If you don’t live in Arizona, or even if you do, it may help to put a little background on the Town of Buckeye, until lately a proud if tiny outpost in the midst of the wide Sonoran Desert west of Phoenix. Buckeye was the point in the car trip when thoughtful and experienced fathers would shout out, “Heads up, kids. This is your last chance to use the potty before we get to California.” This was not literally true, but Buckeye was at the frontier of a land where public facilities of any kind could be hours apart.
That’s all changing, of course. They discovered a huge aquifer under Buckeye, and now it’s on track to be the fourth, third, or even second most-populous city in Arizona — and possibly the largest in land area. From the Arizona Republic:
Buckeye is a place where the best breakfast in town is right on Main Street, where a man still feels comfortable leaving his car running as he jets inside a corner store.
It’s a place where you tell someone to meet you at “the Sonic” because there’s only one.
Signs, though, hint things soon will be sharply different for a town that could someday be as large as Phoenix. The acres of empty land are filling up with plats for homes that will make up more than 30 master-planned communities like Verrado. Town Council meetings provide standing room only and are filled with developers holding poster boards with more plans for Buckeye’s future. The numbers say the town could have 1 million people by 2025, up from about 25,000 now.
And most of those 25,000 people are new arrivals. The town’s population was 8,000 in 2000. Folks in other parts of the country have no way of getting their minds around that much growth, that fast. This is one of the signal triumphs of the Phoenix metropolitan area, sixty years of expertise at managing — and surviving — extreme growth.
At 230 square miles now, Buckeye already is larger than Tucson, Mesa and Seattle. Even one of the town’s planned communities, Douglas Ranch, is 55 square miles, larger than Tempe.
The proposed annexation would put Buckeye closer to its planning area of 600-plus square miles and further away from its past as a sleepy, rural community.
“Most people don’t have any idea how big Buckeye is,” said Bob Bushfield, its community development director. “If we continue to annex all the property around, we will be every bit as big as Phoenix.”
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