Q.C. Left Behind on $19B Road Aid: Town’s History Led to Its Estrangement From Regional Transportation Fund

By J. Craig Anderson, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Apr. 12–East Valley cities and towns are looking forward to nearly $19 billion in regional transportation funds that will be doled out in the coming years for improvements to arterial roads and major intersections.

But Queen Creek, which arguably needs those improvements more than any other municipality, will have to go it alone.

The Valley’s 20-year Regional Transportation Plan, updated this month to reflect higher construction costs and minor changes in priorities, maintains a strong focus on improving East Valley surface roads to accommodate traffic entering and exiting the area’s new freeways: the Loop 202′s Santan and Red Mountain freeways and the future state Route 802, also known as the Williams Gateway Freeway.

Meanwhile, the regional plan focuses far more on freeway construction in the West Valley and on improving public transit in central areas such as Tempe and downtown Phoenix.

However, the transportation plan’s East Valley map, which shows dozens of road improvement projects that will receive funding, stops dead at the Queen Creek border.

Understanding the reasons for this requires taking a trip back in time to about 2002, when the Valley’s regional transportation planning authority, the Maricopa Association of Governments, was accepting proposals for road projects to be funded under a proposed half-cent sales tax increase in Maricopa County, approved by voters in 2004 as Proposition 400.

Back then, no one could have anticipated how Queen Creek’s traffic situation would be transformed in the coming years, town Special Transportation Projects Manager Dick Schaner said.

“At the time, we were just rural Queen Creek,” he said. “I think we all got blindsided.”

The town was blindsided by its own growth, but even more so by development to the southeast in Pinal County, where residents now account for about 80 percent of Queen Creek’s traffic, Schaner said.

“At that time, Johnson Ranch was still just a dream,” he said. “Everyone had the same question: Who would buy a house way out there to work in Phoenix?”

Queen Creek faced other challenges in 2002 that also led to its estrangement from the Prop. 400 trough.

When the town incorporated in 1989, it did so without assuming ownership of dozens of miles of roads within town limits, leaving them under Maricopa County’s jurisdiction.

The roadless incorporation tactic — since outlawed by state statute — allowed rural Queen Creek to fend off encroaching annexation efforts by neighboring Gilbert and Mesa without forcing town residents to take on the high cost of maintaining arterial streets.

But as of 2002, Maricopa County still owned most of the town’s major roads, so any Regional Transportation Plan funding requests for those roads would have been required to come directly from the county.

County officials had higher priorities in other parts of the Valley, Schaner said. He added that since then, Queen Creek has taken possession of nearly all of its major streets.

“Over this period of time, we have taken in a mile here, a mile there,” he said, “but the bulk of it was taken in this past year.”

Even if Queen Creek had owned its roads in 2002, Schaner said it’s unlikely any requests to improve them would have survived MAG’s prioritization process. Only the projects deemed most urgent or providing the greatest amount of traffic relief were approved, MAG spokeswoman Kelly Taft said.

“There were a lot of projects that didn’t make it into the plan,” Taft said.

Another problem is that the Queen Creek of 2002 did not have the money to pay for its share of Regional Transportation Plan projects, she added.

Local governments were required to pay about 30 percent of those costs, and their share has since increased to about 40 percent because of increased construction prices.

In addition, most road projects must be paid for in advance by municipalities, to be repaid incrementally over a 20-year period with Prop. 400 funding.

Schaner said the measure’s repayment structure would not have solved Queen Creek’s immediate traffic problems, but it would have provided a way to recoup the cost of road improvements over the long term.

“Believe me, if there was a way to get some extra money in there, we would have,” he said.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

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