Why it matters
Scottsdale exists because of a ditch, and the Salt River Project owns the ditch. The Arizona Canal that William J. Murphy finished in 1885 still crosses the city on the diagonal, carrying Salt and Verde river water that SRP stores behind six dams. Below the canal, on land the Valley’s farmers pledged in 1903, SRP water reaches Scottsdale taps through the Chaparral plant. SRP power lines serve much of the city’s south, center and east, while APS serves Old Town and most of the north.
It is also one of the strangest institutions in American local government: two bodies wearing one name. The private Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association formed on February 9, 1903; the public Agricultural Improvement and Power District was created in 1937 so the Association could borrow tax-free. The District now serves about 1.2 million electric accounts, and its board is elected by landowners at one vote per acre. The Supreme Court looked at that in 1981 and let it stand.
Where to find it today
The canal. Four miles of the Arizona Canal cross Scottsdale from Pima Road to 64th Street, with a path past Chaparral Park and the Waterfront: walk, ride or lead a horse, never swim. The Crosscut Canal Path continues down 64th Street to Tempe on a canal the Association dug in 1912 and 1913.
The water. The Chaparral plant inside Chaparral Park turns SRP river water into drinking water; the Scottsdale Water guide explains the blend.
The ballot. If your power bill says SRP and you own your house, you get a ballot in April of even-numbered years, weighted by the size of your lot.
How it started
The Salt River Valley of the 1880s was watered by private canal companies digging along, and above, the lines the Hohokam had laid down a thousand years earlier. The boldest was the Arizona Canal Company, formed in December 1882, which hired railroad contractor W.J. Murphy in 1883 to run a canal along the high line of the north valley. He finished it in May 1885, largely on credit, and three years later an Army chaplain named Winfield Scott bought 640 acres beside it.
The weakness was storage. On February 19, 1891 the biggest flood on record tore out the Arizona Canal’s wooden diversion dam; a drought beginning in 1898 then nearly emptied the river. Private reservoir schemes could not raise the money. The federal government could, and the Reclamation Act that Theodore Roosevelt signed on June 17, 1902 offered a dam if the landowners would guarantee repayment.
That condition shaped everything after. Judge Joseph H. Kibbey drafted the plan, and Phoenix publisher Benjamin A. Fowler, who had spent two winters in Washington lobbying for the act, chaired the committee that wrote the articles. On February 9, 1903, about 4,800 landowners incorporated the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association under territorial law and pledged more than 200,000 acres as collateral. Because each acre secured the same share of the debt, each acre carried one vote. Scottsdale’s farm families signed with everyone else. Roosevelt Dam, then the tallest masonry dam in the world, was dedicated by its namesake on March 18, 1911. The Reclamation Service ran the works until November 1, 1917, when it handed operation to the Association.
The decisions that locked it in
Power to pay for water. The dam came with a hydroelectric plant, and the Association learned quickly that electricity sold to mines and farms could carry the water bills. It opened the Arizona Falls plant on the canal at 56th Street in 1913 and the Crosscut plant by 1915. In 1918 William Kimsey, Charles Miller and E.O. Brown started Scottsdale Light and Power by buying current from Arizona Falls. By the time the Supreme Court looked at SRP in 1981, 98% of the District’s revenue came from power.
The 1937 District. The Depression broke the Association’s finances. Arizona’s 1922 Agricultural Improvement District Act offered public districts cheap tax-exempt borrowing, but with one vote per landowner, which many Association shareholders refused to accept. The Association asked the Legislature to change the law, and on November 27, 1936 it did: districts would vote one acre, one vote. In 1937 the Association transferred all its property to the new District, and after amendments in 1946 and 1949 the District ran the power business while the Association ran water as its agent, with one management for both since 1949. The choice bought cheap money and, as a side effect, placed a public utility outside the Corporation Commission’s rate authority, where it remains.
Selling water to cities. In 1952 SRP agreed to supply Phoenix’s domestic water; Scottsdale and the other cities followed. The acreage rule held: SRP water goes only to on-project land, which in Scottsdale is the farmland south of the Arizona Canal. The city’s 16,894 acre-feet a year is a right attached to those old fields, not to the city as a whole, which is why north Scottsdale drinks Colorado River water instead.
Defending the acre-vote. When residents who owned no land or less than an acre sued, the Ninth Circuit held in 1980 that a utility serving a quarter-million customers had to obey one-person-one-vote. The Legislature had already softened the system, allowing fractional votes for small lots in 1969 and adding four at-large seats in 1976. On April 29, 1981, the Supreme Court reversed in Ball v. James. Justice Stewart’s five-vote majority called the District’s functions “of the narrow, special sort which justifies a departure from the popular-election requirement.” Justice White’s dissent called it “an integral governmental actor providing important governmental services to residents.” The system Fowler’s committee wrote in 1903 still elects the board that sets Scottsdale’s SRP rates.
The years it nearly ended
The Association’s near-death came before its birth, in the flood of 1891 and the drought that followed. The 1930s produced the public District that defines it today. The 1976 to 1981 litigation could have ended landowner government of the power business entirely; SRP gave up the at-large seats and fractional votes, kept the rest, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the system again in Smith v. Salt River Project in 1997.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1903 articles describe a repayment cooperative: pledge the land, build the dam, deliver stored water to member acres. The Association delivered, and retired the debt in October 1955 at a total cost of about $10 million for the dam and original works.
What grew around that purpose was a power company. Electric customers went from 12,400 in 1947 to about 500,000 by 1988 and to 1,183,163 accounts by April 2025, served by coal, gas and nuclear plants across four states. Water delivery remained, in the Court’s phrase, its “primary and originating purpose,” but by the 1980s it was a minority of the business. The District’s statement of purpose today is to provide “reliable, affordable and sustainable water and power to more than 2 million people and businesses in central Arizona.” The constituency moved too: in 1937, 94% of District land was farmed; by the early 1980s about half was urban. Today the acre-voters are overwhelmingly homeowners on quarter-acre lots, and in a 2022 district race fewer than 10% of them voted. One advocate told Grist in 2026 the system was “effectively feudal.”
Scottsdale’s imprint runs through one man. Bill Schrader, the farm boy who became the city’s first charter mayor in 1962, joined the SRP board in 1964 and was its president from 1994 to 2006, the years of the Roosevelt Dam raising and the fight over electric deregulation. Executives of both SRP and APS have sat on Scottsdale’s council and chamber boards throughout the city’s history.
Who the record leaves out
The Akimel O’odham and Piipaash. The Salt River Reservation was set in 1879 along what became Scottsdale’s eastern edge, and the Arizona Canal crosses it on the way from Granite Reef. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community descends from the people who built the first canals here, yet its water rights were not settled until 1988, in a settlement to which SRP, the Association and Scottsdale were all parties. The 1879 reservation and the 1988 settlement are documented; the decades between them are mostly absent from SRP’s own telling.
Everyone who rents. Ball v. James was brought by people who lived in the District, paid its bills and could not vote for its board. They are still there, and Grist’s 2026 reporting found condominium owners worth a hundredth of a vote each.
Scottsdale’s own founders. The 4,800 signatures of 1903 include Scottsdale’s farm families, but no public source names them.
What it didn’t have to become
The acre-vote. Arizona’s 1922 district law offered one vote per landowner, and in 1936 the Association could have accepted it as the price of public financing. It asked the Legislature for a special rule instead, and got it; had it not, Ball v. James would never have been filed. The alternative was written in statute and rejected by shareholders who did not want to dilute the power of large acreage. The data-center fights, the gas-versus-solar slates and the sub-10% turnouts of 2026 all follow from that choice. The water was always going to be stored. Who would govern it was not.