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KIDS’ ADVOCATE
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
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Land deal: $23M for TU, 197 homes for Ahwatukee BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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FIGHTING FOR WARRIORS
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IMPACT MIXED
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he sale last week of one of Ahwatukee’s few remaining large developable tracts of land has made Tempe Union High School $23.04 million richer and will bring a new 197-home community here next year. Desert Vista 100, a subsidiary of Blandford Homes, completed the sale of a 62-acre parcel on the southwest corner of Desert Foothills Parkway and Frye Road and announced it will start selling homes on the tract by mid2019 for a community it is calling Palma Brisa. “Palma Brisa is already under development and will consist of an exclusive yet lively and
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Google maps
exciting gated community,” the developer said in a release. It will become the 11th community in the Foothills Community Association, but will also have its own homeowners association, according to Pat Wontor, community manager for the association’s management company. “They are working very hard and have moved a lot of dirt already,” Wontor said. “They’ve
On Desert Foothills Parkway, running left of center on this map, the new Palma Brisa community will be on built the parcel in the upperight quadrant.
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Ahwatukee 2018 in the rear-view mirror BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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ith only six days left until 2018 fades into history, Ahwatukee residents can pretty comfortably declare the year has brought some significant changes to their political, social and even geological landscape. Here’s a look at some of the more noteworthy changes the year is leaving in its wake. Club West Golf Course The year began with promise for the 2,400 homeowners in Club West as they greeted 2018 with a verdant golf course that turned into a wasteland in stunning time after the Phoenix Water Services Department turned off the tap for then-owner Richard Breuninger’s failure to pay a tab that now approaches $300,000. It first turned to brown in summer 2016 when the city first turned off the water after Gee ran up a $130,000 bill. He turned off the water,
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one employee – a longtime associate with whom he once worked. As the course got browner, Breuninger found himself deeper in the red and stopped paying on the $1.3 million note he signed with Wilson Gee to buy the course on Dec. 1, 2017. Gee foreclosed on the note, but Breuninger tried an end run by filing bankruptcy, delaying the foreclosure by a Special to AFN few weeks. The Ahwatukee Board of Management ended the year with good news Although bankruptcy from the city: More than 130 trees that were expected to be planted along Warner-Elliot Loop in March arrived early. ABM worked with the court dismissed his petition city all year long to spruce up the loop and 48th Street. for failure to follow court guidelines on appropriate saying he could not afford the potable water the paperwork, Breuninger filed for course feeds on. reinstatement of his case. Gee’s lawyers filed a Breuninger blamed his own woes on the blistering response, asking the judge to dismiss management company he hired to run dayto-day operations, but that company had only See REVIEW on page 20
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