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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
DUST-UP OVER PECOS
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
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@AhwatukeeFN
Foothills Reserve legal case threatens freeway progress
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS A BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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new court battle has emerged over the South Mountain Freeway that could threaten the state’s plan to complete the $1.7 billion project by late next year. Foothills Reserve homeowner Dietmar Hanke has asked state Superior Court to allow him to challenge condemnation proceedings for an 11-acre parcel of common grounds owned by his homeowners association. Hanke filed the request to intervene on Jan.
28 and two days later, the condemnation proceedings involving the 590-home Foothills Reserve HOA and the Arizona Department of Transportation were transferred to the court’s complex litigation division. Both ADOT and the HOA tried to stop that transfer. And while he notes that both the HOA and ADOT last month told the court that “time is of the essence” to complete condemnation proceedings, Hanke maintains “this urgency is at best premature or nonexistent.”
(Cheryl Haselhorst/AFN Contributor)
FREEWAY on page 7
Foothills Reserve resident Dietmar Hanke is challenging ADOT’s eminent domain action.
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS VOLUNTEERS SOUGHT
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Mountain Pointe thespians jazzed about daring play BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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CHINESE SPECTACLE
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THUNDER LIVES!
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orey Quinn admits he likes to take risks. But it’s not in the lab at Mountain Pointe High School, where he teaches biology, but on stage, where he has been the student theater company sponsor the entire 19 years he’s been there. This weekend, the student thespians will be presenting perhaps his riskiest production – the late playwright August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 drama “Fences.” What makes it such a daring work for a high school production, Quinn admits, is Wilson’s raw look at the mounting rage of inner-city blacks in the mid-1950s as a bitter ex-Negro League baseball player blocks (Kimberly Carrillo/AFN Staff Photographer) his son’s budding athletic career. Set entirely in the backyard of a Pitts- Mountain Pointe students in the “Fences” cast are, from left, Janae Jesse, Nehemiah “Nemo” Wright, Grant (with hat), Kentrell Henderson (sitting) and Noah Butler. Director Corey Quinn is on the right. burgh home, the play was turned into a Cunningham Not pictured: Kendrick Horton. movie two years ago that garnered Denzel Washington an Oscar nomination for his the production, running it past his chain of Black Student Union and even Wilson’s performance as Troy Maxson, who could command, beginning with Assistant Prin- family, since he needed their OK to change not break into the major leagues because cipal/Activities Joe Dominguez all the way some of the play’s coarser language – particof his color and now barely scrapes by as a to the Tempe Union High School District ularly omitting the n-word from the script. headquarters. trash collector. He also conferred with Mountain Pointe’s See PLAY on page 12 Quinn went to great lengths to mount
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