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3 PETS KILLED
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
.3 AHWATUKEE FIRST TIME SCARES NOVELIST
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THEY HAVE YOUR CAKE
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Make Gee comply, residents ask court BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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ime to pay the piper. That’s what Ahwatukee Lakes residents Eileen Breslin and Linda Swain this week told state Superior Court as they asked it to require owner Wilson Gee to restore the golf course or be held in civil and criminal contempt of court. Opening a new front in their five-year-old legal battle to restore the course that Gee closed in 2013, Breslin and Swain in an open letter to AFN said they’ve directed their lawyer, Tim Barnes, “to enforce the permanent injunction we were awarded.” Barnes filed asked the court to force Gee to show cause why he should either begin work to restore the course or risk being held in contempt.
“To date the golf course has continued to deteriorate and no apparent steps have been taken to restore the golf course,” Barnes’ motion states. He asked the court to conduct an evidentiary hearing and order Gee’s company “to appear and show cause why it should not be held in contempt for violating the permanent injunction ordering the owner of the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course to operate a golf course on that property.” The request will be considered by a different judge from the one who twice ruled that the covenants, conditions and restrictions governing the 101-acre site required it be maintained as a golf course. Superior Court Judge John Hannah issued that decision twice in the last three years and his latter ruling of January 2018 was recently upheld by a three-judge panel of the Arizona
Court of Appeals. Through normal judicial rotations, Herron no longer oversees the case and a different judge will hear Barnes’ motion. The case will now be before Judge Theodore Campagnolo. Several different companies owned by Gee are listed in Barnes’ motion. The True Life Companies, which had tried to get homeowners to let it build houses, a school and other amenities on the site, also is named in Barnes’ motion. That motion sets the stage for an historic showdown between Gee and the homeowners. After the appeals court ruled in the homeowners’ favor, Gee repeatedly in an interview what he has consistently told AFN in the past – namely, that the site will never be a golf course again.
see LAKES page 12
Sound wall’s endpoint angers community
BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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s crews race to toward a possible opening on Dec, 20, the South Mountain Freeway continues to produce new problems for Ahwatukee homeowners. Even as design-builder Connect202Partners and the Arizona Department of Transportation bowed to pressure from two homeowners associations and the entire Legislative District 18 delegation and agreed to address two problems, residents in one of Ahwatukee’s newest communities are fuming the highway agencies’ westernmost termination point for the sound wall on the Pecos segment. Instead of extending the wall around a bend as the freeway extends through South Mountain, it now ends at a point several
see WALL page 14
At the western end of the Pecos segment of the freeway, the sound wall takes an abrupt turn toward the Promontory community, creating a noise and nighttime nuisance, residents say.(Tom Sanfilippo/InsideOut Aerial)
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