Developer plans office building, Queen Creek annexes land

Two acres of land at Ellsworth and Happy roads will be the site of a commercial office building.

Despite some opposition from residents in the area, the Queen Creek Town Council voted to annex the land from Maricopa County and rezone it from rural to commercial, making room for a 17,070-square-foot single-story office building.

“We try and balance the needs of an entire community and one of the things we have not had is true office development in 15 years,” Mayor Julia Wheatley said. “We’ve grown 50,000 residents over those 15 years, and we haven’t added any square footage of office space.”

At its meeting on Feb. 5, the council voted 7-0 to approve the changes at the request of Queen Creek developer Carder Development, which plans to have offices on the site.

The building will be at the intersection of a number of through roads along Ellsworth, Riggs, Meridian, Power and Ironwood roads.

One of the residents’ main concerns was additional traffic on Happy Road. A traffic analysis found that the development would add 37 cars onto the road during peak morning hours.

“That’s a considerable amount,” resident Scott Hindman told the council. “To allow almost 10 times the existing amount of morning peak traffic and four times the existing evening peak traffic — if this project is allowed the town needs to put some type of physical road barrier like a curb to force Carder Development traffic to make a left turn. A do-not-turn-right sign will not work.”

Carder’s representative at the meeting, Chris Webb of Rose Law Group, said preventing or discouraging right-hand turns would be difficult.

“We cannot impede the through flow of traffic back and forth down Happy Road,” Webb said. “That’s where it gets tricky, so I don’t know that we will be able to come up with something that physically prevents a right turn, but we are committed to looking at options that might visually further deter a right turn with curbing or other things that we can. We’re committed to look at those options.”

Among the town’s conditions for building the office site is that no right-turn sign will be installed at the access drive along Happy Road.

Carder Development will be building a right-hand-turn lane on Ellsworth Road approaching Happy Road.

“There is no right-turn lane, so today people have to slow down through (the intersection) to make that turn, which is not the safest thing to do,” Webb said. “This is going to improve the safety of that intersection just by building the right-turn lane.”

Another concern for residents is light pollution, which the developer plans to mitigate with landscaping that includes a double row of trees along both the west and north borders of the site from the adjacent county residential acre lots.

There will be about 160 feet between the office building and the western property boundary. Existing walls along the north and west sides will remain intact, and a new parking screen wall up to 4-feet high “will be added within the landscape setback along the south side of the parking lot to provide privacy and shield parking from Happy Road,” a staff report stated.

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