Rogue Columnist Jon Talton must be having second-thoughts lately when he ap-pended an honest opinion to an earlier statement that he made in "a constant attempt to keep viable."
Once again hindsight is everything; it can be revised with the strokes of a pen warmed up in hell.
On April 2nd, 2006, the Viewpoints section of the Arizona Republic was dedicated to Superstition Vistas. On October 20, 2020 Talton traveled back through time to start off this article on the same subject re-visited as you read-for-yourselves in the insert below.
But why does Jon Talton - The Rogue Columnist - choose to write now about Roc Arnett's "Superstition Vistas"??? That's anybody's guess, but he's getting nostalgic and not quite-so-rogue when he ends his article stating he likes it the way it was.
Readers might wonder what this is all about (see the post headline), with so many details included. Talton turns over more explanations on the subject to recent reports written and published online the next day.
In 1977, when I was working on the ambulance as an EMT-paramedic, I was temporarily exiled from the city and worked for Aids Ambulance (the former Mesa Ambulance Service). . .
". . . Headlined, "A Better Vision: At this key moment, Arizona Must Decide How to Plan For The State's Next Great Community," the front page featured columns by Grady Gammage and yours truly. Gammage, the real-estate lawyer, was lead author of the Morrison report. Although an apologist for sprawl, he argued that careful planning could get Superstition Vistas "right."
Talton largely praised the April 2006 report then quite obviously had a change of heart just a few days ago in October 2020:
Of course, the honest response would have been: Another million people in single-family-house sprawl, far from jobs and amenities, adding to air pollution and environmental degradation, in a region that already has yet to build the infrastructure to meet even existing needs, where the temperature has risen 10 degrees in my lifetime, when 300,000 acres of empty land already sits in the metro area, and climate change is coming...are you insane?
But this was state trust land, meant to be sold and developed, and stopping the onslaught was never going to happen. At least given the politics of that era and now, the enormous power of the Real Estate Industrial Complex.
Other power alignments could have turned the land into a wilderness area. After all, this land was given to Arizona by the federal government at statehood to fund education . . ."
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OK. Then what happened? Let's turn to some extracts taken from an earlier post on this blog, featuring a different reporter, Gary Nelson
The next piece of the jig-saw puzzle was written about earlier in the summer.
Superstition Vistas: An EV vision on hold looks for new life
“. . . Seldom in the history of the U.S. has there been a chance to envision the future of one piece of property this large, this strategic and this close to a major metropolitan region,” a 2006 report said. It seemed then that construction in the Vistas could begin at any moment.
But history, in the form of the Great Recession, hit the pause button . . . if life there were to be tenable, it would need untold billions of infrastructure – provided by whom, exactly? And what about the water supply? . ."
Blogger Note: The City of Mesa appears to be solving part of that solution by a taxpayer-funded $184,000,000 investment for the infrastructure and construction of the Greenfield Water Treatment Plant planned to go into operation in late 2018.
Mike Hutchinson, a former Mesa city manager, has served for nine years as the East Valley Partnership’s project director for Superstition Vistas. It was the EVP that launched planning efforts in about 2003. . .
Maybe by so-called "Angel Investors"?? . . .
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