Gilbert faces decisions amid financial woes

A slowing housing and retail market has Gilbert’s finance department seeing red and looking to leaders to decide what’s really important in coming years.

Gilbert Town Manager George Pettit told Town Council members Tuesday they’ll need to prioritize planned capital projects, especially parks and recreation facilities planned in the next five years, in order to keep the town’s budget in the black in the next five years.

The town’s retail market is not developing as officials had hoped. In particular, the town was banking on more sales tax revenue from the Santan Motorplex at Val Vista Drive and the Santan Freeway stretch of Loop 202. Gilbert’s budget forecasts were based on the auto mall having four dealerships open by now, with four more opening each of the following two years. Only two dealerships have opened so far.

“We are going to have to re-forecast that,” Pettit said.

Council members appear ready to push back a planned $21 million traffic management center that would allow traffic engineers to manipulate signals from a central office.

According to Pettit, the town would have needed to pull money from its street maintenance funds to help pay for the project.

“I was interested in smooth-flowing traffic, but not for $21 million,” Vice Mayor Steve Urie said.

But the council wants to survey town residents before deciding what to do about parks projects. Projects that were slated to begin in the next year or two will have to wait until the survey is completed to gauge what should get funded first.

“There’s quite a bit of work in progress, so it’s not like nothing is going to happen,” Pettit said.

No matter what gets built first, residents in south Gilbert, where many parks projects are already planned, will have to be patient, Councilman Les Presmyk said.

He pointed out that the town took 14 years to build Freestone Recreational Center in north Gilbert. Voters approved bond funding for that facility in 1988, Presmyk said.

“I’m not saying the south side has to wait 14 years, but we still have roads to build down there,” Presmyk said.

Officials also want the survey to show what sort of amenities residents want at the town’s next pool, planned to be built at the Gilbert Unified School District’s planned fifth high school at Val Vista Drive and Germann Road.

Some on the council are pushing for an aquatic center with water slides and other features, while others seem to prefer a more basic pool to free up money for other projects.

The annual Gilbert Days Rodeo could also face budget woes, both at the town and county levels.

Gilbert’s Rodeo Park has hosted the rodeo for years, but the former landfill it sits on is actually owned by Maricopa County. County officials have recently told the town and the nonprofit group that puts on the rodeo, Gilbert Promotional Corp., that they will need to come up with $750,000 to pay for drainage work necessary to continue to hold the event at the park.

But rodeo organizers told the council that the event has outgrown its current home, and they would be willing to move it to any site the town provides. Council members seemed to favor looking for ways to put the rodeo in a drainage basin at Hetchler Park, near the Santan Freeway and Greenfield Road.

“It would be a burden, it would be hard, but we’d do it,” said Tim Neese, vice president of Gilbert Promotional Corp.