1/2/2010 9:59:00 PM
2000-2009: A decade filled with turmoil draws to a close
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Les Stukenberg/
The Daily Courier
2002 -
Prescott and Central Yavapai firefighters wait for an assignment at the Indian Fire south of Prescott on May 15, 2002. |
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Les Stukenberg/
The Daily Courier
2005 -
Motor officers from Prescott, Prescott Valley and the Arizona Department of Public Safety cracked down on speeding cars near Walker Road on Highway 69 in this file photo from Dec. 28, 2005. |
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From the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to a devastating Prescott-area wildfire to economic crises not seen since the Great Depression, the 2000s were memorable in more ways than one.
However, despite those painful events, residents in the Prescott area and across Yavapai County have managed to pull through most of these difficulties and persevere.
What follows is a chronological rundown of some of the biggest local stories from the past 10 years.
• 2000: Democrat gains a seat in District 1
For the first time in 25 years, voters in Republican-dominated District 1 chose a Democrat to fill their seat in the state Legislature. On Nov. 7, Prescott attorney Henry Camarot claimed the spot, primarily because of voters' frustrations with ultraconservative incumbent Rep. Barbara Blewster, R-Dewey, who, among other things, made inflammatory comments about homosexuals during her first term.
Camarot finished second behind another incumbent, Rep. Linda Binder, R-Lake Havasu, to nab one of the two LD1 seats.
"A miracle has happened in District 1," Camarot said on election night. "I thought I was a long shot."
Voters also approved spending $69.5 million in 20-year bonds for Yavapai College, which paved the way for two new buildings at the college's Prescott campus. A new library and a new swimming pool were included in the mix.
• 2001: Tri-city residents search for ways to meet the challenge after Sept. 11 attacks
The aftereffects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., reverberated across the country, with Prescott residents reaching out to help families of the 9/11 victims and rescue workers on the East Coast.
Residents donated money and organized various fundraisers for the Red Cross, which had a direct pipeline to those suffering most.
The only trouble was that many of the donations began bypassing the tri-city area's charitable organizations, which had come to depend on local residents for support.
Six days after the attacks, the Red Cross sponsored a patriotic rally at the Courthouse Plaza, where other vigils were later conducted.
• 2002: Indian Fire goes down as worst in Prescott history
On May 15, a stubborn and fast-moving fire began in a seemingly benign area of the Prescott National Forest and charred 1,350 acres - displacing people and animals, destroying homes and reminding residents not to take the forest for granted.
Known as the Indian Fire, it was the worst wildfire in Prescott's history, obliterating seven homes or structures. Firefighters did not contain the fire until May 18.
The blaze started around 2:30 p.m. near a campground just north of Indian Creek Road and grew to 100 acres within 30 minutes. Gusty winds and extremely dry conditions fed the flames, which melted thick metal guardrails as they jumped across Highway 89 toward several subdivisions.
Although no one died in the fire, it forced some 1,000-1,500 people to evacuate, mostly from the Timber Ridge, Mountain Club, Hidden Valley Ranch and Cathedral Pines subdivisions in south Prescott.
"There were seven structures lost, but there were many, many more saved," Prescott Fire Chief Darrell Willis said that year. "We had in the neighborhood of 2,000 structures at risk."
• 2003: Debate over smoking in public divides Prescott
With two fundamental rights at the forefront, a debate over smoking in public split the community almost down the middle throughout much of the year.
Although a host of other issues also heated up in 2003, it was the smoking issue that most thoroughly caught the public's attention.
In the end, the group touting the right to a healthy environment prevailed over another that advocated the right to choose. By a margin of 1 percent, voters in November approved a ban on smoking in most workplaces.
Nonetheless, soon after the Nov. 4 general election, the Citizens for Fair Non-Smoking Laws vowed to take their "freedom of choice" option back to the voters in 2004.
The winning initiative, Proposition 200, included a two-year exemption from the ban for bars. City Attorney John Moffitt later ruled that the exemption also applied to bars inside of restaurants.
• 2004: Water deals top local headlines
As 2004 began, the City of Prescott was well into a deal to buy a 50,000-acre water ranch northwest of Paulden. By the time the year ended, though, the city had finalized the purchase of a different ranch nearby.
After months of exploration in the two Paulden-area ranches - the CV/CF and the JWK - the city became the owner in late December of about 4,500 acres of the JWK Ranch, along with the rights to pump thousands of acre-feet of water per year for new growth.
In January of that year, the city was still deep in the "due diligence" it was conducting to determine if it should buy the massive CV/CF Ranch for $30 million. Those studies continued for the first four or five months of the year.
But complications arose with the CV/CF Ranch, including a question about prior claims on the water rights. The city's own appraisal of the ranch came in about $7 million lower than the $30 million purchase price.
In late May, the city changed course from the CV/CF Ranch and focused instead on the nearby JWK Ranch, which consisted of considerably less acreage, but the rights to more water.
Prescott and the Town of Prescott Valley later signed an intergovernmental agreement to split the water from the ranch between them, with the former getting about 54 percent, while the latter received about 46 percent. The matter of how to go about paying for a pipeline that would bring the water to those communities remained a sticking point, though.
• 2005: As traffic increases, so do fatalities on Highway 69
In 2005, Highway 69 proved to be as dangerous and deadly a roadway as it had been in previous years.
The crude nickname "Blood Alley" that the highway earned among locals decades ago seemed to justly describe the risk thousands of motorists were taking each day on the stretch between Prescott and Prescott Valley where most accidents, including three fatalities, occurred that year.
Shortly after a 22-year-old Prescott Valley woman died in a head-on collision just west of Prescott Gateway Mall Oct. 20, state and local law enforcement officials began conducting collaborative traffic enforcement patrols on a 16-mile stretch of the highway between Dewey and Prescott.
In early November, government officials from Prescott and Prescott Valley rallied behind police efforts during a press conference when they announced the start of the Highway 69 Motorist Safety Project. Traffic light violations, speeding, impairment and inattention were factoring into the vast majority of the accidents, Department of Public Safety Sgt. Tim Bolger said at the time.
• 2006: Young's Farm closure signals end of an era
After playing host to decades of annual corn and pumpkin festivals that drew hundreds of thousands of urbanites from all over the state to the tiny town of Dewey, Young's Farm put on its last festival in 2006.
The end of an era really didn't hit home until the Young family conducted an auction in the spring of 2007. Until that time, the family kept its store and gift shop open while it cleared out its inventory of canned goods and other items.
Although the future of the property remained unclear, Young's Farm and Monogram Development Services LLC, a Phoenix-based developer, officially announced the sale of the property on Jan. 23. Residents in the newly incorporated town of Dewey-Humboldt expressed their opposition to the developer's plans to construct homes and commercial buildings on the property - plans that ultimately never got off the ground.
• 2007: Wilson beats Simmons for Prescott mayoral post
Heading into the 2007 Prescott City Council election campaign, incumbent Mayor Rowle Simmons appeared to have plenty of strengths: longevity in the community, six years of experience as mayor, and a solid record at City Hall.
But in the ensuing months, the highly structured campaign of challenger Jack Wilson - bolstered by an ongoing controversy over the Lowe's home improvement store construction site on Highway 69 - tapped into the community's desire for change.
The result was an upset in which seven-year Prescott resident Wilson unseated Simmons, a Prescott businessman of three decades.
From the start, the two candidates emphasized their disparate styles. Throughout the campaign, Wilson used his Internet savvy to manage a highly organized effort.
While primary night ended with the preliminary results too close to call, a subsequent count the next day showed that Wilson had outdistanced Simmons by 142 votes, with Wilson receiving 6,546 votes to Simmons' 6,404.
Afterward, both candidates attributed the results to three main factors: Wilson's energetic campaign, voter outrage over the Lowe's project, and a general desire for change.
• 2008: Economy woes
Caught up in the housing market crash, local governments rushed to cut everything from employees to electricity use as revenues plummeted in 2008.
With revenue sources heavily dependent on sales taxes from construction and retail/tourism, the state and its counties and municipalities faced some tough decisions.
For example, Prescott Valley had been issuing as many as 143 single-family home building permits per month in the new millennium, but in 2008 the monthly count never even hit 20. The town's budget dropped 17 percent in the fiscal year that started July 1, as the town initiated a hiring freeze and cut departmental budgets by 10 percent.
Cutbacks hit Prescott and Chino Valley hard, too. Linens N Things closed at the Gateway Mall, American Home furniture store shut its doors at the Frontier Village shopping center, and Ted Lamb shut down his Subaru dealership. Nonetheless, Cracker Barrel restaurant and The Home Depot opened in Prescott Valley, while Tim's Toyota and the York family celebrated anniversaries of their car dealerships in 2008.
• 2009: Money matters
This past year witnessed some of the same economic stresses as 2008, with businesses such as the Frontier Village movie theater and the Prescott KMart dissolving.
Local governments felt the same pain as most businesses did with shrinking revenues, which led to layoffs, furloughs and more penny-pinching.
As 2009 drew to a close, Prescott, Prescott Valley and Chino Valley continued to see drops in sales tax revenues, which affected everything from employees' pay to reduced services.
So what does the new decade have in store for this area? Stay tuned and read all about it.
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Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
RJ
Nothing of any importance ever happens here......and nothing ever will. Enjoy it.
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
GasMan
I see where the decade "dents" are still fuming on the exact meaning of this 10-year period. Not as meaningful as your good list, though. Too bad you forgot Mr. Renzi's fall from grace. Otherwise, you get a "10" in my book.
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
Martha
Doug, thanks for a great overview of our local news during this last decade -
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
Sheryl Tilley
I'm not surprised at all. But in the grand scheme of things -- who really gives a rat's patootie?
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
No name provided
I checked out the meaning of a decade in Wikipedia. Here is what they say: A decade is a period of ten years. The word is derived (via French) from the Late Latin decadem which actually stands for ten days. The other words for spans of years also come from Latin: lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years). Although any period of ten years is a decade,[1][2] a convenient and frequently referenced interval is based on the tens digit of the calendar year, as in using 1960s to represent the decade from 1960 to 1969.[3][4] Often, for brevity, only the tens part is mentioned (60s or sixties), although this may leave it uncertain which century is meant. These references are frequently used to encapsulate pop culture or other widespread phenomena that dominated such a decade, as in The Great Depression of the 1930s. For example, the decade commonly referred to as the "two thousands" ended on December 31, 2009. Some writers[5] like to point out that since the common calendar starts from the year 1, its first full decade contained the years from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and so on. The interval from the year 2001 to 2010 could thus be called the 201st decade, using ordinal numbers. However, contrary to practices in referencing centuries, ordinal references to decades are quite uncommon. In addition to the interpretations noted above, a decade may refer to an arbitrary span of 10 years. For example, the statement "during his last decade, Mozart explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time," merely refers to the last 10 years of Mozart's life without regard to which calendar years are encompassed.
Posted: Sunday, January 03, 2010
Article comment by:
trippetta
Not having to do with naught and every day being a new day; why fill ones life with faux snobbery?
Posted: Saturday, January 02, 2010
Article comment by:
Stephen Waits
The decade goes from 2001 through 2010, so it has another year. You could say the noughts ended, but not the decade.
No, I'm not surprised this has to be explained to you at The Courier.
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