At a glance: Scottsdale spent the 1960s asking its residents what kind of city it should be. It spent the 1970s writing the answers into law. A 60-foot height limit came first, in 1970. Voters gave the city charter power in 1973 to make developers pay for parks, schools and flood control, to review the design of every building but a house, and to tear down nonconforming signs. The greenbelt was paid for with a bond, a federal contract and a bargain with developers: more homes in exchange for digging the channel. A 1976 plan drew a line north of the canal, and a 1977 ordinance tried to keep building off the McDowell Mountains. Then the city found out in court where its powers ended: it lost the sign case in 1978 and the mountain case in 1985. The 1960s chapter tells how the city got here.
The council
The decade’s council was the steadiest the city had had. Billie Gentry and Herb Drinkwater were elected in 1970; Gentry stayed sixteen years. Richard Campana took Robert Jones’s seat that July, and in November 1971 Paul Messinger, the funeral director who had led the campaign for a college, took the seat of Ken Murray, who resigned after the state attorney general found a conflict between the council and his job with the Department of Corrections. Heinz Hink, appointed in 1968, served throughout.
Mayor Bud Tims resigned on July 11, 1974 and that November won a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission. The council made Vice Mayor Bill Jenkins, a Scottsdale High School government teacher, mayor a week later and appointed Planning Commissioner Charlie Smith to his seat; voters kept Jenkins in 1976. Drinkwater stepped away in 1978, when Diane Cusack, a former planning commissioner, was elected, and came back as mayor in 1980. The city’s own reports name the managers who ran the departments: Dale Carter, in office from at least 1972 to mid-1974, and Frank Aleshire by 1975.
Sixty feet
A 1964 zoning amendment had allowed high-rise buildings to 120 feet, and a few went up along Camelback Road. In 1969 a citizen STEP committee asked the council to strike the high-rise district and allow 60 feet only on large regional shopping centers. In November 1970, the city’s historic context says, the council set a 60-foot maximum by a vote of 6 to 1. Tims, who wanted 120 feet, was the one vote against. The record holds no exact date and no second account of the vote, but sixty feet became the city’s benchmark for height.
Growth without a cap
The decade’s central question was whether a city adding thousands of people a year could control what it became. In 1971 and 1972 the council held seminars with the Brookings Institution, published as Alternate Futures for the City of Scottsdale. Tims’s essay in it described the pressure: “As long as I’ve lived here people, ‘old-timers’ living here two or five or ten years, have said they didn’t want Scottsdale changed,” and “there is a strong tendency among some citizens to set artificial limits.” He did not share it: “it is doubtful as a practical matter if our community will stop growing,” and the city “must responsibly prepare for its consequences.” The conferees recommended “an over-all density of not more than three dwelling units per undeveloped acre.”
Scottsdale’s answer was rules, not a cap. In July 1971, the city’s context says, the council created a Planned Community District for master-planned developments of 160 acres or more, and McCormick Ranch’s first phase, approved that September, was the first to use it. The decisive step came on April 10, 1973, when voters approved seven charter amendments. Four were about growth: the power to make developers provide or pay for utilities, parks, school sites, bike paths, drainage and flood control, which passed 7,339 to 1,028; architectural and site-plan review of every building except a house, 7,510 to 833; specific plans to refine the general plan, 7,437 to 892; and the removal of nonconforming signs, 7,425 to 795. The home builders challenged the city’s $400-a-unit water fee, arguing it “defines an arbitrary and discriminatory class,” and lost in the Court of Appeals in 1977.
In October 1976 the council adopted a Northeast Area Plan that drew a “future development line” north of the Central Arizona Project canal, beyond which, the city’s context says, development would not occur for ten years. In 1978 it declined to annex Pinnacle Peak for lack of “property owner and political support,” and the county approved projects there instead. Residents who wanted limits appear in the record only as Tims described them; no group of them is named in any source found.
The mountains
On November 15, 1977 the council adopted a Hillside ordinance that drew a no-development line across the McDowell Mountain slopes. The city defended it at trial on safety grounds, “rolling rock,” rock slides from blasting, “washouts and landslides.” Joyce Corrigan, who owned about 5,700 acres of former DC Ranch land, much of it above the line, sued, arguing that the ordinance’s “primary purpose … is to obtain a permanent mountain preserve for the public without cost.” On February 28, 1985 the Court of Appeals agreed and voided the ordinance as an unconstitutional taking. “The ordinance in question is particularly beguiling in that it attempts to achieve a laudable goal, preservation of the McDowell Mountains in their natural state, without apparent cost,” it wrote. In 1986 the Arizona Supreme Court held that she could seek damages for the years the ordinance stood. The city replaced it with the Environmentally Sensitive Lands ordinance in 1991 and, in the end, bought the mountains.
The greenbelt
The Labor Day flood of 1970 broke the Arizona Canal near Pima Road at about 8 p.m. and sent water into a subdivision built in the wash; more than 250 Scottsdale homes were evacuated, the U.S. Geological Survey reported, and 219 homeowners later won damages from the canal’s operator. The June 22, 1972 flood destroyed seventeen homes. In April 1973 voters approved $10 million in bonds for the greenbelt, seven to one by the city’s own account. The city’s context says the Corps of Engineers approved a final design in April 1974 and signed a cost-sharing contract with the city on February 13, 1976.
Part of the bill 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 in 1973. Developers dug and turfed stretches of the channel and deeded them to the city, and built townhouses and apartments along it; a city report of 1985 said large sections were protected “at no cost to the city.” In March 1978 the system had its first real test. “It worked beautifully!” Mayor Jenkins wrote to Congressman John Rhodes; the protected areas were “virtually unscathed.” Councilwoman Gentry is remembered as one of the project’s champions, and a 2019 redevelopment beside the wash carries her name. The greenbelt fight page tells the whole story.
Signs, and the limits of home rule
The 1973 sign amendment led to a STEP forum that September under the heading “We are not discussing whether or not to amortize but how to amortize signs,” and to Ordinance 823 in August 1974, which gave owners of old signs one or two more years to take them down. A merchants’ group sued. On July 13, 1978 the Arizona Supreme Court voided the ordinance: “Zoning regulation is a matter of statewide concern,” and state law allowed removal only by purchase or condemnation. Between the sign case and the Hillside case, the courts drew the same line twice: Scottsdale’s charter gave it power to plan, but not to take property or override state law without paying. The sign fight page has the details.
The state itself was on the agenda. At a STEP forum on January 8, 1974, with Governor Jack Williams as lunch speaker, residents studied state proposals on regional planning, gas-tax sharing, local tax limits, preemption of city revenue and compulsory arbitration for public employees, which the city’s background paper warned could force it “either to raise taxes or cut public services.” It is the first time the city’s records show it arguing with the Legislature over home rule.
The barrio, Vista del Camino and the fire contract
With federal Neighborhood Development money the city cleared about 18.5 acres west of City Hall in the early 1970s, much of the old barrio, and displaced families, mostly Hispanic, moved to rental housing, the city’s context says. The landscaped mall was dedicated in 1974 and the Center for the Arts opened on October 23, 1975. To the south, the Yaqui families flooded out of Indian Bend Wash moved into new houses at Vista del Camino in 1972 or 1973. No statement from either community about its relocation survives in the public record; The Barrio Under the Civic Center and the Yaqui families page tell what is known.
The city still bought its fire protection from Lou Witzeman’s Rural/Metro, and the arrangement drew national attention. Reason magazine reported in 1975 that the contract had been renewed for five years and in 1976 that it cost $6.67 a resident against a national average of $24.39. Reason said the “fire establishment” had twice sent delegations to write exposés, and a 1976 letter from a critic called its account “closer to the realm of fiction than the land of truth.” “We have the greatest incentive in the world to innovate,” Witzeman answered, “sheer survival.” No council fight over it is on record.
The press and the wider politics
The city’s daily was itself a political actor. Its publisher, Jonathan Marshall, campaigned to strengthen Arizona’s open meetings law, amended in 1974, and that year left the paper to run for the U.S. Senate, losing to Barry Goldwater 320,396 to 229,523. Women’s politics in the record is mostly a matter of office: Gentry served through the decade and Cusack joined her in 1978. Arizona never ratified the Equal Rights Amendment; in 1974 the state Senate majority leader, Sandra Day O’Connor of Paradise Valley, wrote constituents that the Legislature “will not ratify” it. No Scottsdale chapter of a women’s, civil-rights, antiwar or gay rights group appears in any source found. In February 1978 the council created a Human Services Commission; the city’s 1970 census table counted 123 Black residents, and by 1980, it says, 3.1 percent of residents were of Spanish origin, against 14.8 percent in Phoenix.
The arguments of the 1970s, over height, density, the northern desert and the mountains, ran straight into the 1980s annexations and the fight to save the McDowells.