Why she matters
Scottsdale voted to buy its mountains in 1995. Somebody then had to actually buy them, and the first mayor to do it was Sam Kathryn Campana. Elected in 1996 as Herb Drinkwater retired, she took over a city that had more than doubled in his sixteen years and a preserve that so far existed as a council resolution and a new tax.
The smooth handoff proved something about the town: the preservation consensus was bigger than any one politician.
Where to find her mark today
The Preserve. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve is the work of several mayors, but the first land closings are hers.
Camino Campana. The barrier-free Camino Campana Interpretive Trail at the Pima and Dynamite trailhead shares her name, though whether it was named for her isn’t confirmed.
The job she inherited
The funding vote of May 23, 1995 turned the previous October’s resolution into money. Campana’s administration turned the money into land: ranch parcels, failed subdivisions and State Trust sections that had to be bid away from developers at auction. The 1996 and 1998 pages track those closings.
The full story
Sam Kathryn Campana was elected in 1996, the first time since 1980 that Scottsdale chose a new mayor. The city had grown from 88,412 people to past 190,000, and the voters had written her agenda for her the year before: a 30-year, 0.2% sales tax dedicated to buying land for the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
The work that followed was unglamorous and permanent. The purchases were market transactions, not condemnations, made acre by acre with ranch owners and the State Land Department. Meanwhile the growth the Preserve was meant to steer kept coming, north along the coming Loop 101 and up through the Airpark, and her predecessor’s death in December 1997 passed with the preservation consensus holding firm.
Her term ended in 2000, the year the census counted 202,705 residents. Mary Manross succeeded her and carried the buying forward. The whole arc is in the 1990s chapter.