The Daily Agenda: Housing hoopla in Oro Valley

Town council gets an earful about apartment complex … But the apartments are still coming ... Our sister newsletter makes waves.

Simmering tensions came to a head last week in Oro Valley over rezoning part of a golf course to make way for an apartment complex. 

It all has to do with the former Golf Club at Vistoso, which closed in 2018 and left officials and residents trying to figure out what to do with it. Local residents donated $1.8 million to convert most of it into a nature preserve a few years ago, along with $900,000 of the town’s money. But they didn’t buy the entire golf course. Developer Ross Rulney bought the clubhouse area, with plans to build 132 multi-family apartments there.

As the Oro Valley Town Council saw at their March 20 meeting, local residents are not happy about all those apartments going up in their neighborhood. 

The council ended up approving the rezoning of a key part of the property that paves the way for the apartments, by a 4-3 vote. But first they listened to more than 90 minutes of town residents taking the mic at call-to-the-public to condemn it.

While council members pointed out the property was zoned for high-density residential in 1987, seven years before it became a golf course, residents said they were concerned about dealing with more noise, more traffic on the dead-end, two-lane street that runs alongside the proposed development, and preserving the natural state of the land. 

Most of all, they were upset by what they saw as shady dealings by the town council that left them uninformed about such a large apartment complex coming to their neighborhood, as well as relatively late changes to the project.

“It’s a real disappointing mess we are all in,” said Chris Westermeyer. “The agreement was hastily made behind closed doors. Nobody in the community would ever agree to these apartments.”

Karen Stemper said the decision regarding where the apartments were placed was made “without any real consideration for neighborhood residents,” even though the apartments would change the quality of life for her and her neighbors.

“It is not up to us to discover what our leaders have planned. It is up to our leaders to be totally straightforward and honest about abrupt changes that would negatively impact our community,” Stemper said. 

Another Oro Valley resident, Jim Burns, called for some “creative thinking” from the town council. He suggested they buy back the land from the developer or trade another piece of land to prevent the construction of the apartments.

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Some council members and town staff pointed to the various outreach efforts the town offered to residents over the past year, such as a pair of neighborhood meetings, and the fact that the Planning and Zoning Commission approved the rezoning last month. 

But Councilman Timothy Bohen leaned into the controversy.

“I was saying back in 2020, as soon as these people figure it out, they’re going to be really unhappy. And I feel like a prophet because that’s what’s happened tonight,” Bohen said.

The kerfuffle at the meeting last week was the second time in recent months that Oro Valley residents balked at a new apartment complex. Back in January, the town council considered rezoning 88 acres of land from commercial to high-density residential, which would have allowed for more than 200 apartments. Most of the community members who spoke at call-to-the-public at the January meeting railed against the project. The council ended up rejecting that motion.

And it’s also not the only local effort to convert a golf course into housing. The Pima County Board of Supervisors approved a project last year that would build 310 housing units on the former Quail Canyon Golf Course in the Catalina Foothills. 

The need for more housing wasn’t a big part of the discussion at last week’s meeting. But the town is growing quickly. Oro Valley’s population grew twice as fast as Pima County as a whole from 2010 to 2020. Since 1990, the town grew from about 7,000 residents to about 47,000 in 2020. About three-quarters of residents own their homes, while about one-quarter rent.

As the council prepared to vote four hours into last week’s meeting, Mayor Joe Winfield addressed the public to explain his view of the process.

“Three years ago, what was at stake here was 208 acres of the former Vistoso golf course,” Winfield said. “What’s resulted from your participation, from the town’s participation, from Mr. Rulney, is the preservation of the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve. 96% percent of that open space has been preserved.”

Winfield said the process “hasn’t been perfect,” but “we’ve done our best.”

“I understand you can agree or not agree with that, but we really did our best and I believe that we’ve accomplished more than I thought could have been accomplished,” Winfield said.

Confidence growing: The news that the recently negotiated federal funding bill will help local officials keep supporting asylum seekers is making those officials cautiously optimistic, the Arizona Daily Star’s Emily Bregel reports. The $650 million reportedly set aside for those efforts nationwide is 20% less than the previous year, but it’s still a lot better than seeing the funding dry up entirely as expected by the end of the month. Still, officials are wondering what will happen next.

"There are two questions: how much, and when?" said Pima County spokesman Mark Evans early on Monday. "Everything is in flux right now."

Affordable Care in crisis: Democratic lawmakers gathered in Tucson Friday to mark the 14th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and decry the latest Republican efforts to undo landmark health insurance law, the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel writes. Sen. Priya Sundareshan, Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, Tucson Unified School District Governing Board member Dr. Ravi Shah and Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva were all on hand to talk about the impact of a repeal to the hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who receive health insurance through the marketplace.

Nature on the go: The Tucson Audubon Society has launched a Habitat on Wheels program, bringing free resources to build native plants and their habitats to communities in need, This is Tucson’s Elvia Verdugo reports. The new program falls under the society’s Habitat at Home program and aims to make native plants more accessible while creating more green spaces in areas impacted by urban heat. Other goals include creating a safe urban habitat for pollinators and connecting local families to nature and birdwatching.

Church plus state: The Diocese of Tucson’s Bishop Edward Weisenburger and other local Catholic leaders talked about the role of the Catholic community in addressing climate change during a panel on the University of Arizona Campus last week, Arizona Public Media’s Katya Mendoza writes. Weisenburger talked about the importance of uniting faith and environmental stewardship to address the moral imperative of climate change and his November visit to the White House following Pope Francis’ calling for government action.

“You can’t isolate ecological issues and just talk about water pollution or soil degradation or decrease in the number of types of plants or the horrible air pollution on the rising sea levels without also seeing the impact they’re having on people,” Weisenburger said.

Dropping knowledge: Curt sat on a panel of local experts earlier this month during a League of Women Voters meeting focusing on the future of local news, which also featured journalists from the Arizona Luminaria, Tucson Sentinel and Arizona Daily Star. Curt talked about the Tucson Agenda’s platform, model and all that we do to help our readers stay informed.

Making waves: Our sister publication, the Arizona Agenda was mentioned in a Washington Post article about the looming threat of artificial intelligence in the upcoming election in response to the Agenda’s Friday newsletter that featured a Deep Fake of former newscaster turned political candidate Kari Lake endorsing the Arizona Agenda. We might be biased, but we have to agree with the Post’s assessment that “Hank Stephenson has a finely tuned B.S. detector.”

270,000: The number of housing units Arizona is short, according to a report from Arizona State University in January.