At a glance: In the 1990s Scottsdale settled its arguments at the ballot box. Voters taxed themselves to buy the McDowell Mountains in 1995, over organized opposition, and kept voting for the Preserve through the decade. North Scottsdale residents petitioned council rezonings to the ballot and won twice in 1996; the council and the Chamber answered with rules that made petitions harder to carry, and won too. Voters rejected a sales tax for buses and a canal district downtown, and approved a hockey arena that was never built. Across Pima Road the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community fought the governor for a casino compact and won. And Herb Drinkwater handed the mayor’s office not to a successor but to an election: Sam Campana, the city’s first woman mayor, won it in two rounds. The 1980s chapter tells how the city got here.
The council
Herb Drinkwater won his fourth and last term in February 1992, 13,796 to 5,798 over Mark Frick, and did not run in 1996. The council around him turned over steadily. In 1992 Mary Manross, Richard Thomas and James Burke won, and Councilwoman Susan Bitter Smith finished last of six. In 1994, on a March turnout under 6 percent, Donald Prior beat former councilman Ross Dean for the last seat.
The race to succeed Drinkwater took two rounds. Sam Campana, on the council from 1986 to 1994, led Diana Smith, a former Chamber president, 12,036 to 10,352 in February 1996, and won the March runoff 13,598 to 11,333. Phoenix New Times later reported that an “Anyone-But-Sam” faction had recruited Smith and that Campana raised $225,000, “most of it from developers.” Manross topped the council field in both 1992 and 1996. In 1998 Cynthia Lukas won outright, and George Zraket, who had led the neighborhood fight against the Cattle Track rezoning, unseated Prior in the May runoff. In 2000 Campana did not run, and Manross, who had announced against “the incumbent,” won the office in a runoff with Dean.
Day to day the city was run by Richard Bowers, deputy city manager in the 1980s, who is city manager on the city’s budget books from 1991.
The mountains
The decade’s great project began with thirteen people at the Mustang Library on November 17, 1990, who founded what became the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, with Jane Rau and Karen Bertiger signing its incorporation papers in January 1991. In March 1993 the council created a fifteen-member McDowell Mountain Task Force, chaired by car dealer Virginia Korte; in October it recommended that the city take the lead in saving the mountains, find an equitable way to pay and create a commission. The council created the Preserve Commission on January 18, 1994 and dedicated the first city land to the Preserve that October.
The money came from the voters. On May 23, 1995 they approved a 0.2 percent sales tax for thirty years, 12,873 to 7,204. It was not unopposed. Citizens Against Constant Tax Increases, chaired by Ross Dean, warned it “could raise over $1 billion,” and former council members Susan Bitter Smith and Myron Deibel called it “a blank check with no safeguards, except to say, ‘Trust Us.’” The Chamber, led by Diana Smith, answered: “No one likes taxes. But what shall our legacy be?” Drinkwater and Councilman Greg Bielli recused themselves from the council vote calling the election because they owned land in the study area, Joan Fudala writes.
Voters kept saying yes: revenue bonds in September 1996, 14,675 to 5,258; charter protection for Preserve land in November 1998, 39,429 to 9,340, with a larger boundary for the tax; and up to $200 million in general-obligation bonds in September 1999, 25,573 to 7,499. At the state level, Governor Symington signed the Arizona Preserve Initiative in 1996, and voters adopted the Growing Smarter act in 1998, both meant to let state trust land be set aside for conservation. The Preserve guide carries the story on.
Who decides zoning
The decade’s sharpest civic fight was over the referendum itself. In 1991 the Arizona Supreme Court threw out petitions against a rezoning at Pima Road and Shea Boulevard for failing the constitution’s requirements, observing that “the power of referendum is extraordinary. It allows a minority of voters to delay laws that may well represent the wishes of the majority.” In 1992 a referendum on widening 64th Street reached the ballot, and the council won by 818 votes.
Then on February 20, 1996 the petitioners won. North Scottsdale residents had referred a council rezoning at Pima and Black Mountain roads, warning of “almost FOUR TIMES THE PRESENT DENSITY”; the Chamber and The Scottsdale Partnership answered that if voters would decide anyway, “we have effectively assigned [our elected officials] to a clerical role.” Voters overturned the council, 14,881 to 9,695, and did it again in September at Cactus Road and 132nd Street.
The same February ballot carried a charter amendment renaming the city’s elections, which its business sponsors said would have “the practical effect of increasing the number of valid signatures required on a Referendum or Recall petition.” No one argued against it, and it passed. In 1997 the Supreme Court threw out a referendum against a rezoning for a Coyotes ice rink because paid out-of-state circulators had gathered many of its signatures, “political vagabonds,” Justice Frederick Martone called them. The council then required circulators to be Scottsdale residents, the activists referred that too, and on March 10, 1998 voters kept it, 10,778 to 6,943. In May 1997 voters had upheld the council on the Cattle Track arts compound, where former mayor Drinkwater argued for the owners: “They are not ‘developers’. They are Scottsdale pioneers.”
Downtown, the Canals and Los Arcos
Downtown’s problem was the Scottsdale Galleria, which opened on the Arizona Canal in 1991 and emptied almost at once. In 1996 the city declared downtown a redevelopment area and leased a new garage for Nordstrom at Fashion Square for 50 years, $31.4 million in rent over 30 years by the city’s own record. A team including developer Fred Unger proposed the Canals of Scottsdale for the Galleria and the canal bank, and on September 7, 1999 Mayor Campana asked voters to let the district’s sales taxes pay its public costs: “There would not be a tax increase of any kind.” The Save Old Scottsdale Committee answered with the Preserve campaign’s own words, “You voted to SAVE THE McDOWELL MOUNTAINS. Now we are asking you to SAVE OLD SCOTTSDALE,” and won, 17,823 to 15,411. The Canals of Scottsdale page tells it.
In south Scottsdale the result went the other way. The council created a district in December 1998 to rebuild the dead Los Arcos mall around a Phoenix Coyotes arena. The NO PUCKS committee forced a referendum, calling it “a private sports palace,” and lost it in May 1999, 23,166 to 13,548; voters approved the district’s share of state sales tax that November. The team went to Glendale in 2001. The Los Arcos arena page has the details.
Buses and the spending limit
Not every tax passed. On September 9, 1997 the council asked for up to a half-cent sales tax for “Transit Plus,” which Campana said would buy nearly 200 clean-fuel buses, and she argued that “there are few other complaints I hear more than Scottsdale’s worsening traffic and deteriorating air quality.” Ross Dean answered that “97% of Scottsdale bus seats run EMPTY.” It lost 14,018 to 8,070, in every district. In November 1998 a permanent adjustment to the state spending limit passed 31,202 to 17,061 over the Coalition of Pinnacle Peak’s objection that it was “like an individual who has reached the spending limits of a credit card,” and voters wrote a two-thirds council vote for General Plan changes into the charter.
Across Pima Road
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community spent the decade turning its western edge, facing Scottsdale, into an economy. In 1990, after years of negotiation, the state bought the right of way for the Pima Freeway across Community land, one history puts the price at $247 million, and Campana won a 1 percent for art amendment that made the state decorate the Scottsdale stretch. In 1995 the Community asked for the gaming compact sixteen other tribes had; Governor Symington refused and said he would accept a casino only along State Route 87, “not on Salt River tribal land near Scottsdale.” The Community won a statewide vote in 1996 and an Arizona Supreme Court order in 1997, and signed its compact on August 18, 1998. No Scottsdale council position on the casino has been found. The gaming compact page tells the story.
Courts and the rest
The city’s ordinances kept going to court. In 1991 the Arizona Supreme Court struck down its striptease rules as vague; the city wrote a licensing ordinance for sexually oriented businesses in 1993 and a stricter one in 1995, and the Court of Appeals upheld it in 1999. In 1997 the Supreme Court upheld the water resources development fee the city had charged new homes since the 1980s, writing that Scottsdale “clearly lacks sufficient water for the future.”
The social history of the decade is thin in the record. One newspaper reported police discrimination verdicts and the police chief’s departure in 1998; no second source was found, so they are left as a gap. Scottsdale won one of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 1993 City Livability Awards. No organized gay-rights or civil-rights campaign in the city appears in any source found. The 2000s brought the arguments the 1990s left open: the Waterfront, SkySong and the 2004 Preserve tax.