Time to fight for your right to write the rules — before developers and lobbyists do it for you.
The ink isn’t even dry on Prop 495, and the lobbyist-backed growth machine is already eyeing San Tan Valley like a buffet table. We’ve got one shot — our Town Charter — to lock in protections that will keep our water clean, our neighborhoods livable, and our taxes from becoming developer welfare.
Here’s what’s at stake right now:
1. No Crap in Our Aquifers
HB 2753 gave developers the right to “recharge” our groundwater with treated sewage. In Phoenix they call it “reclaimed water.” Here, it’s toilet-to-tap.
Your charter can ban developers from using effluent injection to meet the 100-year water supply requirement. If they can’t prove a safe, renewable water source, they don’t build.
2. Apartments & Condos Must Follow the 100-Year Rule
State law lets certain multi-family projects slip past strict water checks. That loophole is a developer’s dream and a resident’s nightmare. Your charter can close it, requiring every housing development — single-family or multi-family — to prove a real, renewable 100-year water supply.
3. Stop Out-of-Control HOAs
HOAs in other parts of Arizona have turned entire communities into water-guzzling, rule-heavy, fee-raising nightmares. Your charter can:
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Limit HOA authority to common areas only
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Ban mandatory turf lawns in new builds
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Require transparency in HOA budgets and meetings
Why This Fight Matters
The “Yes” campaign to incorporate wasn’t a feel-good grassroots movement — it was a $70,000 PAC-funded blitz from developer-backed insiders. Their signs, glossy mailers, and social media ads were designed to drown out the voices of residents who had maybe $500, a few homemade signs, and chalk markers. Many who opposed incorporation couldn’t even vote because of gerrymandered boundaries.
Now that incorporation passed, those same insiders will try to shape the charter in ways that benefit them, not you. If you don’t show up, your “local control” will belong to Scottsdale lobbyists and HOA lawyers.
The Campaign
This is the first in a series of articles we’re calling “Fight For Your Charter San Tan Valley.” Each one will spotlight a specific protection we can — and must — demand in our charter:
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Water safety & anti-pollution clauses
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Strict 100-year water proof for all development
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HOA limits & transparency
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Fiscal guardrails to stop tax hikes for developer subsidies
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Ethical rules to keep lobbyists out of our local government
If we don’t write these protections into our charter, the developers will write their own. And once it’s in, you’ll be living with it — and paying for it — for decades.
Bottom line:
The fight for San Tan Valley didn’t end with the election — it just began. A charter is a town’s constitution. Let’s make sure ours protects the people who live here, not the people who profit here.