What it means
A bond election is Scottsdale asking its voters for permission to borrow. The city wants to build something big, a fire station, a park, a new pool, a library expansion, and rather than pay cash out of one year’s budget it sells general obligation bonds, long-term debt that investors buy and the city repays over years. Arizona law will not let a city do that without a vote, so the council puts a list of projects on the ballot as a set of numbered questions.
“The bond” is how residents shorthand the result. “That park was a bond project.” “The new fire station came out of the bond.” In the 2020s it almost always means the 2019 bond, the $319 million program voters approved on November 5, 2019, which paid for projects from new pools at Cactus Park to Ashler Hills Park in the far north.
The voters and ballot measures guide puts bond elections alongside the city’s other votes, and the budget guide shows where the debt fits in the city’s finances.
Where you’ll meet it
On the ballot every few years, in the city’s election pamphlet, on signs at finished projects, in the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee’s reports, and on your property tax bill, as the city’s secondary levy.
Where the word came from
The vocabulary is municipal finance, and the vote is Arizona law. As the city’s 2019 pamphlet put it, bonds are “similar to your home mortgage”: the city gets the money now and repays it over time, and “for general obligation bonds like these, the city levies property taxes to repay them.” Specifically, they are repaid through the city’s secondary property tax, the part of the bill outside the state’s cap on everyday levies. The county property tax guide explains the primary and secondary split.
Bond elections are numbered by question, and in Scottsdale the numbers stick. The 2019 ballot asked three. Question 1, $112.6 million, covered 14 parks, recreation and senior services projects. Question 2, $112.3 million, covered 20 community spaces and infrastructure projects. Question 3, $94.1 million, covered 24 public safety and technology projects, from fire department equipment to city server rooms. The council voted unanimously to put the $319 million on the ballot, and the special election was held entirely by mail.
All three passed: 69 to 31, 68 to 32 and 73 to 27 percent, with 47,798 ballots cast, a turnout of about 27.5 percent. A local magazine called it the city’s first major bond program in 19 years. The last attempt had gone badly: in 2015 a package of six questions, about $95.5 million, was mostly rejected.
What it is not
A city bond is not a school bond or an override, though they share ballots. School districts such as Scottsdale Unified run their own bond and override elections, and on most Scottsdale property tax bills the school district’s lines are far larger than the city’s. Nor is a bond a tax increase in itself: the 2019 plan was designed to keep the city’s secondary rate at or below its existing level.
The fine print
The 2019 pamphlet spelled out the cost. It estimated an average annual secondary tax rate of $0.2877 per $100 of limited assessed value for the full authorization, about $107.89 a year on the county assessor’s estimated 2020 median Scottsdale home of $375,000. It also said the council had sized the program at $319 million after confirming the bonds could be issued in stages “as existing bonds are paid off in order to keep the city’s secondary property taxes at or below current levels.” Voters, in other words, were asked to replace old debt with new rather than add to the bill.
The rules on spending are strict. Arizona law limits bond proceeds to the projects described in the ballot questions; if a project comes in under budget, the leftover can go only to other projects in the same question. Each project still needs council approval, usually through the annual capital budget, and the council must vote to issue each round of debt.
Approval is not a guarantee. The pamphlet warned that if costs rose, a project might be postponed or need money from elsewhere, and the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee, made up of residents, exists to track exactly that. Its reports are the best place to check what the 2019 bond actually delivered.