Why it matters
Motorola’s military electronics plant opened on McDowell Road in 1957, just outside a town of a few thousand, and within a decade was the biggest employer in Scottsdale and, by 1970, in Arizona. More than 7,500 people worked there at the peak, building radar, secure radios and the electronics that flew on NASA missions. Their wages built the ranch-house grid of south Scottsdale, filled the schools and gave Los Arcos Mall its customers. Scottsdale’s postwar story is told in postcards; this was the payroll.
The plant also left the city its worst environmental problem. Solvents poured into unlined lagoons behind the building reached the aquifer, trichloroethylene turned up in south Scottsdale’s wells in 1981, and the Indian Bend Wash area went on the first Superfund list in 1983. The treatment plants are still running, and the treated water is in the city’s supply.
Motorola left in 2001, selling the business to General Dynamics for $825 million. The building, the work and the jobs stayed. What left was the name, and the idea Daniel Noble sold the Valley in 1949: that a resort town could also be a technology center.
Where to find it today
8201 East McDowell Road. The 1957 building, its 1961 and 1965 additions and the 1970 tower stand on the north side between Hayden and Granite Reef as General Dynamics Mission Systems. Look from the street.
The subdivisions. The city’s preservation studies credit Motorola’s wages for the larger 1950s houses south of Thomas Road.
The treatment plants. Air-stripping towers at Miller Road and McDonald Drive and behind the plant pump the aquifer; the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt runs over the plume, unmarked.
How it started
Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 as one square mile around the old townsite, with an economy of dude ranches and the Chamber’s slogan. Motorola arrived for reasons that had nothing to do with the town. After the war, as the city’s historic-preservation staff put it, “the federal government asked Motorola to move part of their military research and development operations out of Chicago to avoid the potential of losing everything in the event of an atomic attack.” Daniel E. Noble, Motorola’s director of research and the engineer behind the Army’s SCR-300 backpack radio, chose Phoenix: he had asthma, liked to ride and had wintered in Scottsdale in the late 1940s. In 1949 he opened a solid-state research laboratory in a rented building on Central Avenue; in 1950 he bought a house in Scottsdale, and the company built a laboratory near town on Ingleside Road. The founder himself, Paul Galvin, had been wintering at the Camelback Inn since 1944.
The first plant was not quite Scottsdale’s. In 1954 Motorola opened a factory at 52nd Street and McDowell, “just over a mile from Scottsdale” in the Historical Society’s phrase, which became the semiconductor plant. Scottsdale’s own came in 1957: a nearly 200,000-square-foot military electronics facility at Granite Reef and McDowell, just outside the town limits, by Varney, Sexton, Sydnor, the firm that had finished the Hotel Valley Ho the year before. The city’s driving tour calls it a “garden industrial” building, long and low behind lawns, meant to look like a clean industry rather than a steel mill. Additions of 200,000 square feet followed in 1961 and 1965, and Peter Lendrum’s tower in 1970. The 1958 annual report lists the Military Electronics Division’s work as radar, missiles, communications, data processing and navigation, and pictures Noble at the console of the “Western Military Electronics Center, Phoenix.” The legal shape was the simplest possible, a division of a Chicago public company. Scottsdale had no stake and no leverage. It had the housing.
The decisions that locked it in
Phoenix, not somewhere else (1949). Any dry, dispersed city would have satisfied the Pentagon. Noble’s lungs, his horses and his Scottsdale winters chose this one, and the city’s preservation staff credit the arrival with “driving the state’s single most important industry, electronics.”
The McDowell Road site (1957). The company could have kept growing at 52nd Street. Instead it put the military work on 144 acres at the edge of Scottsdale. “Because Motorola’s wages were much higher than those paid by most other employers,” the city’s study says, “their employees could afford to pay more for their new homes,” which produced neighborhoods “with more square footage, rooms, and bathrooms, than the average housing found elsewhere in the Valley.” Motorola assumed its line workers would live within six miles of a plant; its financial officers sent new hires to Valley National Bank and Western Savings for mortgages; its executives waited at the Valley Ho for Paradise Valley houses. By 1960 Scottsdale was the most affluent community in the state, with a median income 25 percent above the rest of the metro area. The 1950s and 1960s chapters show the grid filling in.
The lagoons (1960s). The decision nobody signed lasted longest. Solvents from several Motorola plants were poured into unlined lagoons behind the Scottsdale building on Indian Bend Wash. A 1965 internal memo, obtained by Phoenix New Times in 1992, recorded 30,000 gallons dumped in a single year and warned it “could result in serious consequences from a contamination standpoint.” Motorola has said the lagoons were never used for solvents. They were filled in 1980; the TCE was found in the wells in 1981.
Iridium (1987). Three engineers in the Government Electronics Division’s systems group, Bary Bertiger, Raymond Leopold and Kenneth Peterson, proposed a constellation of low-orbit satellites for a phone that would work anywhere. The division had always been a subcontractor; Iridium was its bid to be a prime contractor for commercial customers. Motorola spent more than $5 billion building it and sold the bankrupt system in 1999 for $25 million. That is where the company’s attention left the defense business.
The sale (2001). On August 6, 2001 General Dynamics agreed to buy the Scottsdale-based Integrated Information Systems Group, 3,000 employees including 1,100 engineers and about $830 million in expected revenue, for $825 million in cash; the deal closed September 28. The alternative was the spin-off Motorola had used for its chip business in 1999. Instead the plant became General Dynamics Decision Systems, later C4 Systems and now Mission Systems, the same address on the Pentagon’s vendor list under a different name.
The years it nearly ended
The plant never nearly ended; the company’s standing in the city did, twice.
The first crisis began in 1981, when TCE was detected in south Scottsdale’s municipal wells. On September 8, 1983 the EPA listed the 13-square-mile Indian Bend Wash area on the National Priorities List. The responsible parties for the northern portion were Motorola, Siemens, GlaxoSmithKline, the Salt River Project and the City of Scottsdale itself, whose wells had pulled the plume along. The Central Groundwater Treatment Facility started in October 1993, Miller Road followed, and by 2025 the system had treated more than 145 billion gallons and removed about 99,000 pounds of TCE, with the cleaned water blended into the city’s supply; the Scottsdale Water guide explains how. In 2002 a court ordered Motorola and the other companies to pay $61 million to roughly 22,000 residents. In October 2007 and January 2008 equipment failures at Miller Road let water above the 5-parts-per-billion limit into the drinking system, and the Justice Department collected a $500,000 penalty.
The second crisis was the end of the Cold War. The group that had employed 7,500 was a fraction of that by the early 1990s; a May 1993 reduction in force cut 69 people, and 21 of them sued the next year alleging discrimination by age, sex and ethnicity. The money was in phones and chips, and the division was sold in 2001.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The founding purpose was narrow: keep the government’s military electronics research out of Chicago, and make money doing it. The 1958 annual report’s list of fields is a fair description of what the plant did for 44 years and of what General Dynamics Mission Systems still does there. The mission held; the ownership moved. Motorola’s remaining purpose in Scottsdale is written in its July 2025 information packet: running the Area 12 treatment system in the southeast corner of the plant site, where two wells pump about 1,800 gallons a minute through an air-stripping tower in partnership with Salt River Project, which takes the clean water for the Grand Canal. The company that came to build the Valley’s future now exists here to clean up its past.
Who the record leaves out
The official story is told by engineers and executives. The assembly-line workers Motorola expected to live within six miles are present only as a planning assumption; the 1993 layoffs and the 1994 suit, with six African American and three Hispanic plaintiffs among the 69 cut, are the one place the record shows who was let go first. The 22,000 residents of the 2002 settlement are a statistic in every city history. The eastern boundary of the Superfund site is Pima Road, which is also the boundary of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community; nothing in the EPA, Motorola or city records speaks to the Community’s wells or its view of a plume drawn to its fence line. That silence is the finding.
What it didn’t have to become
Motorola did not have to be in Scottsdale. The government wanted dispersion, not Arizona; Noble wanted dry air and horses. Had the 1957 plant gone up beside the 1954 one at 52nd Street, south Scottsdale would have been built later, cheaper and smaller, Los Arcos might never have opened, and the plume would have been Phoenix’s second Superfund site instead of Scottsdale’s first.
Nor did it have to become a cleanup. The 1965 memo shows that someone inside the company saw the lagoons for what they were, fifteen years before they were filled. The alternative was lined ponds or off-site disposal; the choice not to use them is why a city that got its payroll from Motorola in 1957 is still drinking Motorola’s treated groundwater in 2025.