Why she matters
For twelve years Linda Milhaven was one of the most popular names on a Scottsdale ballot and one of the council’s steadiest votes for the decade’s projects and bonds. She topped the vote in 2010 and 2014. In the decade’s biggest fight she was on the side that lost: she backed the Desert Discovery Center at the Preserve’s Gateway trailhead, told its opponents to go get signatures, and then argued against the initiative they filed.
Where to find her work today
In the city’s ballot pamphlets for 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2019, and in the council’s minutes. The Desert Discovery Center and Southbridge Two referendum pages tell those fights in full.
The Preserve
On September 19, 2016 a citizen petition asked the council to require a public vote before anything beyond trails was built in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Milhaven moved to take no action, and the motion carried 4 to 3, with Councilmembers Suzanne Klapp, Virginia Korte and David Smith. A year later, as the council considered writing its own ballot question, she told the room, KJZZ reported: “I think it’s bad precedent … All you need to do is go get the signatures.” Opponents filed about 37,600 in July 2018.
In the pamphlet that fall she wrote: “The proposed educational center is no more commercial than a museum or library. Today, the educational center idea is on hold. At my suggestion, City Council agreed to wait so citizens could bring forward their ballot initiative.” The charter amendment, she argued, “goes beyond the question of an educational center and restricts our ability to protect our Preserve.” It passed with 71 percent, and she was re-elected the same day.
Money and downtown
She signed for every bond package of the decade. In 2013 she and Klapp told voters the four questions would cost “$22 per $100,000 of assessed valuation”; all four failed. In 2019 she wrote that “All seven City Council members agree that investment is needed,” and all three questions passed. On December 4, 2019 she moved the approval of Southbridge Two, a canal-front project with towers up to 150 feet, arguing that downtown needed “more people that live and work in the area.” When the developer asked for repeal after a referendum qualified, she seconded it and told the council, by the city’s transcript, that “this referendum will have a chilling effect and dampen any investment in our downtown.”
Other votes
As vice mayor on March 31, 2015 she seconded Korte’s motion to start public outreach toward a nondiscrimination ordinance; no vote was taken that night. In August she was one of four members who put the question back on the agenda, and the council voted 5 to 2 to have staff draft the ordinance’s elements. The LGBTQ note follows that story.
NoDDC’s paid argument in the 2018 pamphlet said she had called its members “terrorists” at a council meeting. No transcript or news report read for this page records the remark, so it stands as the group’s claim.
Her city biography describes her as a community bank president from 1993 to 2005 and a past board chair of the Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce and Scottsdale Arts, and her candidate statements describe her as a banker. The 2010s politics chapter sets her terms beside the decade’s other arguments.