About 50 Cornville residents attended the nonprofit Cornville Community Association’s first quarterly meeting of the year on Tuesday, Jan. 14, at Oak Creek Elementary School, which was followed by a town hall with Yavapai County District 2 Supervisor James Gregory [R] and county staff.
“We were going to trade land in Cottonwood for the 80 acres next to Oak Creek in Windmill Park, Well, it took 20 years to get that process done,” Gregory said. “By the time the appraisers came out, one appraised [what] the county owns for $13 million, and the one that the county wanted, which is Windmill Park on the other side of the Oak Creek, appraised for $3 million due to the offset. We [had] to back out of the deal.”
Gregory said that he has initiated a process to purchase the 80 acres directly and that the county will be working with the Coconino National Forest on the park’s expansion.
“We’ve secured $3 million in the county budget to purchase the 80 acres,” Gregory said.”And then we plan on working with you guys to do, hopefully community center, and putting some resources, trails out there. Hopefully we can be meeting out there in the next five or six years.”
Gregory also introduced Newly-elected Yavapai County District 3 Supervisor Nikki Check [D] to the attendees.
“Right now we have five dispatch centers throughout the county for police, fire and medical,” Gregory said. “Our game plan is that we have another. We’re doing another study to look at to condense it down to two [dispatch centers]. One for the Verde Valley and then another one for Prescott. By doing that, you get a more efficient response. You can consolidate your resources so we’re not all paying for dispatchers in the middle of night. We literally can put them in one location.”
Gregory subsequently said that he expected the final draft of the study to be released within the next few months.
“I just want to say thank you for the letter that you all wrote in support of the Upper Verde Wild and Scenic River designation,” Check told the audience. “It’s actually one of the best letters of support that we’ve received … and I do plan to continue working on that issue as supervisor into the future. Hopefully we’ll get it over the finish line soon.”
Director of Roads Verl Cook said that the county has spent “a little over $230,000” on regular maintenance of roads around Cornville during the last year.
“We do have one project this fiscal year in the Cornville area,” Cook said. “That’s Loy Lane, it’s off Chick Road over by the market. We’re turning that into a paved road. It’s about a tenth of a mile. We’ve got the subgrade done, we have a plan for paving next week.”
“Fingers crossed, we’re thinking of summertime construction,” Cook said with regard to the timeframe for a proposed roundabout at the intersection of Cornville Road and Tissaw Road.
A member of the audience asked Cook if the county had plans to fix a pothole in front of the post office and Cook replied that they did not as “it’s not a public road.”
“In the last year, we issued over 5,400 permits, and so a crazy amount of development happening in the county,” Director of Development Services Jeremy Dye said. “In the last year, we issued 192 permits for the Cornville area, and that included 11 new homes and three new manufactured homes … Those other 192 permits, those were for garages, things like that. People are making investments in their property, trying to improve their property, and that’s what we would like to see in a rural community like this.”
Dye said that the county had a five-month backlog on approving septic system permits at the start of 2024, but the backlog has been cleared and they are now “turning them around in under a week.” He also discussed the county’s Home of My Own program, which provides free home plans to landowners to speed up construction and recently added three new designs.
Yavapai County is considering updating Section 603 of its Planning and Zoning Ordinance to include provisions related to LED lighting, which was not a significant technology the last time Section 603 was revised.
“The dark sky ordinance, I’m hoping to get in front of the board for approval by this spring,” Dye subsequently said.
Yavapai County is also in the process of rewriting its zoning ordinance, which was first adopted in 1968.
“We’ve got a document that, in some cases, just doesn’t match what we’re trying to do in our modern times,” Dye said. “We’re working on a full update of that. And so that’s going to be about a three-year process to get that revised and updated and rewritten and then adopted by the next Board of Supervisors.”
The county currently has a request for proposals out for a consultant to write the updated zoning ordinance and Dye subsequently said that he hopes to have a public outreach schedule for discussion of the planned update “by early summer.”
For more information about the Cornville Community Association, a nongovernmental 501(c)(3) nonprofit, visit cornvilleaz.org.
