Why it matters
Most of what made Scottsdale look like Scottsdale by 1975, the Civic Center, the airport, the first parks, the greenbelt, the low skyline and the absence of freeways, went through a room of residents first. The Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, STEP, was the city’s way of asking them. It began in November 1964, when the city was growing by thousands of people a year and its government was two years old, and it ran in rounds until 1982.
It was also selective. The committees that recommended clearing the old barrio and moving the Yaqui families out of Indian Bend Wash did not, as far as their published rosters show, include anyone from those neighborhoods.
Where to find it today
Nowhere as an institution. Its reports sit in the city’s online general plan library, and the 1960s politics chapter shows how its arguments played out.
How it started
Who thought of it is disputed: the city’s 2012 historic context credits City Manager Richard Malcolm, Joan Fudala credits Planning Director George Fretz along with Malcolm and Mayors John Woudenberg and Bill Clayton, and the program’s own report says “the Mayor and City Council conceived the idea.” The month is not in dispute. “During November of 1964,” the 1969 report says, the city sought “citizen voluntary support in designing, projecting, planning, and implementing programs that would enhance the booming growth of Scottsdale.”
The report remembers the mood frankly: “The community spirit was anything but unified. Some older residents thought such things as paved streets and street lighting were unnecessary frills. Newcomers felt that they were necessities.” Seven committees met for ten weeks, and on January 20, 1965 presented the council with “capital improvements that would cost $14,605,570 to be accomplished in three fiscal years. Most of those improvements, it should be quickly added, were accomplished in the time allotted.”
The decisions that locked it in
The first round produced a capital program, and the city built it: a civic center after a second bond vote in 1966, an airport in 1967, parks and street lighting. The committee habit stuck. A college committee chaired by Paul Messinger lobbied the county for a campus from 1966, by his account. The 1969 report credits the program with “the revised City Charter,” the six amendments voters approved on November 7, 1967.
The second round, launched at a public meeting on September 30, 1969, was about policy. More than two hundred residents in six committees, each with a council member attached, met into April 1970. They asked the council to strike high-rise zoning and cap big shopping centers at 60 feet; warned that “Massive 8-lane elevated, depressed, or surface freeways may be envisioned dissecting the City of Scottsdale”; recommended “That the Erickson Plan be adopted” for Indian Bend Wash; and urged federal Neighborhood Development money for the blocks west of the Civic Center and for Vista del Camino as “an immediate, effective, and lasting solution.” The council adopted the 60-foot limit in November 1970 and took up the rest through the decade.
What it set out to do, and what it became
The later rounds were forums more than committees. Seminars with the Brookings Institution in 1971 and 1972 were published as Alternate Futures for the City of Scottsdale, with an essay in which Mayor Bud Tims credited “STEP in 1965” and the seminars with “seven intensive years in critical self-study.” A forum at the Safari Hotel on September 25, 1973 worked out how to carry out the charter amendments voters had approved that April, beginning with the removal of nonconforming signs (“We are not discussing whether or not to amortize but how to amortize signs”), the work that led to the city’s defeat in the sign fight. Forums on state legislation and on transportation followed in 1974, and a Dialogue on Aging in 1975. The last known report is from 1982.
Who the record leaves out
The 1969 community development committee, chaired by Councilman Robert Jones, included a former councilman and Billie Gentry, later a councilwoman. It recommended clearing two neighborhoods: the blocks west of the Civic Center, part of the old barrio, and Vista del Camino, home to Yaqui families displaced by flooding. No one identifiable as a resident of either sat on it, and the report records no testimony from them. The barrio and Yaqui families pages tell their side as far as it survives.