Sensible Development
I’ve heard the people of Tucson say that our growth seems out of control. Our city budgets are always in crisis, our roads keep clogging and the Sonoran Desert keeps moving further and further away. If growth has so many benefits, why aren’t we seeing them?
We’re suffering from growth because we are not growing in ways that make sense for Tucson. For too long, we have simply sprawled into the desert, ignoring the havoc this has been wreaking on our budgets, our environment, and our traffic.
It is important to point out that I do not believe in demonizing developers. There are simply good projects and bad projects. We need to encourage the good projects and discourage the bad ones.
In recent years, a new group of developers have been creating innovative new projects that do make sense for Tucson. From James Hamilton and Diane DiSimone at Stone Curves to Phil Lipman, Randi Dorman, Rob Paulos & Warren Michaels at the Ice House Lofts to Michael Keith and his partners at Rio Development to the Fina brothers’ mixed-use project up on Stone, a new breed of developers are making money by doing the right thing. These new places will help us grow sustainably.
As a councilmember, I will make sure that we make it as easy as possible for developers to build the right kind of projects by delaying development services fees to the end of a project instead of the beginning, expediting the permitting process to save financing costs, and waiving impact fees in the central core.
And these sustainable developments will be designed to use less water. Perhaps someone should tell Fred Ronstadt that there is another way to secure our future water supply besides drinking sewage from our taps.
