Around Town

There are a couple of interesting articles in the newspapers today about Gilbert issues that touch on or near the Morrison Ranch community. The first has to do with Sawyer Estates, the county island that abuts Higley Estates to the west. We've seen the yellow signs along Elliot Road, and assumed they were joining the stampede to annexation along with several other county islands, in order to preserve emergency fire service. The AZ Republic says that the annexation isn't happening, at least for now:

The council also voted unanimously, and without discussion, to repeal the annexation of Sawyer Estates, a county island neighborhood near Elliot Road and the Eastern Canal in north Gilbert.

About three dozen people filed a lawsuit against the town in mid-July to stop the neighborhood's annexation.

In a July 20 ruling, Superior Court Judge Robert C. Houser issued a temporary restraining order to halt the annexation.

Town officials, while researching for the lawsuit, said they discovered that the residents suing Gilbert comprised more than 50 percent of the county island's assessed value. According to state law, a majority of property owners and the assessed value is required for annexation.

"We'll just wait and see how the town responds to undoing what was done," Les Love, a Sawyer Estates resident who fought the annexation effort, said Wednesday afternoon in response to the council's action.

Love said he and other neighbors were frustrated by the town's process, particularly after several residents took their names off the original annexation petition. Now, they must contend with getting back some lost services, he said.

Meanwhile, Gilbert officials said the window is closing for people who want to annex into Gilbert and not have their fire service interrupted.

The Mister opined that his understanding is that annexation is based upon having residents with more than 50% of the acreage, rather than the assessed values as stated above, in favor. We wonder if the folks who are in favor of annexing will now sue; in any case, it appears that Sawyer Estates will most definitely have their fire service interrupted.

On a less contentious note, the new elementary school next to Higley Groves is getting ready to open next week. The East Valley Tribune tells us that they are working hard to be ready:

Gilbert Unified School District starts school Aug. 9. Teachers at the district’s new Highland Park Elementary School, 230 N. Cole Drive, were just able to begin moving in on Monday.

On Tuesday, they were painting and setting up their rooms while Eagle Scouts and parent volunteers sorted books and helped paint the library.

Principal Jason Martin said all of the school’s playground equipment is in, but the cafeteria equipment needs to be tested and cleaned, and the music room needs cabinets. Pallets are still arriving from the district’s warehouse with furniture, curriculum materials, music stands, computers and PE equipment to be set up throughout the 75,000-square-foot building.

With 60 contractor employees, more than 30 district personnel, school staff and volunteers at work, Martin is confident the classrooms will be ready for Meet the Teacher Night at 5:30 p.m. Monday.

Highland Park will serve about 600 preschool through sixth-grade students this year. The school cost more than $7 million and was funded through a bond approved by voters.

This is a very attractive school, as most of Gilbert's schools are, and will be easily accessible to the nearby students.

And the third topic around town (and the state, and the country) has to do with the housing market. I pass several houses for sale in Higley Groves West on my way to our office; some have had signs out front all summer, which was not the case a year ago, when houses were selling as fast as they went on the market. A radio talk-show yesterday was urging folks to call in with their disaster stories of home-selling, while simultaneously pointing out that people's expectations were to make between $20,000 and $50,000 on flipping houses. There are articles almost every day, sometimes 3 or 4 articles, about the slowdown in the housing market, the uptick in the mortgage rates, and the smaller numbers of housing permits each month. This East Valley Tribune article has the somewhat dour headline "Valley Home Market Slides in June..." but the reporter is more balanced in the opening paragraph:

New home permits and closings as well as the sale of existing homes in the Valley continued their slide in June when compared with the record levels of last year, according to a recently released housing report compiled by RL Brown.

June permits decreased nearly 26 percent and sales of existing homes were down 34 percent compared with June 2005. New home closings were off 11 percent in June compared with the same month in 2005, Brown said.

Year-to-date numbers showed permits down nearly 19 percent and existing home sales off by more than 25 percent compared with 2005. Year-to-date new home closings are down more than 7 percent from last year, Brown said.

“Builders have seen significant cancellations across the region as resale homes owned by buyers of new homes have failed to sell in time to have funds to close,” the report says.

“This weakness in the resale market, along with the over aggressive price increases and seasonal pressures have seemingly created ‘The Perfect Storm.’ ”

I am not pretending that there is no slowdown in the housing market. But how could it look anything but dire when compared to the out of control escalation of the market last year? Chatting with the builders around the valley, it becomes apparent that everyone is actually relieved (except for the folks who can't sell their homes quickly enough) that the market is correcting itself. It would be impossible to sustain the price increases, the buying frenzies, or the lotteries to buy those highly priced houses; and indeed, everyone would prefer the correction of the market to the crash of same. So I give more weight to the words following the "perfect storm" phrase:

Brown predicted the downturn will be short, saying the market bottomed out in February. When compared with the last five years, 2006 has remained relatively consistent in the number of permits counted each month, he said.

Housing starts will remain lower until new homes already built are sold. To do so, builders will lower the prices of floor plans in existing communities and the market will level off, Brown said.

The most recent statistics indicate 74 percent of the current 4,276 floor plans offered in new home subdivisions had no price increase in June compared with May.

The general consensus of the folks in the building industry is that the bottoming out has already happened. Things are stabilizing, and returning to normal; prices are still higher than they were two years ago, but they are not ascending like a 4th of July rocket, and that is good, for everyone.

Now if only we could see some bottoming out on the price of cement...