Vote YES on Prop. 134 and empower all voices across Arizona. Break Up Maricopa County’s Monopoly Arizona currently has lenient requirements for ballot measures to appear on the ballot. To qualify, ballot measures only need to receive a small percentage of votes that were cast for governor in the most recent election to appear on the ballot.
MAKE EVERY VOICE HEARD
FUTURE
With the exceptions of Arizona and California, every other western state “showed relatively small urban and highly developed increases,” the researchers noted. The development is needed to meet the exigencies of housing, said Joan Serviss, director of the Arizona Department of Housing. “The primary causes of the housing shortage are lack of supply and rising rents not keeping pace with wages,” she said. “We need to build, build, build.” Serviss said the ADOH has made up ground in the housing crisis since the 270,000-unit shortage was first documented five years ago by awarding tax credits to affordable housing developers in Buckeye. Solana Villas, owned by Roers Buckeye Downtown Limited Partnership, is a 200-unit low-income housing project funded by ADOH tax credits awarded in 2022. It is 70% complete at 25201 W. MC 85. The state housing director said the department “encourages affordable housing developers to seek local jurisdiction support,” however, she noted support often comes from elected officials rather than the public. Buckeye’s history has been marked by segregation since Allenville came to be in 1944. It was “Buckeye’s all-Black community,” according to Estrella Mountain Community College, where Black residents were relegated
to trailers on Beloat Road and forced to farm rainwater in peach tins. Today, the segregation manifests itself differently — old money versus new, Old Town versus Verrado, legacy farmers versus urbanites — whichever way you slice it, those two groups, elected officials and the public, in Buckeye, are ripe for disagreement. Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER This departure became evident during an interview with Buckeye Mayor Eric Orsborn. Agricultural lands are prime locations for development, he said, pointing at Chandler and Gilbert as examples of predominantly agricultural communities in the 1960s and ‘70s that grew into high-density urban cities. “As we grow, we have farmers that are ready to sell the land and maybe move the farm out to a different location or sell the land and … move onto other things,” Orsborn said. “That is just the way things happen across the metro Phoenix area.” Buckeye Development Services Director Brian Craig said the city plans to honor Buckeye’s agricultural legacy through farm-themed mural paintings and parades. It’s not the legacy farmers like Bales, Dean and Wood imagined.
The farmer has to be an optimist, or he wouldn’t still be a farmer. WILL ROGERS There are 600 million unfarmed acres of arable land in the U.S. right now, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. As available farmland in Buckeye dwindles, more and more is vacated in the lower Great Plains over the Ogallala Aquifer and the lower Mississippi River valley, the Atlantic Coast, North Dakota, northern Montana and eastern Washington, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found in a March study. If you want to be a senator, you must work in D.C. If you want to be a movie star, you need to go to Hollywood. So, why can’t the farmers just work where the farmland is? Does it matter if my chain restaurant steak was raised in Arizona or Kansas? While Kenny lamented Arizona Grown labels “used to really mean something,” Porter, the ASU researcher, said “farm to table” philosophy is a want rather than a need in the broad scope of the debate. “A lot of people have this dream that someone would grow all the food that we want to eat on the farm next door, but it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “That’s kind of a romantic notion.” The global ag-tech company Syngenta explored this last year in article titled, “Is urbanization a threat or an opportunity for agriculture?” The authors concluded while urban areas account for up to 76% of CO2 emissions despite taking up just 3% of land, they can help agriculture through new technology and optimizing the supply chain. The solution, they said, is a balance of traditional and urban farming. But a scholarly article published in the peer- reviewed journal Land the same month noted the “conversion is usually irreversible — once urbanized, agricultural lands are very unlikely to be recultivated,” even for urban farming. “Despite the considerable loss of productive croplands due to historic urbanization in the U.S., little is known about the locations and magnitudes of extant agricultural land still under threat of future urban expansion,” wrote eight land-use scientists. Arizona by 2040 will see up to 350,000 acres of new urban and highly developed growth, almost perfectly centered around the West Valley, according to their projection model.
With 6 in 10 Arizonans living in Maricopa County, petitioners can get their ballot measure qualified for the ballot without having to collect a single signature from rural Arizona. This often leads to over a third of the state’s population going unheard in the ballot measure process. Prop. 134 is a simple solution to ensure ALL voices are heard across Arizona.
WHY YOU SHOULD SUPPORT PROP. 134! Prop. 134 would require ballot measures to receive support from registered voters from each of the 30 legislative districts in Arizona: REFERENDUMS 5% of all qualified electors from each legislative district. STATEWIDE MEASURES 10% of qualified electors from each legislative district. CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS 15% of qualified electors from each legislative district. Prop. 134 would ensure that all of Arizona’s communities have a say in what makes it to the ballot! ✓ ✓ ✓
State-sponsored low-income housing in Buckeye
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Cholla Ranch 316 N. Miller Road Riverwood Apartments 25157 W. Beloat Road Smoketree Apartments 902 E. Centre Ave. AZ3 Portfolio 300 S. 9th St. Solana Villas 25201 W. Maricopa County Road 85
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VOTE YES ON 134
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Paid for by Make Every Voice Heard. Top contributors Arizona Farm Bureau, National Pork Producers Council, AZ ACRE PAC. 62% from out of state contributors.
Source: Arizona Department of Housing
InBuckeye.com | Fall 2024
Fall 2024 | InBuckeye.com
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