'Growth monster' keeps on moving in Gilbert

Fairview Street, on a Gilbert county island, seems to have gone back in time. Children play in the street. Residents ride their horses freely outside the large lots of an acre or more.

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And road rage that neighbors say had taken over the 25 mph county road just south of the Santan Village Parkway exit of Loop 202’s Santan Freeway has been stopped by temporary barricades.

“It’s pretty quiet now that we don’t have the rat race going on,” said Larry Krugen, appointed president of the Higley Ranches Homeowners Association, as he recently walked down the closed street. “This is the way the neighborhood used to be five years ago. Now we can get up on our horses. We can go for walks, see kids playing.”

But changing times threaten to shatter that serenity. The traffic barricades, put up to keep out cut-through traffic coming off the freeway, will be taken down as Maricopa County officials study the traffic problem.

The Higley Ranches area is just one of the rural neighborhoods along Gilbert’s leg of the Santan Freeway that is seeing life change as commercial development arrives and begins to transition what was once a highly rural region into what is anticipated to become the economic core of Gilbert. And that has created a divide between rural and urban life.

“I fully believe (Gilbert officials) would prefer that everybody move, and it turn into another quarter- or fifth-acre lots for suburbanites,” Higley Ranches resident Jim Torgeson said. “The whole plan, they counted on victimizing the county islands, and they did.”

Gilbert Mayor Steve Berman said that while some homeowners along the freeway have sold their homes to developers eager to bring offices and retail to prime real estate, the town itself can’t take the homes and replace them with businesses or smaller home lots.

“We haven’t zoned anybody’s house and turned it into a Wal-Mart,” he said.

But the growth is bringing so much new business and traffic to a once quiet region that it has caused some newly annexed residents so much angst that they’ve created a political action committee called Manage Commercial Density.

The group is collecting signatures to get a referendum on a ballot that would ask voters to overturn the zoning of a shopping center and commercial lot on land adjacent to their homes, at Germann and Greenfield roads.

“We moved here after the freeway was coming in, but we had no idea it would be every corner in Gilbert that was going to be turned into commercial,” said Mike Webb, a group member. “It just seems the city won’t stop.”

The growth is a cause of concern for residents in various rural areas along the freeway, especially from the Val Vista Drive exit to the Greenfield Road/Santan Village Parkway exit. Major projects are under construction along that stretch, including two regional malls, what’s expected to be the state’s largest auto mall, and a large health care complex near Mercy Gilbert Medical Center.

The freeway also is the target of town talk to zone for mid-rises as a way to attract larger companies.

On Gilbert’s general plan maps, some rural residential areas are included in future plans for the town’s limited business and office space.

And where the freeway turns north after Val Vista, many commuters from Queen Creek and Pinal County exit in this vicinity and speed through the local streets.

It all adds up to one thing for county residents who moved to rural homes once surrounded by cotton fields and cows: Growth is encroaching on their lifestyle, and some fear it may not stop until they’re all gone.

Town officials said they have no plans to run off rural residents, but admit that the town zoned retail, industrial and business parks where they made logical sense to succeed: Off the town’s only freeway, including where homes are now.

Town Manager George Pettit said it’s up to homeowners whether they sell their land to developers in coming years, in what has become largely a metropolitan area rather than a rural location.

“I think over time you will see that, just because of the economic land value,” Pettit said. But “from some people’s perspective, this is their property and they lived there 20 years. They thought they were running ahead of the growth monster, and it wouldn’t catch them.”

Town Councilwoman Joan Krueger criticized Manage Commercial Density’s referendum attempt, and said the town needs the retail and business development, including the strip mall the residents oppose, to be healthy in the future, because the town relies too strongly now on revenue from new homes.

“People’s neighborhoods are being infringed on by the growth. They don’t want their lifestyles to change, I understand that,” Krueger said. “But the accusation that somehow the council is making this growth happen is hogwash. Growth happens.”