Funeral home project approved by Queen Creek council

The Queen Creek Town Council has given the go-ahead to plans to build a funeral home on 2.72 acres on the northwest corner of Ocotillo and Hawes roads.

SCI Shared Resources, which does business at SCI Funeral Services, requested that a 0.14-acre parcel currently in Maricopa County be annexed, and the entire 2.72 acres site be rezoned from rural to light commercial to build a single-story, 7,630-square-foot funeral home and associated parking.

The project site is surrounded by an existing residential community to the west, the Queen Creek Wash to the north, Ocotillo Road and residential estate lots to the south, and Hawes Road and the Queen Creek Wash to the east.

At its meeting on Wednesday, the council unanimously voted to annex the parcel as part of the consent agenda and gave rezoning and site plan approvals for the overall project after a public hearing.

One member of the public, Jake Ellsworth, spoke in opposition to the project. He said the proposed business is too close to the intersection and would add to already existing traffic congestion. He claimed that neighbors did not have an opportunity to speak out on the project.

“If there is an option to buy more time, I can promise you I can get you guys 200 different people calling in and opposing to this because there’s a lot of opposition,” Ellsworth said. “Everybody’s just kind of confused on when these meetings are, or they moved, or hey, is this a final hearing,” he asked. “The first time a bunch of neighbors showed up is kind of just the company putting on their own little thing.”

Sean Lake of the law firm of Pew and Lake, which represents SCI, countered that they had mailed notices to all area residents about a public meeting held in June, which was attended by six people.

The public also had an opportunity to speak out during the Nov. 12 planning commission meeting when the site plan and rezoning were recommended for approval. No member of the public spoke at the commission meeting.

“There were a number of questions regarding the funeral home operations. One of the biggest was with regard to any crematory operations occurring here. This will not have that at this location,” senior town planner Les Johnson told the council. “There were really no (other) concerns identified by those in attendance.”

The town received one email in opposition about two months ago from a resident living about a mile west of the site, Johnson said.

Focusing on the issue of road congestion, Council Member Travis Padilla asked what additional traffic the funeral home could bring.

“Traffic for this type of an operation is typically off-peak-hour type traffic,” Lake said. “People coming during the day to services, smaller gathering type services. This is not going to be a location where you’re going to have a monster funeral that I think this community has seen. And those are typically held at religious buildings like a stake center, where you would have those big, huge facilities that would cause a lot of traffic problems. They just don’t have the spacing or capacity to have that type of a funeral.”

Lake said the funeral home has a capacity to hold 100 people.

Padilla also pointed to the long-time interest the community has had in the site and fears of what could go in there.

“One of the sentiments that I get from local residents nearby this corner is that they will be excited to have that piece of property improved,” Padilla said. “That’s something that they have wanted to see for some time, and we appreciate anything that would be done there.”

Council Member Robin Benning said the funeral home was “certainly a lot better than some of the other applications that we’ve seen for this parcel, and for that reason I’m generally supportive of this.”

“While I might have hoped for a different business, it doesn’t really matter because we are a property-rights state, and at the end of the day, what I really don’t believe is that anybody would have purchased that property to build a single-family residence that close to one of the busier intersections,” Benning said.

In her first council meeting since returning from a leave of absence, Mayor Julia Wheatley said a low-intensity project such as the funeral home was likely one of the best options for the location.

“There are many other things that could go on this corner — drive-thrus, gas stations, car washes — all of these high-intensity uses. I do see this as a low-intensity use,” Wheatley said. “Where the alternative is leaving it residential, it just doesn’t make sense on that parcel. It’s one of the reasons it sat like that for so many years. So, I do understand the reasoning behind the rezone, and I think given its use, it makes sense.”

Branded as Dignity Memorial, SCI has several funeral homes in the Valley, but this will be its first location in Queen Creek.

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