great staff; and we’re going to make it happen.”
The terms
In December 1984, before it had the federal land, the city leased the planned complex to PGA Tour Investments, Inc., whose Tournament Players Club subsidiary would run it. The city would get 10 percent of golf revenue and 2 percent of everything else. In June 1985 the Bureau turned over about 400 acres for the golf complex, for 50 years with a 25-year option. The city raised about $16.6 million through bonds; the auditors put the total cost at about $17.8 million to $20 million, of which the federal share was a grant of about $62,000. Ground was broken in August 1985, by Beat’s account, and the Stadium Course opened in December 1986. On January 22, 1987 the Phoenix Open teed off there for the first time.
The hotel was part of the plan. While it designed the courses, the federal audit says, the city was “soliciting proposals nationally” for a resort next door, believing it “would provide a source of customers for the adjacent golf complex,” and chose Princess Hotels International. Neighboring landowners donated the hotel site, which Kelly remembered as an informal motorcycle track and dump; Bruner credited Councilman Bill Walton with getting the land from Kemper Marley. The Princess was topped off on March 3, 1987 and opened later that year.
The audit
The money flowed. From 1988 through 1990, the auditors found, the golf complex and the horse park took in about $24 million, of which the city was entitled to about $1.5 million. In 1989 alone the two operators earned about $8.2 million “with no fee compensation to the Bureau.” The public course also came with a reservation system: 20 percent of tee times on each course were held for PGA Tour, Inc., which passed a large share of them, as much as 60 percent in peak season, to guests of the resort next door. The Bureau had wanted fewer restrictions and the Tour more, and the 80/20 split was the compromise. In 1991 a peak-season round on the Stadium Course cost $80 with a mandatory cart.
Rep. Mike Synar, an Oklahoma Democrat who chaired a House Government Operations subcommittee, had been complaining since 1990. “If people in the private sector did these kinds of deals, they’d be fired,” he told Insight magazine. An Interior Department negotiator, Bob Michaels, conceded that the lease “probably should have been drawn up differently,” though he pointed out that the government paid no maintenance. Synar and Rep. George Miller asked the General Accounting Office to look.
On July 11, 1991 the office delivered its report and testified at Synar’s hearing. Its verdict was narrow and pointed. “None of the terms and conditions of the agreements between the Bureau and Scottsdale appear to be contrary to the requirements of the act,” it said, but “the two Scottsdale agreements are prime examples of what can occur when agencies receive program authority, but then fail to develop sound policies and guidance for implementing that authority.” The Bureau’s local officials had answered that it was proper for the government to take no fee, because leasing the land served the Bureau’s goal of providing it for recreation, and that the city, which paid for the building, should be the one to share in the revenue. The auditors recommended that the Bureau postpone any new agreement with a public body, or any further development under the existing ones, until it had written policies.
What stayed
Nothing was undone. The city still holds the land and the Tour still runs the courses, under a lease the council has amended seven times, most recently in 2021 to allow a sports book in the clubhouse. The argument over who came out ahead never closed. Beat said in 2007 that hotel and course revenue had paid off the 20-year bonds. A city report in 2012, as reported the next year, counted a net loss of nearly $26 million since 1986 once land, improvements and debt were included. Supporters point to the tournament’s sales tax, the Princess and the resort corridor along the canal; critics to a public course built on public land that reserves its best tee times for a tour and a hotel. The Thunderbirds guide and TPC Scottsdale entry carry the story forward, and the 1980s politics chapter sets it beside the decade’s other deals.