What it means
The General Plan is the document Scottsdale points to when it argues with itself about growth. It sets out, in 24 chapters called elements, what the city wants: where housing, offices and resorts belong, how much desert stays desert, how tall Old Town should feel, how people get around, where the water comes from. It is policy, not law. The zoning ordinance is what a builder actually has to obey.
But the plan is where zoning fights begin. You will hear a neighbor at the podium say a project “violates the General Plan,” a developer’s attorney reply that it “implements the General Plan,” and a council member ask whether the case needs a “major amendment.” All three are talking about the same book, and each is reading a different page.
The machinery around it, from the Planning Commission to the Development Review Board, is laid out in the site’s General Plan and zoning guide. This page explains the term.
Where you’ll meet it
In staff reports on every rezoning, in council candidates’ platforms, on the November 2021 ballot as Proposition 463, and every year when the city’s planners file the annual progress report state law requires.
Where the word came from
“General plan” is the term Arizona statutes use for what other states call a comprehensive plan or master plan. Scottsdale adopted its first one in 1967, during the decade when the new charter city banned billboards, wrote its design-review rules and annexed land in every direction; the annexation guide tells that part.
For decades a general plan was something a city council adopted and amended on its own. That changed with Arizona’s Growing Smarter legislation of 1998, amended as Growing Smarter Plus in 2000. Under the statute that resulted, every city of 10,000 or more people must submit each new general plan to its voters for ratification. If the vote fails, the old plan stays in force until voters approve a new one. The same law caps a plan’s life at ten years and requires a two-thirds council vote for any major amendment.
So the phrase acquired a capital G in local politics. Scottsdale voters ratified General Plan 2001 in a March 2002 election, the first plan passed under the new rules. The council adopted its successor, General Plan 2035, on June 8, 2021, and voters approved it as Proposition 463 that November 2, by 53.6 to 46.4 percent. The campaign was really about height and density in Old Town, the same argument that runs through the city’s ballot measures.
What it is not
It is not the zoning map, and passing it does not rezone anything. It is not a master plan in the developer’s sense of a master-planned community like McCormick Ranch, though those communities have their own plans. And it is not permanent: a plan that is not readopted or replaced within ten years expires on paper, which is why one is always either new or due.
The fine print
General Plan 2035 has 24 elements. Most are the ones state law requires of a city Scottsdale’s size, covering land use, circulation, open space, growth areas, water resources, cost of development and the rest. Seven were created locally: Character and Design; Arts, Culture and Creative Community; Healthy Community; Tourism; Education; Economic Vitality; and Community Involvement. Beneath the plan sit character area plans that apply it to specific places, from the Old Town plan whose 2018 height changes started a decade of fights to the Desert Foothills and Dynamite Foothills plans of the north.
The statute’s rules shape behavior. Because a major amendment needs at least two-thirds of the council, five of seven in Scottsdale, and must be heard in public within twelve months of the request, a single swing vote can sink a project that a simple rezoning majority would have approved. Because a plan lasts at most ten years, the clock on General Plan 2035 runs out by 2031. And because a rejected plan leaves the old one in place, a “no” campaign can only freeze the city’s policy, not erase it.
The plan’s limits are just as real. The state’s 2006 Proposition 207 makes cities pay or waive when new rules cut existing property values, and the preemption fights at the legislature keep narrowing what any local plan can decide. The taking part guide explains how to comment when the next one is drafted.