By Gary Nelson | The Arizona Republic
Like a modern Stonehenge, rows of massive pillars guard swaths of as-yet-undeveloped desert in southeast Mesa.
Adorned with rebar and the hieroglyphics of freeway artistry, the towers soon will be topped with what planners see as a literal roadway to the future.
The vision includes high-rises just across the street from Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. It includes a 60-gate airport terminal just south of where the freeway will someday cross Ellsworth Road. It embraces the concept of a world-class “aerotropolis” that may become one of the state’s strongest economic nodes.
The roadway opening onto all of this is called Arizona 24, or the Gateway Freeway. Its vital first mile is scheduled for completion late this year, connecting a curving stretch of Loop 202 to Ellsworth and to some of the most economically fertile parts of the East Valley.
When the road opens, however, Mesa will celebrate far more than a new stretch of pavement. It will tout a creative financing scheme that sped freeway construction by four years while saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
The exact savings will never be known because no one can extrapolate what it would have cost in the future to buy the land, build the pillars and lay the concrete.
But waiting until 2016, as originally scheduled, would have cost more, even considering the normal arc of inflation.
Instead, Mesa got the project rolling while land prices were low and recession-stricken contractors were willing to work cheaply.
Creative bond plan
The mechanism Mesa used to accomplish this goes by the name “highway project advancement notes.” It’s a special type of bond authorized by the Legislature during the past decade at Mesa’s behest, when the city was seeking a way to speed construction on its part of Loop 202.
Mesa is the only Valley city to have used the bonds.
The basic idea: Mesa borrows money on the bond market and turns it over to the Arizona Department of Transportation to build the freeway.
Mesa repays the bonds with money it is scheduled to receive in due course from the Proposition 400 transportation sales tax that county voters approved in 2004.
