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State highway project riles rural townsfolk

BUMBLE BEE — This town sits silently in the cool autumn air. There is no breeze, no movement, no rustle among the ocotillo and brittlebush that line the road. Even the grasshoppers and lizards are hunkered down waiting for the sun to set.

The main road into town road winds from the noisy Interstate 17 through Bumble Bee and Cleator before beginning its ascent through the eastern portions of the Bradshaw Mountains. The mummified town is decaying gracefully – roofs sagging under the weight of years, weathered planks pulling away from warped frames, river rock foundations crumbling.

It looks like the world’s largest museum diorama. Still, residents here are passionate about the town’s rural lifestyle.

Around a bend, a large sign appears, its red letters incongruous with the dusty townscape: “Save Bumblebee!”

A few hundred yards later another sign offers a little more information: “No Highway Thru Here!”

And finally, set into a low hillside, rocks piled in the shape of six-foot-tall letters: “FUCK ADOT.”

“We’ve heard from some very passionate residents who would prefer that a highway not be constructed near their home,” says Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Bill Williams.

Nothing is set in stone, he adds. But one of the options has Bumble Bee townsfolk buzzing.

A LIFE IN THE SLOW LANE

Bumble Bee sits about 60 miles due north of Downtown. It began life as a stop on the stagecoach line between Prescott to Phoenix.

Originally named Snyder’s Station after one of the area’s early ranchers, W.W. Snyder, the town was renamed in February 1879 when a post office was established. The name Bumble Bee was taken from the name of a nearby creek, which, depending on which depending the source, got its name from a bunch of honey-rich bee hives clustered along its banks or local Native Americans who lived in the area at the time and seemed as numerous and quarrelsome as a swarm of bees.

By the 1930s, Bumble Bee had been largely forgotten. The surrounding mining projects had ended, and the advent of the railroad and automobile rendered the stagecoach line obsolete.

Today the town is home to 13 permanent residents, most of whom are employees of the Bumble Bee Ranch – a dude ranch owned (along with most of the town) by Diamondbacks executive Ken Kendrick.

The ranch provides horseback riding, cattle driving, off-road and helicopter tours and more for tourists and corporate groups, as well as a number of children’s charities that Kendrick is involved with – Foundation for the Blind, Hope Kids, and Mentor Kids USA to name a few. For the dozen or so residents of Bumble Bee and the hundreds who enjoy its quirky charm and old west hospitality every year, a threat to town life was hard to imagine until recently.

REAR-ENDED BY PROGRESS

In 2006, the Arizona Department of Transportation, along with the Federal Highway Administration, began looking into the possibility of expanding the capacity of I-17 north of Phoenix.

The stretch of highway between Black Canyon City and Bloody Basin Road had become increasingly congested and dangerous. The steep, winding grade lends to frequent rear-end collisions in the northbound lanes and often catastrophic roll-overs headed south.

Since 2001, these 18 freeway miles have averaged over 180 accidents per year – including about three fatal crashes, and eight serious-injury crashes annually, according to 2007 statistics from ADOT.

During the planning phases of the project, nine potential routes emerged as the most logistically plausible. The ideas from transportation officials ranged from simply adding two lanes, a widened shoulder and a northbound climbing lane to the I-17 to completely re-routing the freeway two miles west of its current location. That idea would put the freeway on the path of Bumble Bee Road, meaning the route would run straight through the town.

This last suggestion had a number of setbacks. Some of the costs include “high potential impacts to riparian habitat…high impact probability to wildlife…moderate to high visual impacts…not consistent with BLM Resource Management Plan…24 new stream crossings… high right of way requirements…high earthworks requirements…impacts to recreational experience – limited access, sever existing trails” and more, according to a state transportation report released last year.

In January 2007, Bumble Bee residents became aware the project through two state-sponsored public meetings held in Black Canyon City and nearby Spring Valley. Seven months later, an article about the project appeared in the town tattler, the Big Bug News.

Since then, residents have relied mostly on ADOT’s website for project information.

“They were supposed to have another meeting this January, but that hasn’t happened so far. Now they’re talking about one next January,” says Gary Giordano, a former state legislator who lives outside of the neighboring town of Cleator.

During the 1990s, Giordano led the Save New River group, which was opposed to the development of Anthem, a sprawling master-planned community that sits on 5,700 acres north of Phoenix. Today, it has its own ZIP code, “big box” stores and about 40,000 residents.

Giordano hopes the Bumble Bee freeway fight doesn’t have similar dénouement.

“Our feelings are that if enough public opposition is generated now, it could prevent them from running the track where they’re hoping to run it,” he says. “We just don’t see any benefit from the point of view of the taxpayer or the person who comes up here for the beauty and the recreation. The area is very important…there’s going to be a lot of impact.”

Most of the area’s residents can only speculate as to why re-routing the freeway through their town seems like a good idea – despite being time-consuming, labor-intensive, wildly unpopular and extremely expensive.

“It’s convenient,” says Kelly Powell, manager of the Bumble Bee Ranch. “They can build the new highway without disturbing traffic on I-17, and then just re-route it when they’re done.”

Powell’s journey to Bumble Bee reads like the script of a movie on the Lifetime Channel. Living in Baltimore in November 1998, the company she was working for held its annual sales meeting in Phoenix that year. For their day off the company had planned a Wild West-themed adventure at a dude ranch north of the city – the Bumble Bee Ranch. Powell says she so enjoyed the experience that she and her fiancé returned the following year for their vacation.

A horseback ride up to the neighboring town of Crown King was supposed to last a day-and-a-half ended up stretching to almost three when a supposed shortcut led her party astray. They set up camp for the night on an unnamed hilltop with only a vague idea of where they were or how they’d find their back to the ranch the next day.

By the time they finally rode in Kelly was so smitten with the West – with the country and the people she’d spent the week with – that she was ready to leave her life and career back East and start over in Arizona. As she was packing for airport, she told one of the employees that she’d love to work for the ranch one day. She was told that if she were still interested after returning home, she could call and check about openings from time to time.

“Bad mistake on their part,” she says. “I bugged the heck out of them and they finally agreed to hire me as an event coordinator.” Within a year she and her fianceé (now husband) were offered positions managing the ranch.

Powell, like Giordano foresees a bleak future for the area if the freeway comes through.

“It wound destroy the ranch. It would destroy a beautiful part of the Sonoran desert,” she says.

OFFICIAL ROUTE STILL UNDECIDED

Since ADOT went public with its plans, Powell has been active in the movement to head off the re-routing idea.

The website, savebumblebee.org, was created last year by former Bumble Bee resident Alison Atwater, who now resides in Mayer outside of Prescott.

Atwater worries that re-routing the freeway through Bumble Bee will impact more than just the town. “It’s not just about Bumble Bee itself – it’s about the entire canyon,” Atwater says. “Right now, when you go into the canyon it’s like a step back in time. Even though the freeway is up on the mesa, you aren’t aware of it.”

If the freeway comes through, she says, the entire canyon will be “an unpleasant place.”

“We all see how much trash accumulates alongside of I-17,” Atwater says. “All of that trash would be down in the canyon blowing around. The character of the canyon would be destroyed.”

ADOT spokesman Bill Williams says the re-routing idea is not the department’s leading proposal. “We aren’t leaning in any direction,” he says. “We don’t even have a favorites list yet. Research continues.”

When asked about the potential advantages of routing the freeway through Bumble Bee, Williams remains non-specific.

“Each alternative offers a new set of challenges. You may have a number of stream crossings on one but an incredibly steep grade on another.”

However, Williams acknowledges the controversy that the proposed route is creating, and says there is yet one more option on the table.

“The other alternative is a ‘no build’ alternative, which means if the engineering or environmental challenges are too great, ADOT could decide not to build.”

No one seems to think that the no-build option will prevail in the long run. Even if such an option were chosen, the traffic issues facing I-17 will continue to grow as the region does, and the freeway’s capacity will have to be increased.

It’s a dilemma that ADOT, guided by feedback from the public, will have to weigh carefully over the next year. Although the state’s financial outlook has set the project’s schedule back, the final public hearings are set for Spring 2009.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Dial Corp. goes big and green

SCOTTSDALE — Tough times in the economy are not slowing down one of America’s leading manufacturers of consumer products from continuing with its largest construction project ever.

The Dial Corporation, owned by Germany-based Henkel, is continuing to move forward with the opening of its new headquarters and research and development facility in Scottsdale.

The new building broke ground in December 2006 on a site located on the northeast corner of Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101 freeway, just miles north of its current headquarters.

The 350,000-square-foot building will be 60 feet tall and sit on almost five acres of land. The bottom two floors will house Dial’s research and development center, and the top two floors will hold its headquarters.

The building will contain room for approximately 800 employees. They are set to move in in December.

Dial employees will have amenities including a full service cafeteria, fitness center, break areas, a new mother’s room and wireless Internet. There will also be a roof garden that will hold benches and tables, and an atrium with a grand staircase that will reach from the first floor to the fourth floor.

Dial declined to disclose the cost of the project.

“Combining all these functions into one building has posed some unique engineering challenges,” says Ron Deitrick, an architect for Phoenix-based Will Bruder + Partners who has been working on the building for the past two years. “Although there have been challenges with combining the two buildings, it is fantastic to be on a project like this and see it carried out all the way through from the drawings into reality.”

The environmentally friendly building is designed to increase productivity and efficiency. “We like to facilitate people mixing because it raises the quality of the work place,” Deitrick says.

So far, the project has impressed some workers. Dial purchasing analyst Jarod Polburn says, “Henkel bought us four years ago, and this is the biggest single investment that Henkel has made outside of their headquarters in Germany.”

Dial has called the valley home for over 30 years, and this will be the first time the research and development facility and headquarters will be under one roof.

“The consumer package goods industry is based on new product innovation and being able to come up with groundbreaking initiatives that work in the marketplace,” Polburn says. “I think that [when you have] everybody together under one roof they will be working more face-to-face and hand-to-hand whereas maybe they were not before.”

Still, there is some room for entertainment. The new headquarters will form the southern edge of a new construction project called One Scottsdale, a community full of fine dining, luxury shops, boutique hotels, and residential housing.

One Scottsdale is composed of nearly 120 acres of land and is projected to open fall 2009.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Cautious small towns prove bigger isn’t better

TOLLESON — Like the small community banks that dot their landscapes, small cities and towns that didn’t go all in on the real estate frenzy are having an easier time weathering the economic crisis than their sprawling peers.

The housing market bust and related credit crunch has fueled a worldwide economic crisis, and the U.S. economy has been dragging them down. But you couldn’t really tell if you drove through Tolleson or strolled through City Hall.

Here, in this town of 5,000 west of Phoenix, the outlook isn’t so gloomy.

“We’re holding our own,” says Tollseon Finance director Steve Baumgardt.

Many major U.S. cities recruit developers of single-family housing and thus rely heavily on the housing market for revenues. Until recently, homeowners began scooping up property as if playing a board game, despite the fact they were using risky credit schemes – high-interest loans, interest-only loans or loans with balloon payments – to secure such deals.

When the mortgage rates began to soar as the economy began to collapse, many people simply could not afford to pay their monthly mortgage fees. This lead to the seizure of thousands of properties that are still not fully paid off.

In Phoenix, the nation’s fifth-largest city with 1.5 million people, housing development boomed. But now at least 12 major developments are locked up in trustee sales, mechanic liens or Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to a recent report from the Arizona Department of Real Estate.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon told National Public Radio today that the city faces $250 million in budget cuts this coming year. That’s more than any of the last five years combined, he said, and residents could see the barest minimum of city services ever. Police officers and firefighters will not be laid off, he added.

In Tolleson, however, the development scheme and financial adjustments are a little simpler. Slower. Less risky.

The majority of Tolleson’s funds comes from sales and property taxes. The sewer, water and sanitation departments bring in a good share of money by charging residents operating fees.

Tolleson also has money in bonds, which are sold to large organizations or investment buyers, which further benefit the city.

Officials here focus on developing on the city’s heavy industrial background and neighboring retail opportunities.

“We currently have three apartment complexes that are doing fairly well,” says Tolleson City Manager Reyes Medrano. “Two more are currently being built to attract business for retail.”

Tolleson also cuts back on operation costs within their city. With an estimated operating budget around $45 million, city officials plan to do few layoffs and use the Internet more often for training instead of hiring outside consultants.

“We’ve cut back in hires, only recently putting in one to two positions” Baumgardt says.

Traveling expenses were also cut back, with only those pertaining to emergencies being on the priority list. This included computer help training for city technicians when it comes to new and better technology, but Tolleson has turned towards online training, which is just as helpful and cuts back on traveling costs.

“Three to four hours of online training is just as efficient as sending them [the technicians] out and costs much less versus traveling,” Baumgardt says.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.