Posted May 19, 2023
Many of you turned out last night for our “visioning session” at our future office complex at Broadway and Pantano. Thank you for coming out and sharing your ideas.
Eastside City Hall has been here for a couple of decades, and over the years it has hosted not just the Ward 2 office, but Parks and Recreation, a Tucson Police substation and Planning and Development Services. Our vision for the new complex would be to incorporate other services to make things more convenient for our constituents.
Just to reiterate how we got here, I had been talking about acquiring or even just moving into Centre East at Pantano and Broadway for some time. The complex was largely empty, but there were still many barriers to doing so, not the least the cost. It so happened that a man that purchased the property also sat on the board of Desert Christian School, which is located next to our current building.
Desert Christian wanted to expand and build new athletic fields and the best place to do so would be the currently unused land behind the fire station that we share our complex with. This had the makings of a deal: swap the city complex (except for the fire station) for Centre East.
It turns out that the deal will be good for neighbors too: among Desert Christian’s plans is to make some of the area publicly accessible open space.
We will have plenty of space, the whole complex is 90,000 square feet on two floors. We’d like to include the basics of what we have here over there. Our office, of course, plus the water payment window. Also crucial is still having plenty of meeting spaces that community organizations can use. One of the things that’s been fun about my office has been the variety of groups that come here: a fiction writing group, knitters, the American Sewing Guild, neighborhood associations, HOAs and Al-Anon. I want that to continue.
But now we can also have other groups have offices here, whether that’s social service agencies, other non-profits or other city and county offices. TPD has toured the facility, and I’d like to see them move some of their eastside operations there.
This will be a good chance to reopen and even expand our recycling center. Our parking lot was just too small to accommodate it before so we had to shut it down. I’d like to see that back and set up in such a way that we can get more items efficiently recycled.
We heard some great ideas last night about services that we should offer. We are always looking for more ideas. Feel free to contact my office at ward2@tucsonaz.gov.