At a glance: Scottsdale started the 1960s as a town of ten thousand and ended it as a city of nearly seventy thousand, and its politics were about how to take control of that growth. Voters gave the town a charter, twice. The council went through five mayors in seven years. It then did something unusual: in November 1964 it handed the question of what the city should build to committees of residents, the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, and largely did what they said. The decade’s arguments came out of that process: paved streets or not, how tall, whether to let freeways in, whether a flood channel should be concrete or grass, whether billboards belonged in a town that sold its view. One argument had only one side on the record, the clearing of the old barrio for the Civic Center. The 1950s chapter tells how the town got here.
A charter, and five mayors
The town council chose its own mayor until 1960, when voters began electing the mayor directly under a first charter that a court later voided. The charter that holds was ratified on October 31, 1961, and on April 3, 1962 the first mayor and council elected under it took office: Mayor Bill Schrader and councilmen Boyd Parker, Herb Caywood, John Woudenberg, Thomas Hunter and Trent Meacham, all on two-year terms.
What followed was the least stable stretch the city’s government has had. By the city’s council history, Meacham resigned in 1963 to move away; his replacement, Tom Felke, resigned three months later “due to too many conflicts of interest between his office and his occupation.” Woudenberg was elected mayor in April 1964 and resigned that September, “citing pressures of his business,” a reason the Arizona Republic also reported. The council appointed Councilman C. W. “Bill” Clayton mayor in October 1964; he died in office on December 21, 1965. On January 6, 1966 the council chose Councilman B. L. “Bud” Tims, an optometrist, and the council history says Tims then ran as a write-in in the February 15 primary and won. He stayed until 1974.
The council of the late 1960s is documented three ways, in the city’s roster, in the captions of two Arizona Supreme Court cases and on the masthead of the 1969 STEP report: Tims, William Jenkins, Doris McCauley, John Senini Jr., Charles Ken Murray, Leonard Johnson and Robert Jones, with Heinz Hink taking McCauley’s seat in September 1968. McCauley, elected in 1966, was the first woman on the council under the charter. The hired city manager ran the departments: Richard Malcolm in 1964 and 1965, then William V. “Bill” Donaldson, in office by July 1966 and still there in 1970. The managers’ exact terms are not on the public record.
Years later Tims described where the city had started. In a 1972 essay he wrote that “Scottsdale in those years has been transformed from a scandal-ridden nonentity to a nationally recognized progressive city.” He did not say what scandal he meant, and no source found names one. The record does show a 1962 annexation passed at a Saturday meeting the mayor could not attend, which a trial court found “illegally convened,” and two police officers fired in January 1965 for refusing to answer questions in a department investigation; the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the city manager’s power to fire them in Kendall v. Malcolm.
STEP: the city asks its residents
In November 1964 the city invited residents to plan it. Who proposed the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program depends on the source: the city’s 2012 historic context credits City Manager Richard Malcolm; local historian Joan Fudala credits Planning Director George Fretz, Malcolm and Mayors Woudenberg and Clayton; the program’s own 1969 report says “the Mayor and City Council conceived the idea.” About a hundred invited residents met at the kickoff, by Fudala’s account, and the city’s context says some 300 took part. They split into seven committees: public works, public utilities, public safety, parks and beautification, a civic center, libraries and museums, and the airport.
After ten weeks, on January 20, 1965, the committees handed the council a three-year capital program costing $14,605,570. “Most of those improvements, it should be quickly added, were accomplished in the time allotted,” the 1969 report says, and it lists the results: “the revised City Charter, Master Plan, Civic Center complex, airport, parks facilities, youth court, and street lighting improvement districts.” The same report remembers the mood of 1964 bluntly: “Some older residents thought such things as paved streets and street lighting were unnecessary frills. Newcomers felt that they were necessities.”
A second round began at a public meeting on September 30, 1969 and met into April 1970, with more than two hundred residents in six committees, each with a council member attached. It produced the decade’s clearest statements of policy, on height, freeways, the wash and redevelopment, and its recommendations shaped the council’s agenda for years. The STEP page follows the program to the 1980s.
Rewriting the charter
The 1969 report credits STEP with “the revised City Charter,” and the revision came on November 7, 1967. At a special election voters approved all six amendments the council had put on the ballot. They lengthened the mayor’s and council’s terms from two years to four and staggered the seats; gave the city express power to designate floodways and to adopt a comprehensive plan with zoning and subdivision rules; let the mayor govern by proclamation during a riot; dropped the rule that city employees live in the city; required ordinances to be posted 24 hours before a vote; and changed how a primary majority was counted. Tims certified the results on November 27, and Governor Jack Williams approved them in January 1968. The returns are not online.
The look of the place
The charter council inherited a town that had dressed itself Western and meant to keep its look. In September 1962 it adopted a comprehensive zoning ordinance, and from September 13 of that year, the city later wrote, “the erection of new billboards in Scottsdale has been prohibited.” The rule barred new billboards only. Existing ones stayed, and no record of any objection to the 1962 rule survives; the sign fight over removing the old ones belongs to the 1970s. On December 7, 1965 the council replaced the 1953 Architectural Board with a Design Review Board, whose guidelines asked that a building be “in harmony with, and compatible to, those structures in the neighboring environment.” Herb Drinkwater, mayor from 1980 to 1996, joined it in 1968.
Height was the next argument. A 1964 amendment, Ordinance 209, allowed high-rise zoning to 120 feet, the city’s context says, and by the same account the 11-story Arizona Bank building on Camelback Road went up under it. The 1969 STEP committee wanted the high-rise district “stricken from the ordinance” and a 60-foot limit for big shopping-center parcels. In November 1970 the council voted 6 to 1 for a 60-foot maximum; Tims, who wanted 120, was the vote against.
Freeways were the argument the city won without a vote. Regional plans of the early 1960s ran freeways along the wash and down Lincoln and McDowell roads, the context says, and the city’s first general plan, adopted in July 1967, “eliminated freeways and expressways from local circulation plans.” The 1969 STEP transportation committee, chaired by Councilman Jenkins, warned of “Massive 8-lane elevated, depressed, or surface freeways … dissecting the City of Scottsdale.”
The rezoning fight that did reach the courts was smaller. On July 3, 1967 the council rezoned 7.5 acres at the southwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive from homes to neighborhood commercial and then tried to send its own ordinance to the voters. On August 1 residents filed an initiative petition against that rezoning and a shopping-center rezoning nearby. The landowners sued, and on March 28, 1968 the Arizona Supreme Court stopped both elections, holding that “zoning law is exempted from the initiative process.”
Concrete or grass
The decade’s longest argument was about Indian Bend Wash, the dry riverbed that flooded across the middle of the city. The Corps of Engineers’ answer, sent to Congress in 1964, was a concrete-lined channel about 170 feet wide, and Congress authorized it in the Flood Control Act of October 1965 at an estimated $7.25 million. The council endorsed a channel in 1962, the city’s context says. In February 1964 a landscape architect, Bill Walton, wrote in the Progress that “planning and foresight could make the Indian Bend Wash flood control project more than just a concrete channel which would divide the city,” and proposed buying the wash for a park. The citizen planners took up the idea, a county bond for the channel failed in 1966, the city hired an engineer whose “Erickson Plan” combined an upstream reservoir with a grass-lined channel, and the 1969 STEP committee asked the council to adopt it. The greenbelt fight page follows it to the 1973 bond that settled it.
The wash was also home to the families with the least say. After a canal break and flooding in September 1966, the city’s context says, many of the Yaqui families living in and beside the wash lost their homes; the 1969 STEP committee described their neighborhood, Vista del Camino, as “deteriorated” by “flood hazards, low-income families, and poor construction techniques” and urged federal redevelopment money. The Yaqui families moved into new houses nearby in the early 1970s.
The Civic Center and the barrio
STEP’s Civic Center committee wanted a new city hall and library. Voters turned down the first bond in 1965 and approved $2.4 million on September 28, 1966, two to one, the city’s context says. Bennie Gonzales’s master plan and model were shown to voters in both campaigns. The city then bought and cleared the houses on the site, blocks of the old barrio east of Brown Avenue that officials considered blighted, and City Hall and the Civic Center Library opened in 1968.
In 1969 the STEP community development committee, chaired by Councilman Robert Jones, recommended going further with federal Neighborhood Development money for the blocks west of the new center, where private redevelopment had “failed in the past, due to such factors as multiple ownership, parcel size, zoning and high land cost.” It called the program “an immediate, effective, and lasting solution.” The city got the money, and in the 1970s it cleared 18.5 more acres. The record holds no statement from the families on those blocks. The Barrio Under the Civic Center tells what is known about them.
The airport and the college
The Chamber had wanted an airport since the 1950s, STEP’s airport committee called for a 5,000-foot runway, and the old Thunderbird II field, annexed in 1962–63, was the obvious place. Neighbors in Desert Estates objected to the noise and traffic, Fudala writes. The city took title to the 201-acre field on July 12, 1966; City Manager Donaldson told the Progress that the $750,000 price had been given to the city by Landel Inc., the developer of the industrial park around it, while the city’s 2012 context says federal funds paid for it. The airport opened on June 16, 1967.
The college began with Mayor Tims’s meetings with business people in spring 1966. A STEP college committee chaired by Paul Messinger lobbied the county junior college board for about two years, by Messinger’s account; in 1968 the district offered sites including a 160-acre lease from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and county voters approved a bond. Scottsdale Community College opened on the leased land in 1970. The Community’s own decision to lease is not on the public record.
Who was missing
The city’s 1960s record is almost silent on race. The resorts’ color line had loosened: in July 1961 the Arizona Tribune, Phoenix’s Black weekly, reported a Jack and Jill of America jamboree at the Racquet Club and a dinner dance at the Safari, two years after the Safari had turned away the Red Sox’s Pumpsie Green, and concluded that “public accommodations legislation is not the most pressing problems for Negroes in Arizona.” An Anti-Defamation League survey reported in January 1964 that the share of Arizona hotels barring Jews had fallen from 45 percent in 1957 to 22 percent. No organized civil-rights, antiwar or women’s group in 1960s Scottsdale appears in any source found, and no Black or Mexican American officeholder is identifiable. The 1969 STEP police committee’s suggestion that “minority group members” could be trained as police assistants is the first mention of minority hiring in the city’s own documents.
The arguments STEP started, over the wash, height, signs and redevelopment, ran on through the 1970s.