Guest View: Devon Sloan ~ Open letter to the Mayor and Town Council

Let’s just take a look at recent happenings:

The $17 million dollar Naranja Park Bond failure. Despite this bond being "all about the kids" you were not planning to add playground equipment in next year's budget, but rather not until FY 2022/23. Then you suddenly moved it up to the FY 2019/20 budget. Could this be because this is one of the issues that mayoral challenger, Joe Winfield, has been campaigning on (citizens asked for playgrounds and you bought three golf courses instead) and you're worried that his campaign will resonate with voters? $350,000 suddenly becoming available for playground equipment in an election year sure seems coincidental to me.

The $14 million dollar bond. You’ve approved a $14M bond, which you can approve with no vote from the citizens, with $6M of that bond going towards improvements at the Community Center and 45 holes of golf, a dying sport supported by less than 1% of the town population. And now, with the Vistoso Golf Course closing, are you not paying attention that golf is NOT a sustainable sport anymore?

Closure of the Overlook Restaurant at the Community Center. This is due to loss of revenues, which makes me wonder…why close the restaurant and NOT the golf courses? The Overlook Restaurant has the best views of ANY restaurant in Oro Valley and would probably be successful with an actual viable restaurant manager/owner who would keep it open for dinner more than three days a month. Get out of the restaurant business, and give it over to someone who has the expertise.

The inane idea of Main Streets. If this was such a great idea, why didn’t the Town discuss with Vestar (when OV Marketplace was being built) that they should expect a town center concept in a few years? If the Town wanted a “Main Streets” they should have planned it long ago. Key word…planned. It would have made more sense in the OV Marketplace location (lots of space for people to congregate, easy access, plenty of parking, walking trails) than in the planned LaCanada Drive location between the Community Center and Lambert Lane (fighting lots of traffic to get to-and-from).

Complete disregard for Steam Pump Ranch and the Oro Valley Historical Society. What are the plans for the Ranch? Are there any? It’s a valuable historical asset to this town, and the Council doesn’t treat it with the respect it deserves.

Amazing disregard for our town’s desert landscape. Look at the two Silverhawke projects on First Avenue and the Capella project on LaCholla. You call this “judicious use of our remaining land” as was mentioned in the State of the Town speech last fall? What is judicious about it? Judicious means sound judgment, and I personally don’t see that, unless you are talking about sound judgment when it comes to funding your campaigns with developers’ money.

Nakoma Sky departure from Lambert and First Avenue. Wow! And now what will the town do about all that bladed land?

I, for one, will not be voting for any of you in the August Town Council election. I want this town to be the one I moved into almost 20 years ago, and I don’t believe that is possible with your “leadership.”