San Tan Valley News

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Aug. 31 that its Queen Creek Arizona Temple will be built southeast of Ryan Road and Euell Drive, on ground between Meridian Road and Ironwood Road that was unincorporated San Tan Valley before Queen Creek annexed it. For a lot of readers, that is the part of this that lands closest to home....

The Town of San Tan Valley owns no parks, no recreation facilities and no land. It has about 100,000 residents. On Sept. 2 the Town Council heard what it would cost to fix that, and then told staff to stop waiting and start making deals. "This town, when it was created, has exactly zero square feet of parks, zero square feet of facilities, and we o...

Rack Room Shoes opens its new San Tan Valley store this Saturday, Sept. 12, at 10 a.m., with a ribbon cutting and giveaways at Skyline Ranch Marketplace. The store sits at 1416 W. Hunt Hwy, Suite E-1, on the northeast corner of Hunt Highway and Gary Road. It covers 8,000 square feet. What Is Happening Saturday First 100 customers get Rack Room Shoe...

San Tan Valley resident Steve Pratt filed a closing brief with the Arizona Corporation Commission on Sept. 4 asking regulators to send the remaining balance of a $456,000 legal settlement to EPCOR customers as bill credits, rather than letting the utility hold the money for what he calculates could be decades. Attached to the brief is an open lette...

San Tan Valley shoppers already pay a 6.7 percent sales tax, and that part is legitimate. What is not legitimate, the town says, is the extra town tax some businesses have started adding on top of it. Town Manager Brent Billingsley told the Town Council on Sept. 2 that the town has approved a sales tax but does not yet have one in effect. The counc...

San Tan Valley residents who sign up for a free library card this month will count toward a Pinal County Library District goal of reaching 100,000 registered users by the end of the year. The district is marking September as Library Card Sign-up Month, and the San Tan Valley Library on Schnepf Road is one of its branches. A card is free to any Pina...

The first annexation request the Town of San Tan Valley has ever received is about 3.3 acres of vacant dirt at the southwest corner of Gantzel Road and Lone Star Lane, and the owners want to build a retail center on it. The request is not new, and neither is the opposition. Neighbors turned out against it at the Town Council's required public heari...

The San Tan Valley Town Council met Sept. 2 for a full agenda. Here is everything the council did. The sales tax is not active yet, and some businesses are charging it anyway The council adopted its tax rates on July 1 in two 6-1 votes, with Councilmember Gia Jenkins opposed, but the Arizona Department of Revenue has to actually switch the tax on, ...

A baby girl who was born in cardiac arrest at a San Tan Valley home in July is expected to make a full recovery, and on Sept. 2 the Town Council honored the firefighters and paramedics who brought her back. Her father brought her to the meeting. "She's truly a miracle," he told the room. What happened on July 30 The call came in at 8:40 a.m. A newb...

A sticky note on a bathroom mirror is the whole idea behind a Pinal County campaign running through September. Pinal County Public Health is inviting schools, businesses, organizations and community coalitions across the county, San Tan Valley included, to take part in Notes of Hope, a monthlong effort to leave short, encouraging messages where peo...

Dutch Bros Coffee and Busy Bees are the first two tenants headed for a six-space commercial center on Hunt Highway in San Tan Heights, and one of the last pieces to settle before they open is how tall the sign out front can be. The Town of San Tan Valley Planning and Zoning Commission reviewed a comprehensive sign plan for the center at its Aug. 24...

An event venue is coming to Hunt Highway in unincorporated San Tan Valley after the Pinal County Board of Supervisors approved a rezoning for the site on Aug. 26. The board approved the request as presented, with 13 stipulations, changing the zoning on about 4.87 acres from CB-1 Local Business to C-3 General Commercial. The parcel sits along West H...

The Town of San Tan Valley will proclaim September as Military Families Month at its Sept. 16 Town Council meeting. The same night, the council will recognize Military Moms in QC / STV, an all-volunteer local group, for 20 years of service to the community. The ceremony takes place during the council meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 6 p.m. in the...

Melanie Eckman, a 73-year-old San Tan Valley great-grandmother, has until Friday evening to finish first in her voting group and move on to the semifinals of a national modeling competition that ends on a runway at New York Fashion Week. Eckman is a quarterfinalist in Next Runway Star, which advances contestants by public vote. Quarterfinalists mus...

Anyone with a Pinal County library card can read thousands of comics, manga and graphic novels at no cost through Comics Plus, a digital service the library district offers in a web browser and through free apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. There are no waitlists and no holds. The Pinal County Library District's digital collections page promises u...