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There's no need to reach for the Thesaurus and search for hyperbolic adjectives such as "phenomenal" or "extraordinary" to add emphasis to "Pinal County is experiencing rapid growth." Not as long as we can practically trip over new developments and building projects no matter where we travel in much of the county.
And if the visuals are not convincing enough, consider the statistics. The county is processing between 1,000 and 1,500 building permits a month, and that's only in the unincorporated areas.
"This doesn't include the cities and towns," said Ken Buchanan, assistant county manager for development services. "You can undoubtedly double it, if you take the comprehensive numbers from the cities and add them to the county's total.
"We're the fastest-growing county in the state of Arizona and one of the fastest in the country. We saw 55 plats (planned communities) approved last year alone. In the unincorporated areas alone, 27,000 lots were created.
"Right now, we have 300,000 that have been entitled, and they're in one form, shape or another, either zoning and/or platted or being developed. You can also say that there's an estimated 200,000 that have been entitled in one form or another in the cities, so you can say that there's a half-million lots that are out there. These lots are all sizes, depending on the zoning codes and ordinances. It could be 4,500-square-foot up to 3·-acre lots."
If the numbers alone didn't set off a lot of alarms, poignant comments from several study groups provided some rude wake-up calls:
"A long-standing rural county, Pinal County now has to deal with urban issues." - Valley Forward Report 2004.
"Pinal County has become the Orange County of Arizona." - Rita Maguire, president ThinkAZ.
"Pinal County offers no given indication that plans have been developed to address growth." - Valley Forward Report 2004.
Accelerating process
But county officials had not been asleep at the wheel. Plans already had been put in motion two years ago to keep pace with anticipated growth, but when the numbers and the reports came in last year, county government quickly realized that it would have to move from the inside lane to the fast lane, "put the pedal to the metal" and move ahead of the new growth indicators at top speed.
"We felt it was time for a comprehensive approach to addressing the growth that is taking place in the unincorporated areas of Pinal County," Buchanan said. "For that comprehensive approach, we needed to organize and coordinate the development services and that included Public Works, Planning and Development, Building Safety, Environmental Health and Air Quality, as well as Flood Plain Management. Once organized, we began to look at the numbers, and the facts that are out there: What Pinal County is, and what it's facing, and it was startling.
"Pinal is a kind of land link to the two metro areas of Tucson and Phoenix, a million people to the south, three-and-a-half million to the north, so it's a natural area for potential growth. If you extrapolate what's happened to those two municipal areas, it's going to happen here. We're already up over 1,000 single-family permits a month now. Those numbers are actually happening. Each one is a house being built, so the growth is there.
"We began to look at the different planning needs. We have been diligently processing all of these lots and trying to plan as we go along. Our comprehensive plan was adopted in 2004. It is felt among many of us in county government that it is already outdated because of the nature of the growth, where it's happening and how it's happening. It's happening exponentially in both the cities and the unincorporated areas. The formula is that growth begets more growth."
20-percent growth rate
During the last fiscal year alone, beginning in July 2004, Buchanan estimates the growth rate at 20 percent, which is mind-boggling because most experts consider a very aggressive growth rate to be between 4 and 6 percent. Last year, Phoenix grew at a 2.5 percent rate. The county is trying to respond to the phenomenal growth rate by taking a strategic approach, consisting of a 15-point plan called the Growth Planning Initiative (GPI).
"We started out by implementing impact fees," Buchanan said, "something the county hadn't been doing, because counties weren't permitted to do impact fees up until recently, during the 1990s. By law, cities can do more with their impact fees than the county can. Of the five elements involved, we can only do three. Statutorily, we aren't allowed to do water and wastewater elements, so we're looking at open space, transportation and public safety, basically the Sheriff's Office. Those are the three elements that we're looking at within an impact fee.
"We have a consulting firm that specializes in developing the level of service documents that would support impact fees, and it'll take about a year to 18 months by the time you go through the whole process, before we have a fee that would be imposed on new growth.
"We're also looking at planning fees. We haven't updated them since 1983, and there's an adjustment that's being proposed in fees to the development community for all zoning functions that will help defray the costs of the planning responsibilities and development responsibilities that we have."
There's a subcommittee of the Planning and Zoning Commission that's reviewing and putting together a proposed new zoning code update. The current code has not been formally updated since 1963. It's in legal counsel review and then will go through the planning and zoning process, with eventual recommendation and adoption by the board.
Also on the table is the Trails Plan, another element of the growth-planning initiative, which will coincide with an effort to create an open space plan. The hope is that a master open space plan that will include the Trails Plan will become available sometime later this year.
"We want to inventory our open spaces, open space facilities and amenities that are in Pinal County," Buchanan said. "We want to work closely with all of our cities and towns with their plans to do that. We have numerous forests, national monuments, considerable state lands, considerable BLM land that we would like to start looking at as a regional open space plan, a more comprehensive parks and recreation open space plan that would include the cities and towns.
"We're also trying to coordinate with Pima County and Maricopa County in making a comprehensive approach to the Trails Plan and open space plans. We're working with Maricopa and Pima County officials to eventually get to that point."
Demographic concerns
Another area being looked at is the Population Demographics Model Program. Pinal County officials are working with the Central Arizona Association of Governments, the Maricopa Association of Governments and the Pima Association of Governments to help create a process to better estimate the county's population and modeling in order to get a better handle on population estimates in the future.
"We continue to look at new technologies that are out there," Buchanan said, "such as ACCELA, a computerized program that will aid in reducing processing times - building permit requests have increased by 70 percent - help eliminate errors and eliminate the need to increase the size of our staff. I guess the buzzword is to create better 'e-government.'
"The first of the ACCELA programs is Building Safety. It's computerized with voice interactive systems for people calling in for permits and things like that. We're trying to make it more efficient so that we can have a faster turn-around in permitting and have a more active and comprehensive review of the permit itself. We've been overrun by sheer volume, but everyone gets equal treatment, from the professional homebuilder to the guy who wants to add a carport to his existing home."
Two very important elements of the GPI, as expressed by Buchanan, are transportation planning and modeling and Small Areas Transportation Study. On the former, the county is working closely with the Arizona Department of Transportation. ADOT is spending $1.5 million on a Freeway Corridor Definition Study to determine whether there's a further need for freeways to be extended into Pinal County from the Phoenix metro area. Reports are expected by the end of the year.
"To coincide with that," Buchanan said, "we're also working on a comprehensive Small Areas Transportation Study, which is something the cities are doing. We'll be doing one for the entire county. Those are the surface streets and where they should be designed, and how they should be designed, how big they should be, whether the roads are of regional significance, how you connect all the communities together and so forth.
"We're also looking at employment centers, and we're looking at how everyone goes to work ... where everybody's coming from. Where are the planned employment centers in Pinal County? Pinal County is working with MAG and the cities to determine where these economic centers are and where they're going to be planned, so that we can then start talking about transportation modeling, getting people to and from work, because that's where the peaks are coming from. It's called Building Quality Communities Program."
Environmental issues
Additionally, the county is looking at environmental issues, which is a big concern, considering that a Zone A - "non-attainment area" - already exists in the Apache Junction area. The primary air quality concern in Pinal County is particulate matter.
Air Quality Director Don Gabrielson points out "there are many, many point sources that are out there, everything from agriculture to rock products to homebuilding to fugitive dust off the desert floor. If we go into non-attainment status, then there will have to be a plan to address that, and we feel that we might be getting close, unfortunately."
"Water is always a big concern," Buchanan said. "It's pretty much the state of Arizona that governs that, so we're very concerned about water and having water supplies that will accommodate for the growth.
"Regional wastewater planning is a big issue, and we're working diligently with the communities to try to improve on the 208 planning process.
"As agriculture and as the desert turns into an urban environment, flood plain and flood control becomes more of an issue. We want more of a comprehensive approach and will work closely with the development communities and the cities and towns on adequate flood plain and flood control management measures. That's an area of major importance that we need to address with master flood control studies and flood plain management plans."
Buchanan also cited quality-of-life issues as being an integral part of Pinal County's plan, such as adopting noise ordinances, dealing with landscaping issues - what subdivisions are going to look like and how are they're going to be developed.
"We don't have the same authorities as cities and towns do," he said, "and we're looking at ways of being able to do that and work with them. Counties specifically can only do what the state law allows them to do. On the other hand, cities and towns have a lot more latitude in what they can do.
"If you go out to 2010, and then work your way back, we're going to be looking at probably in the neighborhood of a couple hundred thousand more people in this county, and we need to do more planning with the cities and towns, regional governments and Indian communities. It's an attempt to plan as fast as the growth and process, and work with the growth community, the developers and homebuilders, to hopefully maintain a high quality of life in Pinal County. That's what it all comes down to is to ensure quality of life, to ensure that we're giving the environment to our kids, that they're going to have something to work with." | 
