Wilow Springs City: A Bedroom Community for Tucson?
J.C. Huntington, May 25, 2001

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Agents of the landowner claim that Willow Springs City is not a bedroom community for Tucson.

To support this claim, agents of the landowner will tell you that businesses will move to Willow Springs City.  These businesses are then supposed to employ the folks that live in Willow Springs City.

There are a couple of problems with this claim. 

1. The landowner cannot name a single business that will relocate to Willow Springs City. 

2. A casual inspection of maps prepared by the agents for the landowner strongly suggest that that the proximity to Tucson is to be used as a selling point when marketing the project as a bedroom community for Tucson.

This is a large error and deserves some scrutiny.

There seem to be two possibilities:

1. The agents for the landowner made an error when citing the distance between the proposed Willow Springs City and Tucson -- placing Willow Springs city some 62% closer to Tucson than is possible.

2. The map was intentionally made to falsely indicate Willow Springs City would be much closer to Tucson than is possible. 

If option 1 is the case, then the agents of the landowner made a rather large error when they made the map.  The error is so large that one could reasonably conclude the people who made the map are incompetent. 

Since the maps were prepared by the firm of Cornoyer Hedricks, a well known planning and design firm located in Phoenix, it is highly unlikely that the error in the map was the result of incompetence. 

This leaves us with option 2 -- the map was intentionally made to indicate that Willow Springs City would be much closer to Tucson than is possible.

This raises the question: "Why would the backers of the project intentionally try to mislead people by telling them Willow Springs City would be closer to Tucson than is possible?

Well . . . if the backers are planning to market Willow Springs as a bedroom community to Tucson, then the proximity of Willow Springs to Tucson would be a strong selling point -- the closer to Tucson the better.

It is interesting to note that if the backers intend to market Willow Springs as a bedroom community for Tucson, then there is no need to actually try and get business to move there. 

This would explain why the backers cannot name a single business that has agreed to locate in Willow Springs City.

The backers want you to believe that once they build the houses and start selling them the businesses that will employ the folks that buy the houses will re-locate to Willow Springs. 

Does it make sense to say that you will build houses for workers before the industry that will employ them has been identified? 

Do you know of any city where the houses were built before any industry had been identified to support the folks that would live in the houses?

The backers even want you to believe that a clinic, or perhaps even a hospital, will be built to minister to the health needs of residents -- residents that will supposedly work at businesses the backers cannot name. 

Do you really believe the backers of Willow Springs when they tell you Willow Springs will bring in industry and is not just a bedroom community for Tucson? 

The map below is a scan taken from the Planned Area Development document for the proposed Willow Springs Project.

If you drive from Park Link to Oracle Junction, you will find that the mileage is about 9.5 miles, so the distance from the boundary of the site to Oracle Junction is about 14 miles.

According to Mapquest.com, the distance between Oracle Junction and Tucson is 29.4 miles, so the distance from the boundary of the site to Tucson is 43.4 miles, not 27 miles as claimed by the landowner.  For some reason the map places the site some 62% closer to Tucson than it actually is.