Scottsdale, the site of a battle of wills over city’s direction

By Beth Duckett | The Republic | azcentral.com

Scottsdale is in many ways a divided city struggling to define its future.

And nowhere is this playing out more than in the city’s General Plan, a document required by law to steer a city’s growth.

In Arizona, cities and towns are required to adopt new General Plans, or update their current plans, every decade. The voter-approved plan is a map of sorts, outlining how a city wants to grow and evolve for at least 10 years. The process usually is a fairly routine exercise.

But in Scottsdale, the effort has been riddled with conflict.

Scottsdale voters shot down the city’s last General Plan proposal in 2012, forcing planners to return to the drawing board. The city has gone out of its way to keep residents informed of the process and include a wider range of participants.

Now, the creation of a new plan — a normally cut-and-dried affair — has been laced with arguments and general discord, which boiled over earlier this month when four people resigned from a task force charged with drafting the new plan. Along the way were allegations of intimidation and special-interest agendas.

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