At a glance: Herb Drinkwater was mayor for the whole decade and never had a close race. Around him the city doubled its map, taking the northern desert toward Carefree and the McDowells so that the county would not decide what got built there. It made every new house carry fire sprinklers. It built the Phoenix Open a stadium course on federal flood-control land it paid nothing to use, and recruited a resort to go next door. Voters gave the council term limits, kept a rule that officeholders own property, raised the tax on hotel rooms and, in 1986, threw out all three council incumbents on the ballot. The 1970s chapter tells how the city got here.
The council
Drinkwater, a councilman in the 1970s who owned a liquor store and, the Associated Press later reported, a home-building business, was elected mayor in February 1980. The city’s canvasses show how safe he was: in 1984 he beat Bob Field 9,200 to 2,466, and in 1988 he was the only name on the ballot, with 11,445 votes to 1,666 for a write-in. His council was another matter. In March 1986 voters turned out all three incumbents who were running, Billie Gentry, on the council since 1970, Diane Cusack and Jean Black, by margins of nearly two to one. The winners, Sam Campana, Bill Soderquist and Myron Deibel, finished within 700 votes of one another; an obituary of Gentry later called them “a slate of challengers,” though what they ran on is not on record. The council went from three women to one. In 1988 Susan Bitter Smith and Ross Dean took the seats of Jim Bruner, who did not run again, and Rene Wendell, who lost.
The city was run day to day by Roy Pederson, whom the city’s 1982 and 1985 reports call city manager and who signed every canvass from 1982 to April 1988 as city clerk; the charter let the council give one person both jobs. Richard Bowers was his deputy by 1985 and city manager by 1992. Who ran the city in between is not on the public record.
Seven in the morning
The decade opened with a race against a deadline. Arizona law allowed “strip annexation” until July 1, 1980, and in late June city officials decided to annex a strip 10 to 25 feet wide around some 86 square miles north and west of the city, which would have put Scottsdale within six miles of Carefree and Cave Creek and forced them to offer annexation to Scottsdale before incorporating. The court later found their motive: fear that Phoenix would do it first, and the belief that “Scottsdale had more rigorous zoning and development standards than Phoenix.” Drinkwater would not call an early meeting, so four members did: Bruner, Jeff Schubert, Charlie Smith and Cusack. Drinkwater, Gentry and Heinz Hink opposed it. The council passed the ordinance at 7 a.m. on Monday, June 30, 1980, “the first council meeting in the memory of any witness to take place at 7:00 a.m.,” and adjourned at 7:15.
Carefree-area residents, the owners of Rawhide and the developer of the Boulders sued. In January 1982 the Court of Appeals voided the annexation because the notice had violated the open meeting law, and added: “We cannot, therefore, share any particular sympathy for Scottsdale’s objectives in attempting to rush through a strip annexation ordinance.”
Doubling the map
The city took the north anyway, the ordinary way. Between 1981 and 1984, by the Historical Society’s dates (the city’s 2001 General Plan says 1982 to 1984), Scottsdale annexed most of the desert between its old limits and Carefree. Its own chart shows 88.64 square miles in 1980 and 182.15 in 1985; the General Plan says about 105 square miles of county land were annexed, most of it zoned for low-density housing. Bruner, in his essay for the city’s 2026 history, gave the reason he remembered: “Annexing the land north of Bell Road to Carefree, to preclude trailer parks being developed in what was then under county jurisdiction.”
The neighbors moved to keep their distance. Carefree incorporated in 1984. Fountain Hills, to the east, needed Scottsdale’s consent; the council gave it in May 1983, but the incorporation vote failed that October, and on May 6, 1985 the council refused to consent again, 4 to 3. The Court of Appeals sided with the city in 1986, and Fountain Hills incorporated in 1989. The annexed desert, much of it state trust land, became the subject of every northern argument since, from Desert Highlands to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. The annexation guide explains the law.
Sprinklers in every house
Scottsdale still bought its fire protection from Lou Witzeman’s Rural/Metro, and the company had a reason to want houses that would not burn. During the week of April 19, 1982 it set nine test fires in two model homes, and its chief, Bob Edwards, brought an ordinance to the council. On June 4, 1985, after four and a half hours of testimony “on both sides of the issue,” the council adopted Ordinance 1709: sprinklers in new commercial and apartment buildings from July 5, 1985 and in every new single-family home from January 1, 1986. The department called it the first comprehensive, community-wide sprinkler ordinance; San Clemente, California had required sprinklers in new homes since 1978.
Representatives of the National Association of Home Builders told the council, the department’s 1997 study says, that homes would cost so much that buyers “would not be able to qualify for a home loan” and that building “would stop.” Bruner remembered homeowners and insurance agents going “ballistic,” and the line from the other side: “we require sprinklers to cover filing cabinets in offices, but we don’t require sprinklers to cover people sleeping in their beds.” The city bought the builders off with design freedoms: 28-foot streets instead of 32, longer cul-de-sacs, hydrants farther apart and smaller water mains. The department’s study says the vote was 6 to 1; Bruner said it was unanimous. The minutes would settle it.
Federal land, a golf course and a resort
The decade’s biggest deal was built on someone else’s land. North of the Central Arizona Project canal, the Bureau of Reclamation had bought a strip of desert to catch runoff. In 1982 it let the city use 132 acres for Horseman’s Park, built to replace a city horse park the airport runway had displaced; it opened in 1983 and became WestWorld. When Phoenix turned down the PGA Tour’s stadium course, Drinkwater, by the Tour negotiator’s account, said, “If Phoenix doesn’t want you, Scottsdale does.” In December 1984 the city leased the Tour a golf complex on Bureau land it received the next June, for 10 percent of the golf revenue; it paid for the courses with bonds, and the Phoenix Open moved to the new Stadium Course in January 1987. The city also ran a national search for a resort to go next door and chose Princess Hotels; the Princess opened late in 1987.
Washington got no rent, and in 1991 a congressman from Oklahoma held a hearing about it. The TPC land deal page tells the whole story. Councilman Bruner remembered that “there were a lot of people, who didn’t think the city would be in the golf course business.”
Charter fights, 1982 and 1988
Voters changed the charter twice. In February 1982 they approved four of six amendments, among them a power for the council to send measures to the voters “on its own motion,” and turned down more freedom for the manager to buy and move money. In 1986 the council created a Charter Review Advisory Commission, and on February 16, 1988 its fifteen proposals went on the ballot. Twelve passed. The most lasting was a limit of three consecutive terms for the mayor and the council, which passed 10,043 to 5,640 but counted only from 1990 for the council and 1992 for the mayor. The two men who signed the pamphlet’s arguments against had wanted two terms: “If two terms are maximum to be President of the USA, that should be the limit for city government.”
Voters also overruled their own commission. It had asked them to drop the rule that council members own real property, which it said “excludes Scottsdale residents who rent or lease their home” and conflicted with the U.S. Constitution; they kept it, 10,380 to 5,308. And over the commission’s objection that it “violates the basic philosophy of the ‘Council/Manager’ form of government,” they created an internal auditor who reports to the council, 8,959 to 6,485.
Who picks the public art
In April 1987 the council abolished its twenty-year-old Fine Arts Commission and hired a nonprofit, the Scottsdale Cultural Council, to manage the city’s arts, keeping a five-member city Curatorial Board over the permanent collection. Within a year the two disagreed over who should choose public art. On October 17, 1988, according to the city’s board records, the Cultural Council asked to make those decisions itself, while the board asked that “any decision should be the subject of a public hearing, after which it would be brought to City Council for a final decision.” Vice Mayor Campana and Mayor Drinkwater sided with the nonprofit, and the council voted 4 to 3 to let it decide and to dissolve the board, with Dean, Deibel and Bitter Smith opposed. The board ended in January 1989. The records are the only source, and no one’s words survive except as the minutes summarized them. Scottsdale Arts is the nonprofit today.
Making visitors pay
The resort boom changed what the city could ask of visitors. On November 8, 1988, on the presidential-election ballot, voters raised the tax on hotel stays from 2 to 3 percent, with two-thirds of the revenue for “hospitality development,” 30,337 to 13,786. A week earlier the council had created a Hospitality Commission to advise on spending it. No campaign for or against the measure appears in the record.
The next year the city went back to the voters for nearly everything else. On November 7, 1989 they approved about $287 million in bonds for roads, police and fire buildings, flood control, parks, libraries and water plants, and a 0.2 percent sales tax for transportation, 11,114 to 8,659. The one bond question that failed was Pima Road, 9,667 to 9,990. One question was $8.4 million to rebuild Scottsdale Stadium, the spring-training ballpark. Former councilman Charlie Smith later recalled that the council put it on the ballot by a vote of 4 to 3 because some feared it “could sink the bond altogether”; it passed with 72 percent.
The state, and the neighbors
The decade’s state politics reached Scottsdale mostly through its senator. Robert Usdane, District 28’s senator since 1977 by the Legislature’s rosters, became president of the Arizona Senate in 1989, the year after the Senate removed Governor Evan Mecham. Mecham’s 1987 rescission of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday cost the Valley conventions, Phoenix’s convention bureau said; no Scottsdale council action on it was found, though a 1991 report lists Scottsdale among about 21 Arizona cities that by then gave employees a paid King holiday. Governor Rose Mofford, a month in office, approved the city’s 1988 charter amendments on May 3. In October 1988 Congress ratified a water settlement with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, with Scottsdale one of seven Valley cities party to it.
The decade’s other famous builder was not a politician. Charles Keating’s American Continental Corporation opened the Phoenician below Camelback in 1988, and within a year his Lincoln Savings had failed and regulators had seized the resort. No council statement on it was found.
What the record leaves out
The social history of the decade is thin in the record. Women’s politics shows up as office: three women on the council until 1986, one after it, and in 1988 Bitter Smith. A gay bar, BS West, opened in Old Town in 1988 and lasted about 35 years (LGBTQ Scottsdale tells its story), but no AIDS-era city action or organizing appears in any source found. Nothing was found on poverty or housing politics in the south of the city, on the school district’s bond elections, or on organized Jewish, retiree or Hispanic voters as blocs. The 1990s brought the arguments the annexations had set up: the Pima Freeway through the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the campaign to buy the McDowells.