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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
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Wednesday, JULY 5, 2017
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Parking complaints cloud farmers market future
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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he future of the Ahwatukee Farmers Market and some events staged by the Ahwatukee Board of Management were clouded in uncertainty this week, mired in a parking controversy. ABM was to ask the city Zoning Board of Adjustment Thursday, July 6, to approve a temporary use permit that would allow the market to continue operating between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Sundays and the HOA to stage its annual Chili Cook-Off in March. The request was filed after Katie Weeks, property manager for the strip mall at Warner Road and 48th Street that is adjacent to ABM’s activities center, complained to the city that people attending the market and other events “are parking in the shopping center parking lot, creating a nuisance for our tenants and their visitors.” Telling the city that “everything we have tried to do (signage, hiring security guards, talking with the Board of Management, etc.) has failed to keep their visitors out of our parking lot,” Weeks, representing Commercial Real Estate Services, Inc., wrote: “We are at the point where we are starting to lose tenants and are having a difficult time leasing to new tenants as our parking lot is
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS TO THE RESCUE
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VENUES GALORE
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IN BIG SIS’ STEPS
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constantly infiltrated by Ahwatukee Board of Management visitors. We are having to slash our rental rates, which in turn is a loss of money for the City as well.” While scores of farmers market supporters
created a furor on Facebook sites late last week, a spokeswoman for the association that runs the market pleaded for calm and See
MARKET on page 8
Banned refrigerant impacting Ahwatukee heat-pump owners BY JIM WALSH AFN Staff Writer
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(Dianne Ross/AFN Contributor)
Elijah Lewis, 2, left, and his 3-year-old brother Ezekial were busy with berries Sunday at the Ahwatukee Farmers Market, blissfully unaware of the furor surrounding its future. See p. 28 for a column on the furor.
s temperatures soar across Ahwatukee, so is the cost of keeping aging heat pumps working for area homeowners. Whether homeowners try to hang on to their existing heat pump till its last blast of cold air or are replacing it, they’re digging deeper into their wallets.
The choice: buying a new, more expensive heat pump or paying far more for a oncecheap refrigerant called R-22 to keep the old one hanging on. A target in the war on climate change since the U.S. ratified the Montreal Protocol in 1988, the gas is being phased out because it depletes the ozone layer around Earth. New heat pumps using it have not been manufactured since 2010. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has
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declared that since a heat pump lasts an average 10 years, R-22 can no longer be produced at all starting Jan. 1, 2020. The EPA has already ordered severe cutbacks in its production as part of the phase-out and a transition to new units that use the less offensive R-410 refrigerant, a chemical that depletes the ozone at a lesser rate.
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