by Gary Nelson – Jul. 23, 2008 07:53 AM
The Arizona Republic

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.

That part of Arizona will probably more than double in population between now and 2040, the report states.

Such staggering growth in just over three decades will require more than 2.9 million new or replacement housing units, 3.2 million new jobs and 3.8 billion square feet of new or replacement commercial space.

Those numbers reinforce two key beliefs that have developed in recent years among local and national planners:
• Mesa’s southeastern corner, the area around Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, will become one of the top urban job centers in the West.
• Superstition Vistas, a 275-square-mile tract of state trust land southeast of the city, will become home to perhaps a million people in coming decades, with many commuting to Gateway for work.

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.

But Arizonans are more focused.

“It’s been a huge obstacle. There’s a lot of decades where people just haven’t been on the same page and don’t even want to be on the same page,” he said.

Emerging regional coalitions, focusing on Gateway and Superstition Vistas, may help erase that mentality.

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.”

The Brookings report singles out Gateway as Arizona’s best opportunity to connect with global markets, and says the airport will need an infusion of federal cash to reach its potential.

Scott Butler, Mesa’s intergovernmental relations director who sat in on the meeting at Brookings, said, “Mesa is really a testament to what is going on in the so-called Sun Corridor.” Butler said. “It’s all going to revolve around job creation that occurs at Gateway Airport.”

He said Mesa’s place at Tuesday’s meeting in Denver speaks to the city’s emerging national role “That the pre-eminent think tank in Washington chose Mayor Smith and Mesa to represent the Sun Corridor is testament to how Mesa is viewed on a national scale,” Butler said.

READ THE REPORT

Thanks to their rapid population growth and maturation, states in the southern Intermountain West are well on their way to earning the title of the “New American Heartland.”

An October 2008 Brookings Institute report entitled “Mountain Megas: America’s Newest Metropolitan Places and a Federal Partnership to Help Them Prosper” describes and assesses the new supersized reality of the Intermountain West and proposes a more helpful role for the federal government in empowering regional leaders’ efforts to build a uniquely Western brand of prosperity that is at once more sustainable, productive, and inclusive than past eras of boom and bust.