Will Scottsdale build in preserve without a vote?

A pair of citizen groups are suing Scottsdale, hoping to stop city leaders from plopping a tourist attraction onto land that residents taxed themselves to preserve.

Protect Our Preserve and No DDC want the city to quit spending the public’s money on this pipedream until the public actually indicates whether it wants to build a Desert Discovery Center in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.

“By the city’s own plan, the DDC would never be self-sustaining or revenue-neutral,” the lawsuit says. “Instead the DDC would rely upon city subsidies, grants, endowments and donations, none of which have been set aside or yet created.”

City leaders have long dreamed of building a desert interpretive center at the main entrance to the preserve.

Apparently, it isn’t enough that taxpayers spend a billion dollars buying the land and creating a public preserve with hundreds of miles of trails.

No. To experience the desert, it seems you must first discover it and the only way to discover it is for taxpayers to foot the bulk of the bill for a $61 million development — and subsidize its operation by $758,000 a year.

The city has spent well over $2 million planning the DDC, now called Desert EDGE. The lawsuit asks a judge to say no more until a public vote.

Last year, the council rejected the call for a vote after the city attorney said city leaders don’t need the public’s permission to build in the preserve. While a few council members support a vote, others say citizens can mount an initiative if they want it on the ballot.

“First of all, wow,” said Councilwoman Linda Milhaven, after a project update last week. “We are talking about an educational center in the preserve … I just think it’s magnificent.”

Milhaven urged her fellow council members not to cave in to opponents, some of whom are “mean, nasty liars” and “reputational terrorists.”

Or put another way, angry, frustrated citizens who question why they should be forced to pay to develop land they already paid to protect. Citizens who question why their elected representatives are “conspiring” with a politically connected non-profit set up to plan and run the tourist attraction.

Citizens — including the board of the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy and former Mayor Mary Manross — who wonder about the precedent.

“If the preserve boundary is penetrated with such commercial oriented uses, it will only be a matter of time until other creative projects are proposed for the Preserve,” Manross said.

Manross says voters never intended for their money to be used this way. She, too, is calling for a public vote if city leaders insist on pushing the plan.

It seems fundamental — to me, at least — that voters should be consulted on whether they want to spend tens of millions of dollars to build and subsidize a development in the preserve that is the city’s crowning achievement.

I can only think of one reason why city leaders would oppose giving the public a say in such an expensive, precedent setting project.

Because, perhaps, Scottsdale voters would say not only no, but oh, hell no?