The decisions that made Scottsdale
None of this had to happen. A city of a quarter-million people with a mountain range for a back yard, a runway for a job center and a golf tournament for a national holiday is the sum of a dozen choices, most of them made by a few hundred voters or seven council members, each of which could have gone the other way. Here they are in order, with what was on the table instead and what each one made permanent.
The same questions the organization profiles ask of a booster club or a hospital, asked of the city itself. Every row links to the chapter or landmark day where the full story is told.
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The Valley’s farmers, Scottsdale’s among them, mortgage their own land to guarantee Roosevelt Dam.
- Instead, it could have
- Wait for private capital that had already failed twice, or stay a dry-farming settlement at the mercy of the Salt River.
- What it locked in
- A water users’ association that became the Salt River Project, which still delivers the water and sets the rules the canal-side town grew up inside.
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Incorporate one square mile around the townsite, with a cafe owner and booster as the first mayor.
- Instead, it could have
- Stay an unincorporated crossroads run by the county and the Chamber, and wait for Phoenix to annex it.
- What it locked in
- A town with its own zoning that wrote the Chamber’s brand into ordinance: hitching posts, board sidewalks and “The West’s Most Western Town” on the seal.
Held in place by Law & contracts Malcolm WhiteScottsdale Area Chamber of CommerceThe City Charter & Council-Manager Government -
Adopt a home-rule charter: council-manager government, every seat elected citywide, no party labels.
- Instead, it could have
- Remain a general-law town doing only what state statute spelled out, or elect the council by district.
- What it locked in
- A professional manager runs the city and politics run on citywide arguments about growth, height and the Preserve rather than on wards.
Held in place by Law & contracts The City Charter & Council-Manager GovernmentThe Mayor & City Council - 04 1962
Ban billboards and adopt design review for new buildings.
- Instead, it could have
- Grow the way the rest of the Valley was growing: signs, strips and whatever the developer wanted.
- What it locked in
- The low, tidy look the city still sells, and a design-review culture that every later fight over height and apartments runs through.
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Call a truce with Phoenix and fix the boundary at Scottsdale Road from Cactus to Jomax.
- Instead, it could have
- Keep racing Phoenix for every section of desert, ordinance against ordinance, and litigate the overlaps.
- What it locked in
- The city’s long north-south shape, and a line that sixty years later still decides which city a north-Valley address belongs to.
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Buy the old Thunderbird Field from the church school that owned it and open a municipal airport.
- Instead, it could have
- Let the runway be subdivided into ranch lots like the desert around it.
- What it locked in
- The Airpark: an industrial district around a city-owned runway that became the largest employment center in Scottsdale.
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Build a civic center around a library, a theater and a mall instead of a conventional city hall.
- Instead, it could have
- An office block for the staff and a council chamber, which is what a town of 60,000 usually builds.
- What it locked in
- An arts campus the city has kept feeding for fifty years: the Center for the Arts in 1975, the arts council in 1987, the museum in 1999.
- 08 1969
Put the community college on 160 leased acres of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
- Instead, it could have
- A site inside the city, which the district had looked at and not secured.
- What it locked in
- A 99-year lease that runs to 2069, a college on Community land, and a partnership written into the campus rather than chosen later.
Held in place by Law & contracts Scottsdale Community CollegeSalt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community -
After two floods, turn Indian Bend Wash into a chain of parks and lakes instead of a concrete channel.
- Instead, it could have
- The Army Corps of Engineers’ plan: a concrete flood channel through the middle of the city.
- What it locked in
- The Greenbelt, eleven miles of parks that split the city into east and west and became the model other cities copied.
Held in place by Money Indian Bend Wash GreenbeltThe 11-Mile Greenbelt Cruise: Best Morning Cut-Throughs -
Finish four years of annexations and take the city north to the Tonto National Forest.
- Instead, it could have
- Stop at Shea or Bell and let the county, or Phoenix, decide what got built in the McDowells.
- What it locked in
- A city of 181 square miles, most of it empty desert, which made the Preserve possible and north Scottsdale inevitable.
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Lease federal land at the CAP canal to the PGA Tour for a stadium golf course.
- Instead, it could have
- Leave the Phoenix Open at a Phoenix country club and the desert north of Bell Road as it was.
- What it locked in
- The Thunderbirds’ tournament, the Princess next door, and the resort corridor that pays a large share of the city’s sales tax.
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Ask voters to tax themselves to buy the McDowell Mountains, then ask again in 2004 to buy the rest.
- Instead, it could have
- Let the market take the mountains one subdivision at a time, as it had taken the foothills.
- What it locked in
- Thirty thousand acres of Preserve, a conservancy to steward it, and in 2018 a charter amendment that locks it unless the voters say otherwise.
Held in place by The people who depend on it McDowell Sonoran ConservancyMcDowell Sonoran PreserveThe Preserve & the Voters
What didn’t make the list
Plenty of big moments were not forks: Motorola came because Daniel Noble liked the climate, the Valley Ho opened because a hotelier had money in 1956, and the Mayo Clinic chose Scottsdale after its own study. They changed the city, but the city did not choose them in a way that foreclosed something else. The test for this page is the framework’s: a decision counts when reversing it within five years would have been ruinous, when it killed an alternative that was live at the time, and when a feature of today’s city traces back to it through a documented chain. The chapters tell everything else.