The competition over who shall rule east Phoenix–its developers or its neighborhoods–is shifting into overdrive as the City Council prepares to vote this month on a hard-fought plan guiding future growth around the area’s commercial core at 24th Street and Camelback Road. As the council’s March 20 vote approaches, the…
Among the stubby commercial buildings that surged northward along 16th Street when Phoenix started booming after World War II, there is one in the 2600 block that catches the eye again and again. It is part of a cinderblock row of storefronts patterned, like much of the street, by odd…
Don Moon is not an easy man to intimidate. Physically, he is only slightly smaller than a grizzly bear. Within state political circles, Moon, a Phoenix attorney, is considered shrewd and streetwise. But when a cop tipped him that he was the target of a vendetta by a local Hispanic…
Louis Rhodes is a tomahto in a tomato world, a conservative who defends liberals, a flag-waver who defends flag-burners. He is the state’s pre-eminent defender of people with contrarian views–even when those views are contrary to his own. For the past eleven-and-a-half years, Rhodes has been executive director of the…
On June 1, Alex Edwards became the least popular victim in Arizona. That was the day Alex, a frail, five-year-old boy, won the nation’s largest damage award in an AIDS-related lawsuit. Arizona, at the time, was awash in sympathy for victims. Indeed, the state was on the verge of amending…
No candidate this year–with the notable exception of Evan Mecham–has been the target of more questions about his integrity, honor and past actions than Grant Woods, Republican candidate for attorney general. Each time Woods begins to build a substantial lead in the polls, another face from his past surfaces to…
It’s easy to cuss the Arizona Corporation Commission. The name is so depressingly bureaucratic most people don’t even know what it means. And when they find out what the commission does, setting utility rates in this state, the bile automatically starts to rise. Who can forget that Arizona Public Service…
A key architect of the Victims’ Rights Initiative has been accused of sexually abusing at least three female employees. Allen Heinze, who resigned unexpectedly Friday as executive director of the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council (APAAC), was already under fire in a $3 million sexual-harassment suit brought by Colleen Shallock,…
“I’m always nice to Bob Corbin, because if there’s one person in Arizona who can ruin your life, it’s the attorney general.” This observation, made privately by one of the state’s most powerful politicians, reveals how much the office has changed since the days when Arizona’s attorney general did little…
Keith Turley, ex-magnate, is about to receive a tribute befitting his accomplishments, courtesy of Dennis Melgreen. Everybody knows Turley; he’s the guy who led Arizona’s biggest utility, Arizona Public Service Company, to the brink of bankruptcy in two short years of ill-considered diversification. But who in the heck is Dennis…
Dennis Steinberg left the Pinnacle West Corporation annual meeting a happy man. He knew his campaign was working–the ads, the guest appearances and private meetings, all executed with the precision of a chess game in the weeks leading up to this day. He could see the impact in the faces…
The City of Phoenix knew it was buying a lemon when it condemned the Estes Landfill to make room for flood-control improvements along the Salt River in the early 1980s. The landfill, located on the riverbank east of Sky Harbor Airport, had been one of the very first toxic-waste sites…
The truth in their message stands out so starkly that, even though they sound like extremists, you know they’re basically right: The Earth is being destroyed by abuse and corporate greed and somebody has to stop it. And there is something romantic, even heroic, in the stand-alone defense of Mother…
Rancher Troy Neal talks more like an ecologist than a land baron as he surveys the 76 Ranch, his 24,000-acre spread in the Zane Grey country near Payson. “We have to take care of the land, or it won’t take care of us,” he says, gazing up at the 6,200-foot…
The state Attorney General’s Office raised serious questions seven years ago about the legality of the Ensco bid to run Arizona’s hazardous-waste dump in Mobile, but dropped the inquiry after getting heat from the agency in charge of the dump, New Times has learned. A secret 1983 memo, written by…
Mo Udall may be the only Arizona politician, aside from the retrograde Bob Stump, who isn’t scrambling to define himself as an environmentalist these days. What with Earth Day, an “environmental” president and unprecedented public support, almost every politician is going about in environmentalist drag. Small wonder why. The New…
Phoenix Councilmember Howard Adams has a thing about snakes, at least snakes in art. And when artist Luis Jimenez proposed to greet visitors arriving at Sky Harbor Airport with a gigantic image of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of Aztec mythology, Adams practically had a meltdown. Adams didn’t care what the…
City Sights ‘n’ Sounds, Phoenix’s noontime nod to the muses in Patriots Square, is under siege. By Oscar the Grouch. The daily one-hour serving of live music is the only regular, cheap cultural alternative to dirty-movie houses within miles of downtown. But someone in that swarm of high-rises surrounding the…
At any time of day, the welcoming day rooms and lounges of Fellowship Towers are dotted with calm, cheerful people living out their retirements in secure, attractive surroundings. For nearly twenty years, the tall building at 222 East Indianola Avenue has opened its arms to hundreds of old men and…
The little tent pitched on the lawn at Encanto Park is quickly filling up with noisy children who have dragged their parents to yet another circus. It’s getting crowded and hot, but the kids seem only to notice that the Center Ring is so close they can almost touch it…
Did Neighborhood Power score big when Paul Johnson beat out developer crony Howard “High-Rise” Adams for the mayor’s job? To hear Johnson himself, you’d think so. “My hope is to be a friend to the neighborhood groups,” says Hizzoner. But neighborhood advocates are far less buoyant. Even allowing for the…
Feathering your nest: To most, it’s just a cliche. To the board of directors of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, it was an economic strategy. Nothing so illustrates how the “homeboys” did business than how they dished out $50 million in “venture capital”–money loaned for speculative investments. More than half, or…
