Why she matters
Mary Manross was mayor for the decade Scottsdale got a skyline. She took office in 2000 and served through 2008, the stretch that brought Loop 101, condo towers on the Arizona Canal, the rescue of the Hotel Valley Ho, SkySong on the corpse of Los Arcos Mall, and finally the crash.
For the Preserve, her years mattered for one vote. In 2004 the city went back to the voters for more money, and they gave it: a second sales tax that kept land purchases going when prices were high and kept the money coming when the economy stopped.
Where to find her mark today
The Preserve. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve grew well past its early acreage on the 2004 tax.
Gateway Trailhead. The Gateway Trailhead opened in 2009, in the teeth of the recession, on land those purchases secured.
The 2004 vote
May 18, 2004 was the third time in a decade Scottsdale voters taxed themselves to buy a mountain range. Land prices were climbing with everything else in the boom, and the argument was simple: buy the desert now or watch it become someone’s view lots. The 2004 page tells how that tax kept collecting through the bust while cranes stopped everywhere else.
The full story
Mary Manross followed Sam Kathryn Campana into the mayor’s office in 2000, as the census counted 202,705 residents after a decade of better than 55 percent growth. The new century gave the city things it had never had. The Pima Freeway was completed in 2001; the Scottsdale Waterfront lined the canal with shops and the city’s first real high-rise condominiums; the faded Valley Ho reopened in December 2005 after an $80 million restoration; and the city’s 2005 partnership with the ASU Foundation put SkySong on the Los Arcos site by 2008.
Through it all the Preserve kept buying. The 2004 tax added 0.15% to the 0.2% passed in 1995, and the purchases carried on, parcel by parcel, toward the more than 30,000 acres the Preserve holds today.
Then 2008 arrived, and metro Phoenix became one of the epicenters of the national housing collapse. Jim Lane, elected that year, succeeded her. The decade is told in full in the 2000s chapter.