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 own no land," Town Manager Brent Billingsley told the council. "So we're literally starting from zero with a population of 100,000 people."

The presentation came after months of residents raising parks at council meetings, and it was followed by three of them raising it again.

The money problem, in the town's own numbers

The town expects about $37 million in unrestricted general fund revenue from state shared revenues this year, against a $55 million budget. Queen Creek's budget is $650 million, and Billingsley noted that San Tan Valley is the larger of the two.

The current budget supports roughly 18 employees and builds no vertical infrastructure at all.

Because the town is new it also has no financial history, and Billingsley used one example to show what that means in practice. When the town finance director tried to get three purchasing cards, one with a $20,000 limit and two at $5,000, the bank turned the town down for lack of credit. To get the $20,000 card, the town had to move $1 million into an account tied to it, and the process took three months.

"For a $20,000 p-card that I could apply for a $20,000 credit card and have it in the mail tomorrow," he said.

Bonds are further off still. The town has no bond rating and no borrowing capacity. Getting there requires positive cash flow, a deliberate effort to build credit, and a clean audit, which the town expects to begin around October after the fiscal year closes.

What parks actually cost

Billingsley said the mayor asked him to put real numbers in front of the public, because most people have never had reason to learn them. Land in the San Tan Valley area is now selling for $120,000 to $150,000 an acre. On top of that:

• Unlighted neighborhood park: $150,000 to $250,000 per acre
• Lighted sports complex: $350,000 to $550,000 per acre
• One lighted baseball or softball field: $600,000 to $850,000
• Multi-use field for soccer, baseball or lacrosse: $400,000 to $600,000
• Splash pad: $500,000 to $750,000
• Community center: $20 million to $50 million
• Aquatic center: $20 million to $60 million

Those figures are construction only. As one council member pointed out, they do not include operating and maintaining the facility afterward. Billingsley added that Queen Creek's new aquatic center cost $65 million.

The town has $1 million budgeted for a splash pad. He was careful not to let anyone leave thinking that money exists.

"Just to make everybody aware, we budgeted a million dollars for a splash pad. We don't have a million dollars for a splash pad," he said. "That's based on projected revenues. So don't go away tonight thinking, oh, they got a million dollars."

The near-term plan is partnerships, not construction

Rather than buy land it cannot afford, the town is pursuing four tracks:

School districts. The town is in negotiations with Florence Unified and in discussions with J.O. Combs to get practice space for baseball, soccer, flag football and cheerleading.

Boys and Girls Club of Pinal County. Billingsley flagged that some residents will remember a Boys and Girls Club presence here that went away, and said this is deliberately not that organization. The club that operated here before was the Boys and Girls Club of the East Valley. The one now in early talks serves Casa Grande, Eloy, Coolidge, Florence and Maricopa. Both belong to the same national organization but are separate clubs.

Dual-use flood basins. Town staff produced a white paper on using existing flood basins, including HOA-owned ones, for practice fields. Billingsley showed draft slides of sites reviewed in Johnson Ranch, Circle Cross, Bella Vista, one off Gary Road, Valley of the Sun Estates, Skyline and a Pecan Creek linear corridor. Only one of the sites has anywhere to park, and he cautioned that parking often costs more to build than the field. Improvements cannot go in an active floodway, and basins that hold water take on both sediment and liability.

Large developers. Billingsley pointed to Maricopa, where the first park came out of an agreement among a master developer, a home builder and the town, and where the large Copper Sky park doubles as a detention basin that removed more than 300 houses from the floodplain.

He asked the council for direction before going further, and got it from multiple members. "I think your direction is to proceed," the mayor told him.

The town has also budgeted a parks and recreation director but has not hired one. Staff plan to wait for six months of revenue data first. Billingsley recommended funding a parks and trails master plan, saying that in Maricopa the town invested in things that later had to be torn out.

"It is the safety of our children"

The clearest case for urgency came from the podium.

Ali Day, president of San Tan Valley Little League, told the council the league has 388 players this fall, a 30 percent increase over last fall, and expects about 500 in the spring.

"I don't know how I'm gonna house them," she said. "I'm gonna do everything I can, but I do need help."

The league uses Combs Middle School, which she said works with them, along with Ellsworth Park in Pecan Creek South and Skyline Ranch K-8. Of the Skyline Ranch fields: "Those fields are terrible. We have no water, we have no way to do anything. We're self taking care of those." The league holds field days before each season to make them playable.

"I'm not gonna put these kids on a dangerous field," she said. "It is the safety of our children."

She was also candid about where the friction is. The schools themselves help, she said, but "I've gone into meetings with the Combs district. They're not the nicest people. They don't care to help us."

Abby Munger, an Ironwood Crossing resident in her seventh or eighth season with the league and on its board about a year and a half, described the recurring scramble.

"Every season we go through the struggle of where are we going to put our kids," she said. "Every year it's okay, we're going to try here, nope, we get kicked out of there."

She said that instability is what drives families out of youth sports, because parents cannot plan a week around a location that keeps changing. She urged the town to look at Empire Park, an HOA property already built for baseball and heavily used, where she said the HOA will not maintain the fields and has refused the league's offer to pay rent and do the maintenance itself.

One council member tied the issue to public safety, recalling asking the Pinal County sheriff what was distinctive about crime here. "He said the unique thing about San Tan Valley is juvenile crime, and the reason is there's nothing for them to do," the member said. "So we have to be thinking about the next generation."

Another member noted that parks were among the reasons residents voted to incorporate in the first place. "I absolutely think that we need to pursue this, and pursue this now."

Own HOA land with grass on it? Billingsley made an open ask from the dais: if your HOA has a flood basin that might work as a dual-use field and the board would talk to the town about it, contact the town manager's office.

Stay tuned to SanTanValley.com as this story develops.