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Published on: 6/19/2008
Last Visited: 8/30/2008
When Mayor Scott Smith visited Washington last month, he talked with all the usual suspects - congressmen, transportation people, immigration people - who could lend a hand with some of Mesa's biggest issues.
But an unusual side trip led to Smith and Mesa being in the national spotlight Tuesday when the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's oldest and most prominent think tanks, rolled out a big report about the American West.
Smith was the only Arizona representative on a high-profile discussion in Denver about how the region might cope with massive growth that is only expected to accelerate over the next few decades.The report, called "Mountain Megas," says five huge metro areas will congeal over the next 30 years in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.
And Mesa is right smack in the middle of one of them, a huge swath of Arizona that planners have designated the Sun Corridor.
It will stretch, according to the report, from Prescott to Cochise County in Arizona's southeastern corner.
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So the folks at Brookings were more than casually interested when Smith visited their headquarters during his Washington trip.Smith had heard about Brookings' ongoing study and Mesa's Washington lobbyists helped set up the meeting.
"As we met with them and shared ideas they liked what they heard and liked that I have somewhat of a unique perspective," Smith said.
As a member of the Superstition Vistas Steering Committee, Smith said, he has been deeply involved in the early planning for "incredible economic growth" in the area.
But, he said, Mesa and the Southeast Valley are "really not set up as a region to take full advantage" of the potential.
That comment reflects a darker thread in the Brookings report, one that balances optimistic growth projections with serious concerns about transit, water, energy, immigration, education and overall sustainability.
Severely pinched highways and parochial politics, Smith said, hamper the Sun Corridor as a whole.
"The East Valley is sort of a cul-de-sac," Smith said, and it needs a major eastern corridor to Tucson to take pressure off Interstate 10.
Confronting those and other issues will require a regional mindset, he said."Outside of Arizona they don't look at us as Phoenix or Tucson or Pinal County.They look at us as Arizona," Smith said.
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Gateway, Smith said, "will play a central role in not only how Mesa grows but literally how our entire region grows, and we find it creeping into policy discussions statewide."