Last night was Mayor Phil Gordon’s sixth annual delivery of the “State of Downtown” speech, and the third year with my attendance. The venue was the Civic Space Park which was decorated quite well.
Staging aside, the Mayor’s speech left me with more questions than answers. The first year I went (2007), the Mayor outlined several bold proposals for downtown, including moving ASU’s College of Law to the then two-year-old campus. The 2008 address was delivered at the then recently-opened Sheraton but with the economy having just collapsed, the highlight of that speech was for all those in attendance to ride the then yet-to-be-opened METRO light rail.
And then there was last night.
The roughly forty-minute speech seemed to lack a specific focus. Over half of the speech was dedicated to the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus. So was this the State of Downtown or the State of the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus?
My other impression from the Mayor’s speech is that this should have been delivered 3-4 years ago when the different things he was lauding – CityScape (strangely, there wasn’t one mention of One Central Park East), the UofA medical school, the Civic Space, ASU’s presence in downtown, etc. – were being pitched to the voters for their support. Except these things had already opened or are very close to opening.
Another theme I took away from the Mayor’s speech was that there is no separation between ASU Downtown Phoenix and the greater Downtown Phoenix community. The fate of one would affect the fate of the other. Granted, the two are mutually related and intertwined in some fashion, but if there’s one thing that Arizona’s economy has taught us, it’s that we shouldn’t put all of our economic growth eggs in one basket.
Granted, with the Mayor’s tenure in office coming to a close soon (he’ll wrap up his second and final term in January 2011), maybe he’s trying to cement his legacy. I’m not giving him any grief about this, but this city has a lot of issues facing it at the moment.
(It never helps with the state legislature is working against the city, or rather against the state.)
If you want to read the Mayor’s full speech, check out the Downtown Phoenix Journal article, “Recap of the Mayor’s State of Downtown Speech.”
-Edward Jensen