Why she matters
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve was not saved by a vote alone, or by a resolution, or by a single donor. It was saved by an argument made over and over until a growth-minded city believed it, and for years one of the people making it was a south Scottsdale native who goes by one name: Carla.
Born a Woodall, she grew up in the older, southern part of town, raised by a scientist mother who sent her outdoors. Her brother Greg, an archaeologist, mapped where development threatened the desert. She took the political route. She rallied support for the city sales tax that bought the land, took the heat for it, including a newspaper nickname, the “Marxist of the McDowells,” and went on to run the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust as its executive director.
Where to find her mark today
The Preserve. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, about 30,500 acres bought mostly with the taxes she campaigned for.
The front door. The Gateway Trailhead, where most visitors meet the Preserve for the first time.
The northern land. Brown’s Ranch Trailhead sits in the northern reaches of the Preserve, miles beyond the mountain front where the campaign began.
The argument she kept making
Carla’s case had two halves. The first was money: “We realized we weren’t going to raise that money selling T-shirts, so we went to the city,” she told High Country News in 2000. The second was State Trust land. “There’s this illusion of open space,” she said in 2001. “People see the sign that says it’s owned by the state, and they think it’s protected. It’s not.” Arizona must sell or lease that land to benefit schools, and a large share of the planned Preserve was State Trust land.
The first argument won at the ballot box in 1995 and again in 2004. The second took her to the Legislature. The volunteer founding story is told in the Jane Rau profile.
The full story
On January 21, 1991, Jane Rau and Karen Bertiger signed the incorporation papers of the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, a volunteer group with a target that sounded absurd: roughly a third of Scottsdale held as desert forever. Carla was part of the effort from that year on. In 1992, as the board expanded, she joined it, and so did her brother Greg Woodall, an archaeologist who mapped where development was pushing into the range.
She worked the politics. The Trust could not raise land money on its own, so it asked the city to, and Carla became one of the most visible voices for a dedicated sales tax. That made her a target; one local paper called her the “Marxist of the McDowells.” The council established the Preserve on October 3, 1994, and on May 23, 1995, voters approved the 0.2% tax.
The Trust hired Sandy Bahr as its first full-time executive director in 1997. By 2000 Carla held the job. The city had by then bought roughly 14,400 acres of private land and was looking at thousands more acres of State Trust land it would have to buy at auction. “Open space is not what’s left over after development,” she said that year. “It should be the logical framework for development.” She and her brother pushed to more than double the Preserve, and she argued for reforming State Trust law itself, testifying in June 2004 before a legislative committee in support of a conservation and planning package. A month earlier, on May 18, 2004, Scottsdale voters had passed a second Preserve tax.
The Trust became the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy in 2005. The Preserve reached about 30,500 acres, and Carla, by her own account, still lives beside the Indian Bend Wash path and is still arguing for open space. The wider story is in the 1990s chapter and the 2000s chapter.