Ed Honea: We're pretty big on preservation and conservation. On the flat grounds, like Gladden Farms, we will allow more housing per acre on a big piece of property. But if you go up and look at Tangerine and Twin Peaks, we only allow an average of two houses to the acre in there, because that has more cacti and more washes and more rocks. The way we accomplish that is clustering all of the homes on a portion of the acreage, making it cheaper for the developer, and the rest of the property stays open desert forever. That's the reason people want to move there. We've tried to be innovative. We can also build multipurpose facilities, such as parks that double as water retention basins, and we can share facilities with schools.
Dan Post: The ideal place for growth to occur is on the slopes in the desert, as opposed to destroying the green belt and the farm land. The farm land is the easiest place to build, but it's also the part that contributes the most to the environment. We should be considering the best of both worlds by putting the growth up on the slopes and preserving the agricultural community. There's a mitigation of the amount they're allowed to build on the desert, but there's no such mitigation on the farmland. They're trying to preserve the wildlife on the desert, but most of the wildlife now is down on the farmland. For a lot of the agricultural land, it's too late. It's already been bought by the developers because the town has made it easy for them to build on it. I would begin the discussion to provide incentives for them to build on the slope land. There's a lot more of that land than there is farmland. Marana brags about preserving its heritage, but it's already zoned away most of its heritage.
