City acquires land for new public works yard

The Maricopa City Council approved the city’s acquisition of 5.1 acres of land east of Ak-Chin Regional Airport at its meeting Tuesday. The land, at 32240 W. Bud Rd., just west of Russell Road, was purchased for $2.4 million from DRA, LLC, a Laveen company that deals in transportation and warehousing.

While the purchase price of $470,588 per acre may seem high for land in the area, City Manager Rick Horst disputed that notion.

“It’s actually really inexpensive, and let me tell you why,” Horst said. “It comes with 30,000 square feet already enclosed, including all the water, power, sewer and roads so we’re not just buying raw land. We’re outgrowing our public works facility, which is in the heart of town, so it’s where growth will be for our public works. We keep our chips and rocks, pipes and materials and tractors and dump trucks and all that stuff. If we just bought raw land, yes, it would be cheap, but we’d have to build the building, we’d have to run water to it, sewer to it, electric to it, and so by process this was significantly cheaper.”

Horst said the city would continue to use its existing public works yard located within the city rather than use that land for development purposes.

“We’ll be using both facilities, not moving out of one into the other,” he said, adding that the city is growing so fast the need for two facilities exists now.