Queen Creek Town Council meetings open the way they always have: with an award ceremony. Honor students and civic groups come forward, each posing for a photo with the council, and on some nights that stretches close to an hour.
Then the council turns to the business of a town with an $840 million budget, more than 700 employees and a water purchase measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
That gap between ceremony and scale is the job, Mayor Julia Wheatley told the Queen Creek Tribune in an interview published Sunday. Wheatley ran unopposed for a second four-year term in the recent primary, and all three incumbent council members up for re-election won outright, avoiding a November runoff. The new term begins in January.
Four years of growth
Queen Creek's population will have grown by roughly a third during Wheatley's first term as mayor, to a projected 95,338. The same period brought the Harquahala Basin water agreement, designed to deliver about 1.7 million acre-feet of water for roughly $465 million, a purchase the town frames as securing its supply for 110 years.
"The growth is more than we anticipated, but we need to remember that people are moving here for the same reasons that everyone else did," Wheatley told the Tribune.
Signs of the balancing act show up in the ordinance work. The town spent hundreds of staff hours this year updating farm-animal rules for properties of an acre or more. Mini-farms, once the backbone of Queen Creek, now account for 1,200 of its 28,000 properties.
Traffic is the complaint
Police Department figures cited in the interview put the increase in traffic at 150% over four years, with about 225,000 vehicles on Queen Creek roads daily, well beyond what a town of roughly 91,900 residents generates on its own. Police Chief Randy Brice has pointed to through traffic from outside town as a large share of the volume.
The current budget carries $71 million for roadways. Smaller changes often draw the loudest response, Wheatley said, such as a single added left-turn lane. One recent experiment has been noticed outside town: green-painted strips on downtown bike lanes along Ocotillo and Ellsworth roads, meant to pull drivers' attention toward cyclists.
