The organizations that run Scottsdale

The Thunderbirds

The 55 men behind the Phoenix Open since 1939

Fifty-five Phoenix businessmen, chosen by each other, have run the Phoenix Open since 1939 and moved it to Scottsdale in 1987. Their tournament is the best-attended golf event in the world and has sent more than $226 million to Arizona charities. The club was created to put on a rodeo, and it has never had a woman member.

Founded by Five unnamed young executives chosen by the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, Bob Goldwater (early inductee and tournament chairman)

Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce

The merchants who named the town, then built it

Incorporated March 6, 1947, four years before the town, the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce invented 'The West's Most Western Town', the Sunshine Festival and the petitions that incorporated Scottsdale in 1951. It ran the city's tourism marketing on bed-tax money until 2001, when that job became Experience Scottsdale. A merchants' club wrote the town's identity; the town adopted it.

Founded by Wesley Segner, Malcolm White

Arabian Horse Association of Arizona

The all-volunteer club behind the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show

The Arabian Horse Association of Arizona is the volunteer club, founded at a Phoenix hotel in August 1952 with Ed Tweed as president, that stages the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show every February. The show began at the Arizona Biltmore with a few dozen horses and now draws more than 2,400, the world's largest. It is why the city built WestWorld.

Founded by Edwin J. 'Ed' Tweed, Brusally Ranch (first president), Hal Clay (vice president), Dorothy Clyde Long (secretary-treasurer)

The Scottsdale Jaycees

Built the Parada del Sol and rodeo; dissolved in 2009

The Scottsdale Jaycees, the local Junior Chamber of Commerce chapter organized in 1953, took over the town's Sunshine Festival, renamed it the Parada del Sol, added a rodeo in 1956 and the Hashknife Pony Express by 1959, and ran all of it for 56 years. The chapter disbanded in 2009. The parade and rodeo outlived it, which is the point.

Founded by William 'Bill' Schrader (founding member, first Parada del Sol and rodeo chairman)

Rotary Club of Scottsdale

Scottsdale's oldest Rotary club, chartered February 26, 1954

The Rotary Club of Scottsdale was chartered on February 26, 1954, at the Paradise Inn with about 24 members and Rolly Feltman as president. It has given scholarships ever since, built and donated the eight-acre Rotary Park, and counts 25 Chamber of Commerce presidents among past members. Much of Scottsdale's civic bench sat at its Monday lunch.

Founded by Roland D. 'Rolly' Feltman, Earl Shipp

The Scottsdale Charros

Spring training's hosts since 1961; the parade's since 2021

The Scottsdale Charros are a volunteer club of businessmen, founded in 1961 to host spring training, who have kept a major-league team at Scottsdale Stadium nearly every spring since and turned the revenue into more than $21 million for schools and charities. They have run the Parada del Sol parade since 2021, and have never voted in a woman.

Founded by Pat O'Day, Paul Engebretson, Fred Stresen-Reuter, Carl Plumb, Rob McCampbell, Whitie Chambers, Don Chambers, Dick Houseworth, Dave Hallstrom

Scottsdale League for the Arts

Volunteer league that ran the Scottsdale Culinary Festival; inactive since about 2021

The Scottsdale League for the Arts began in 1978 as the Scottsdale Men's League, raising money for the city's new Center for the Arts with a food event that became the Scottsdale Culinary Festival. It admitted women in 1988, turned grant-maker in 1992, and gave millions to Valley arts groups. In 2020 it handed the festival to Scottsdale Arts. The festival never came back from the pandemic, and the League has been silent since 2021.

Founded by The Scottsdale Men's League (members not named in any source found)

Scottsdale Historical Society

Formed to stop one bulldozer; now the city's memory

The Scottsdale Historical Society began in July 1968 as a petition drive to save the 1909 Little Red Schoolhouse from the Scottsdale Mall, incorporated in December 1969 and became the city's official historical society in April 1970. It waited until 1991 for the keys, because the Chamber of Commerce leased the building meanwhile. Today it runs the free, volunteer-staffed museum.

Scottsdale Arts

The city's contracted arts manager since 1987

Scottsdale Arts is the private nonprofit the city pays about $6 million a year to run the Center for the Performing Arts, SMoCA, Scottsdale Public Art and Canal Convergence. Chartered in June 1987 as the Scottsdale Cultural Council, it means a board the voters never elect curates the theater, the museum and the sculptures on the city's bridges.

Founded by City of Scottsdale (council task force led by Jim Bruner), Scottsdale Arts Center Association, Frank Jacobson, founding president and CEO

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Owner of Taliesin West and keeper of Wright's name

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is the nonprofit Wright and Olgivanna created in 1940 to own his homes, drawings and name. It still owns Taliesin West, Scottsdale's one World Heritage site, funded by tours and a licensing business of more than fifty companies. The school that built the place by hand was pushed off the mesa in 2020.

Founded by Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright

Scottsdale Progress

Weekly, daily, Tribune edition, nothing, then weekly again

The Scottsdale Progress published its first weekly issue on May 6, 1948, went daily in 1961, and under Jonathan Marshall (1963–1987) campaigned for Arizona's open meetings law and the greenbelt. Four chain owners later it was a Tribune edition, and in 2009 it vanished. Times Media Group revived the name on September 16, 2018 as a free Sunday weekly.

Founded by James H. Boyd

Scottsdale Artists' School

Workshops with working artists, in the 1928 Loloma School since 1993

Scottsdale Artists' School is a nonprofit atelier founded in 1983 by a group of Arizona artists and community leaders with money from the Scottsdale Artists League. Since 1993 it has taught drawing, painting and sculpture in the 1928 Loloma School on Marshall Way, a city-owned building it leases. It is better known to painters in other states than to people in Scottsdale.

Founded by A group of central Arizona artists and community leaders (the school's history names no individuals), Scottsdale Artists League (financial backer)

Rural/Metro

Scottsdale's private fire department, and the force behind the 1985 home-sprinkler law

Rural/Metro began in 1948 as one fire engine and a subscription list sold door to door by a newspaper reporter, Lou Witzeman. When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 it hired the company instead of building a fire department, and kept it for 57 years. The company used that city as a laboratory. Its 1985 ordinance made Scottsdale the national test case for requiring sprinklers in every new home, and fifteen years later no one had died in a fire in a sprinklered house. Then Rural/Metro grew into a national corporation, and in 2003 it walked away from the city that had made it famous.

Founded by Lou Witzeman

Motorola in Scottsdale

Defense plant that built south Scottsdale and fouled its water

Motorola's military electronics plant opened on McDowell Road in 1957 and grew to more than 7,500 workers building radar, radios and NASA equipment. Its wages built south Scottsdale's ranch-house grid; its solvents built the Indian Bend Wash Superfund site. The plant never closed: General Dynamics bought it in 2001, and Motorola's last Scottsdale job is pumping the groundwater.

Founded by Daniel E. Noble

Barrett-Jackson

The Scottsdale house that invented the televised no-reserve car auction

Barrett-Jackson turned a 1967 Scottsdale charity car show into the world's largest collector car auction: nine days at WestWorld every January, every car at no reserve, live on television, $198 million in sales in 2025. It is why Arizona has a Car Week. It nearly died in the 1990s, when both founders and the heir were gone within three years.

Founded by Tom Barrett, Russ Jackson

Salt River Project

Runs the Arizona Canal, elects its board by the acre

The Salt River Project is the Valley's water-and-power utility, born when about 4,800 landowners pledged 200,000 acres in 1903 so the federal government would build Roosevelt Dam. It owns the Arizona Canal through Scottsdale, delivers river water south of it, powers much of south and east Scottsdale, and still elects its board one vote per acre.

Founded by Benjamin A. Fowler, Joseph H. Kibbey, About 4,800 Salt River Valley landowners

McDowell Sonoran Conservancy

From a library meeting to 650 blue-shirted stewards

The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy began as the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust in January 1991, talked Scottsdale into a preserve in 1994 and a tax to buy it in 1995, then changed jobs: since 1998 it has trained the volunteer stewards who patrol and teach on the 30,500-acre Preserve. It has never owned an acre of the land it saved.

Founded by Jane Rau, Karen Bertiger, Pete Chasar, Anna M. Marsolo, Marilynn Pauwels, Tracy Conner, Stephen M. Jones, Frederick Davidson

Mayo Clinic in Arizona

Rochester's third campus, born in Scottsdale, grown up in Phoenix

Mayo Clinic opened in Scottsdale on June 29, 1987, its third campus and the first it chose on its own: 47 physicians on 180 acres at the east end of Shea Boulevard. It grew to more than 10,000 Arizona employees and the state's top-ranked hospital. The twist: the hospital, the medical school and the $1.9 billion expansion are in Phoenix.

Founded by Richard Hill, M.D.

Scottsdale Public Library

Started by volunteers in 1955, a city library since 1961, and the keeper of Scottsdale's own history

Scottsdale's library began in the summer of 1955 as about 300 donated books in an un-air-conditioned adobe house, open two mornings a week and run by volunteers. The town took it over in 1960–61, moved it into the Little Red Schoolhouse, and in 1968 gave it Bennie Gonzales' white building on the Civic Center as City Hall's twin. Since 1973 it has also been Scottsdale's memory: the local-history collection that became the Scottsdale Heritage Connection is where every question about the old town ends up.

Founded by Lou Ann Noel, Beth Fielder

HonorHealth

Successor of City Hospital of Scottsdale, the town's first hospital

HonorHealth is the nonprofit system descended from City Hospital of Scottsdale, the one-story Baptist-run hospital that opened on Osborn Road in May 1962 for a city of 10,000. It added Shea in 1984 and Thompson Peak in 2007, merged with John C. Lincoln Health Network in 2013 and took the HonorHealth name in 2015, dropping Scottsdale from the masthead.

Scottsdale Airport & Airpark

A city-owned business-jet port, 50,000 jobs, no airline

Scottsdale Airport is a city-owned, single-runway general-aviation field on the site of Thunderbird Field II, the Army flight school of 1942. The city bought the runway in 1966 with a developer's money, opened it in 1967, and watched the Airpark grow from one machine shop into roughly 2,900 businesses and 51,000 jobs. It has never had airline service that lasted.

Founded by George Tewksbury (Landel Inc.), The Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, City of Scottsdale (Mayor Bud Tims, City Manager Bill Donaldson)

Scottsdale Community College

A Maricopa college on 160 leased acres of Community land

Scottsdale Community College is the Maricopa County college Scottsdale lobbied for in the 1960s. It opened in 1969 and moved in August 1970 onto 160 acres leased for 99 years from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the only public community college on tribal land. Its students, protesting athletic spending in 1972, made it the home of the Fighting Artichokes.

Founded by Paul Messinger, Bud Tims, John Prince