Why she matters
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve began with hikers and environmentalists, the thirteen people who met at the Mustang Library in November 1990 and founded what is now the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy. It became city policy through a task force, and Virginia Korte chaired it. In 1993 she was running a Chevrolet dealership on McDowell Road. Her committee’s report asked the city to lead, to pay and to set up a commission, and within two years the city had done all three.
Where to find her work today
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve. More than 30,000 acres of the mountains and desert her task force set out to save, open to anyone from its trailheads.
The task force
On March 15, 1993 the city council adopted Resolution 3769 creating a McDowell Mountain Task Force, and on May 4 it appointed fifteen members, among them Jane Rau, Peter Chasar and Greg Woodall of the young land trust, with Korte as chair. Joan Fudala writes that Mayor Herb Drinkwater hand-picked her, “at the time a McDowell Road car dealer whose business collected major amounts of sales tax.” Its charge, in the city’s words, was to “define the public interest in and goals for the mountains,” assess funding, legal tools and ownership, and “recommend an action plan.”
Korte presented the recommendations on October 4, 1993. The city should take the lead in saving the McDowells, find an equitable way to pay for the land and create a city-appointed commission. On January 18, 1994 the council created the nine-member McDowell Sonoran Preserve Commission and named her to it with Carla, Art DeCabooter, Chet Andrews and five others. That October it dedicated the first city-owned land to the Preserve.
The 1995 tax
The commission’s plan needed money, and in 1995 the council asked voters for a 0.2 percent sales tax for thirty years. Korte signed one of the arguments in the city’s pamphlet: “The formation of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve will allow us, as well as our future generations, to enjoy the magnificence of the mountains. We must save our McDowell Mountains.” The tax had organized opponents, including four former council members who called it “a blank check,” but it passed on May 23, 1995, with 64 percent. Fudala credits Korte and DeCabooter with being the bridge between business and the environmentalists, and says Korte co-chaired the 1999 campaign for $200 million in Preserve bonds.
On the council
Korte later ran the Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce, by her council biography, and was later elected to the city council, serving from January 8, 2013 to January 12, 2021. On the council she pushed for a nondiscrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation and gender identity. On March 31, 2015 she moved to have staff begin public outreach and bring back an ordinance, a motion that was never put to a vote, and that August she was among the four members who brought the question back. It stalled before an ordinance came to a vote; she later blamed colleagues who were, she said, “homophobic—either homophobic or either believed that discrimination doesn’t exist in Scottsdale or believed that it was harmful to business.” The LGBTQ Scottsdale note tells that story.
In the Preserve fight of the 2010s she sided with the council against a required public vote. In September 2016 she voted with the 4 to 3 majority to take no action on a citizen petition for a public vote on building in the Preserve. In 2018 she argued in the city pamphlet against Prop 420, calling it “a by-product of a political movement started by a self-interest group” and writing, “I helped start our McDowell Sonoran Preserve decades ago and worked on all 5 campaigns.” Voters passed it with 71 percent, and on December 11, 2018 she moved the resolution ending the Desert EDGE project “or other similar projects,” which passed 7 to 0. The Desert Discovery Center page tells that fight.
On Old Town she backed Southbridge Two, the canal-front project with buildings up to 150 feet. After the council approved it 4 to 3 on December 4, 2019, she said, “Our city is evolving. I believe by working together we can find the balance between preserving the charm of Old Town while continuing to make it more contemporary.” When a referendum against it qualified, she moved the repeal that passed 4 to 3 on April 7, 2020 (see the Southbridge Two referendum).
The arc of her public life runs from the Preserve’s beginning to its maturity: a dealer on the Motor Mile in 1993 asking the city to buy its mountains, and a council member twenty years later voting on how to run them. The 1990s politics chapter tells how the Preserve campaign was won.