Caputi: Scottsdale coalition seeks solutions in pursuit of community balance

The Scottsdale Coalition of Today & Tomorrow is dedicated to promoting, enhancing, and improving the city’s quality of life and economic vitality through community education and involvement in important issues.

SCOTT’s goal is to expand public awareness and participation. We recently gathered together virtually with a group of business, education, and civic leaders to discuss the current economic crisis.

Over Zoom coffee, we brainstormed potential solutions for aiding Scottsdale’s economic recovery.

What is happening with development in the city is a critical topic. Many projects that were already facing headwinds going into the crisis have now been halted entirely. Projects that had been approved and were moving forward are now on hold because credit markets have frozen up.

These projects and others are major economic drivers for our city. We get only 9% of our city revenues from property taxes. Almost half of our revenues are generated from sales taxes. Our winning formula of high amenities, strong property value and low property taxes are directly tied to economic activity in our city. Without a diverse and robust economy, this formula falls apart.

Any vision for the future of Scottsdale must be one that protects our community assets and amenities, like our 30,000-acre McDowell Sonoran Preserve, 42 parks, 70 athletic fields, four aquatic facilities and five public libraries. And it must maintain our low level of local property taxes.

How will we pay off the preserve bonds and keep our property taxes low without a diverse and vigorous economy? We can provide large home lots and protect open spaces where it makes sense by making sure the city as a whole generates the revenue to support it. It’s a balance.

We must continue to diversify our economy with biotech, high tech and higher education. We need to invest in areas that generate revenue and sales tax dollars for the city, like the airpark, downtown, and the Bell Road/101 corridor.

Our downtown is about two square miles; Historic Old Town is four square blocks. We should protect Old Town but we need the rest of downtown to be productive. Again, it’s a balance, and it is what distinguishes Scottsdale.

Phoenix recently invested $3 billion in current and proposed construction projects in the health services, hospital and medical research industries. A city can’t be built on tourism and growth alone; we have to diversify. Healthcare and medical biosciences are resilient industries that thrive regardless of the state of the economy. And innovative research opportunities can be tomorrow’s solutions to today’s medical problems, which provides us with another win.

The pandemic is not a “warning against overcrowding” as some have suggested. It’s a wake-up call to keep the engines of our city thriving so that we can maintain our special character as a city with vibrant areas to live, work and play, balanced with open areas and spaces as well.

We can’t have one without the other. And we should never lower our standards. Having both assures that we will have a robust, energized, special Scottsdale for today and tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Tammy Caputi is chair of the SCOTT board and is a candidate for City Council. We encourage more voices from the candidates in this year’s election and anyone else interested to share their ideas.