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Famed EV driving school auctioned off
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This Week
NEWS............................... 6 Waymo expands EV footprint with Mesa hub.
COMMUNITY ......... 11 ASU seeks breast cancer survivors.
BUSINESS................... 15 Mesa couple’s business saves damaged art work.
EAST VALLEY
EV athletes power ASU baseball PAGE 16 Sunday, March 24, 2019
Nature’s clutch play saves Cactus League season BY JIM WALSH Tribune Staff Writer
A
fter a cold, wet start, the Cactus League in the last seven days has staged a late-inning rally at stadiums across the Valley. As temperatures rose and skies cleared last weekend, Mother Nature’s clutch play drove up attendance at most Cactus League stadiums. But nowhere was the impact more visible than at Mesa’s Sloan Park, where over 16,000 fans basked in the sun on St. Patrick’s Day as the Chicago Cubs – the Cactus League’s perennial meal ticket – helped propel a late surge in attendance. The latest Cactus League statistics, through Wednesday’s games, show that Sloan Park and Cubs fans are the clean-up hitters in the Cactus League’s rally from the dismal weather that gripped the league when spring training began. After another 16,000 fans enjoyed a game with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Wednesday night, the Cubs were on pace for at least six games with attendance figures beyond capacity. The Cubs had drawn 189,041 through 14
Jubilant fans caught some rays at Sloan Park in Mesa during a Cubs game last weekend as better weather came in just in the nick of time, rescuing Cactus League attendance here and at most spring training venues in the Valley. (Pablo Robles/Tribune Staff Photographer)
games, for an average crowd of 13,569; the Los Angles Angels of Anaheim had drawn 102,471 through 15 games for an average crowd of 6,831 at Tempe Diablo Stadium; and the Oakland Athletics had drawn 58,978 in a 10-game abbreviated schedule, for an average crowd of 5,898 at Hohokam Stadium.
Elsewhere around the league, the usual teams were leading in attendance at a level far below the Cubs’ benchmark. The Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants were locked in a close battle for second place in the attendance
in Mesa’s first auction of city-owned land in decades. But it could take up to a year for Blandford Homes to make good on the bid and finish buying the beautiful, complicated tract of land at the northwest corner of Recker and Thomas roads. The 132-acre parcel – home to a meandering wash, saguaros and an imposing view of Red Mountain – had been appraised at $15.6 million in August 2018, downgraded from the original $25 million appraisal because of difficult geological characteristics.
Those include a 600-foot buffer with a defense contractor and a layer of shallow bedrock that will make the installation of water and sewer lines more expensive. Red Mountain Ranch residents feel betrayed by the city for auctioning land designated for a park for 30 years. At least two attempts to build houses there in the past failed before the city finally bought the property in 1998 for $4 million, only to
see BASEBALL page 4
Blandford bid exceeds Mesa’s hopes for desert tract
FOOD........................... 24
No fakin’: No bakin’ required. COMMUNITY.................12 BUSINESS........................15 SPORTS ...........................19 GETOUT...........................21 CLASSIFIED.................... 27
BY JIM WALSH Tribune Staff Writer
T
he suspense built while the price tag soared for a controversial but beautiful tract of pristine desert land in northeast Mesa as two dueling developers raised their boards repeatedly in $50,000 increments to up the ante. In the end, Blandford Homes, a successful northeast Mesa developer, prevailed over Toll Brothers with a high bid of $21.1 million
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