Queen Creek HOAs encouraged to use water-friendly landscaping

As part of its ongoing water conservation efforts, Queen Creek is emphasizing a program to help homeowners associations remove turf from certain areas of a subdivision.

At a recent planning meeting, town staff updated the Queen Creek Town Council on its HOA Landscape Conversion Program.

The finer point of the plan is to assist in a landscape transition but not dictate it.

“The program at this stage is reactive to HOAs’ interests. We are not going out there and saying you need to change this, you need to cut back, you need to rip out grass. It is all purely reactive,” Erik Swanson, planning administrator for the town, said in an interview after the meeting. “They come to us. We then have that conversation and engage with them as to what’s appropriate, what kind of modifications they can make. We’re here to really assist them more than anything.”

Under the program, the town issues reimbursements allowing HOAs to remove turf areas “that are typically deemed unusable open space and to convert them to more water-conscience open space areas,” according to a staff report.

Marc Skocypec, the town’s utilities director, said the program is particularly helpful to older, or legacy, subdivisions “that were born out of a time of plenty.”

“One of the things that all HOAs experience is a maturing of their landscape and there are certain instances where HOAs have developed tree canopies,” Skocype said. “And what happens is if there’s grass or there’s other stuff underneath that, it really doesn’t grow very well.”

The program not only provides an HOA with financial help to convert less-than-verdant areas to water-friendly landscapes, but it also offers technical assistance.

“If you look at our new subdivisions, they have a very nice landscape profile that doesn’t use much water. I think the issue and the relevance is I go back to some of those legacy subdivisions,” Skocype said. “They’re having to kind of reinvent themselves with a new approach to landscaping.”

Non-residential businesses and organizations can receive $2 per square foot, up to $20,000 per property “to remove natural grass and install low-water-use landscaping and/or limited artificial turf,” according to the report.

The turf conversion program also has a component for individual residents. Customers within Queen Creek’s water service area can receive $2 per square foot up to $5,000 per property to remove grass and install low-water use landscaping.

The limited funding is provided by Salt River Project and is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.

“(Residents and businesses) actually have to put a program together and there’s a review that it goes through to make sure that it’s not a slash and burn, that we’re not just taking out grass and putting in rocks,” Skocype said. “There has to be a viable landscape transition that these neighborhoods are going through.”

The reactive nature of the program has opened the door to educating residents about water use and conservation.

“A lot of the HOAs haven’t paid particular attention to their water demands in the past and our key is to get an invite to be able to talk to these HOAs,” Skocype said.

Several hundred residents have already attended water education meetings in Ironwood Crossing and Encanterra, Skocype said.

Council was also presented with possible future changes and additions to the town’s current landscaping ordinance for businesses and residents such as:

• Review and refinement of planting requirements for residential common areas, open space and other landscape areas not currently well addressed by the ordinance.
• Review of plant material standards, including suitability, placement and opportunities to encourage more drought-tolerant and native landscape.
• Evaluation of shade and tree placement standards to better support pedestrian areas, gathering spaces and other active use areas.
• Review of turf standards, including limitations on nonfunctional turf and strategies to discourage unnecessary overplanting.

Any possible changes are still being evaluated and would require a review process, public hearing and council approval. For more information on the turf conversion program, visit queencreekaz.gov.

Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org. Please send your comments about this article to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.