Supervisor Snider looks at recent Red Cross aid and future economic development

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Hooray for September! Presumably we have a mere 30 more days of monsoon exposure left in front of us. I don’t know about you, but I’m not washing my vehicle until October 1.

During the last several months you’ve heard me sing the praises of the Arizona Chapter of the American Red Cross: within the last 45 days this incredible organization has more than proven to us their utility and readiness to serve. If you have any doubts as to why we all ought to support the Red Cross, just ask the families living in the Las Casitas subdivision on Chui Chu Road and those folks living in the Sierra Ranch area after that incredible monsoon wind storm moved 25 mobile homes off their foundations and tore down more steel and wooden power poles than you ever want to see strewn along roadsides. It was the Red Cross leading the way with immediate relief in concert with Pinal County Emergency Management Services (EMS) and APS.

Ask the 3,000 residents of Coolidge about the caring and generous volunteers of the Red Cross and county’s EMS who showed up to staff cooling centers, hand out water and inventory who was staying where in order to facilitate calls from relatives asking if so-and-so was OK.

Ask the 35 families of Hacienda Acres in Hidden Valley who were the beneficiaries of Red Cross volunteers working hand-in-hand with the county and Global Water Resources to ensure nobody suffered from dehydration in their recent time of need. If you would like to help volunteer or support the on-going efforts of the Red Cross, please contact Shelley Monahan at [email protected] or (520) 252-9021.

I’d like to move on and invite everyone to come to Peart Park in downtown Casa Grande on Tuesday, Sept. 11. The Casa Grande Youth Commission has once again organized a sobering and inspirational memorial event in commemoration of the 3,600 souls who lost their lives on this date in 2001. The candlelight remembrance will start at 6:30 p.m. and candles will be provided; I hope to see you there.

And as long as you’ve got your calendar out,and you’re looking for worthwhile things to attend or support, the Casa Grande Valley Cotton & Agricultural Women’s 2007 Harvest Party is just ahead. This annual scholarship fund-raiser is slated to take place on Saturday, Sept. 22 at The Property. For more information, call Suzie England ([email protected] or (520) 560-3041) or Cassy Householder ([email protected] or (520) 560-0592. The food’s fantastic, the silent auctions are enormously varied, the company’s great and the cause is very worthwhile.

On a more solemn note, this year’s annual Domestic Violence conference will take place on Friday, Sept. 28 at the Casa Grande Hotel (soon to be the Holiday Inn again). As usual, there’ll be a full lineup of impressive speakers from a wide variety of agency backgrounds present to talk about breaking the cycle of DV and working with those who have been victimized. For more information on the conference, call Against Abuse, Inc. at (520) 836-1239 – and while you’re at it, ask them for your tickets to the 21st Annual Taste of Casa Grande (Oct. 21).

One of the more frequently asked questions I’m asked has to do with jobs and employment opportunities. Why is there so much congestion on SR 347 and I-10? Why do so many people commute to the Phoenix area? Why aren’t there more non-retail jobs here? What is the county doing to bring employment and new jobs to Pinal so we don’t have to commute to good paying jobs somewhere else? Those are all good questions – and, unfortunately, (like many of the challenges we face today as Pinal County moves into the 21st Century) the answers are more long-term than short-term.

The first reality is that most industrial, manufacturing and value-added processing operations prefer locations within incorporated towns and cities. Economic development specialists – such as Paul Ringer and his first-rate staff at the Central Arizona Regional Economic Development Foundation – will tell you that cities and towns offer employers (and more importantly their employees) a wide variety of quality of life amenities that aren’t available in unincorporated parts of the county. Amenities such as health care facilities, schools, libraries, recreational opportunities (parks, movie theaters, etc.), shopping and other things for families to enjoy in their time away from the workplace are critical to the maintenance of a quality workforce. If an employer has to continuously rehire and retrain their workforce, they lose productivity and profits.

Secondly, Pinal County cannot by law provide tax breaks or many of the other incentives that frequently form part of the negotiations that lead to an industry locating here. What we can do is provide support (in the form of air quality data, demographic data, etc.) to local economic development entities such as CAREDF in order to facilitate their efforts in this area. They are the specialists and the focal point for pooling information and support for prospective industries looking at their specific parts of the county. My colleagues and I on the Board of Supervisors regularly engage members of the residential development community in discussions about ways to entice industrial developers to the county in our quest to ensure sustainable growth and development.

Pinal County is also a key player in the bridge between the State of Arizona and local governments. We meet with members of the Arizona Department of Commerce – a critical and proactive conduit for employers who contact the state first in their search for new sites – and other state agencies regularly in order to ensure their knowledge of our current capabilities. And the current revision of the County’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan is another critical tool in our economic development arsenal; by identifying and then protecting appropriate parcels of land for future employment, business, and industrial uses, we can make a difference for the future.