Battery plant surprise / p. 3
This Week
BUSINESS ............. 18
QC eatery owner stays strong amid inflation.
SPORTS ................. 22
EV flag football champs vie nationally.
Sunday, April 2, 2023
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QC begins multimillion-dollar police expansion BY MARK MORAN Tribune Staff Writer
T
he Queen Creek Police Department envisions 100 hires in the next five years and spending as much as $189 million over the next two decades to accommodate its expanding ranks. “We have taken every possible space where you could put people or stuff and we have shoved it in there,” Police Chief Randy Brice told Town Council recently. “And we continue to run out of space. We have kind of fina-
Queen Creek mapping its arts future
gled our way into every municipal building possible.” Brice said his department currently has staff in five different government buildings around town and that kind of decentralization can create inefficiencies in some areas. He said that problem will only get worse as Queen Creek’s population grows and the number of calls for service increases with it. He offered as evidence the department’s call response time, which the department has tried to get to five minutes or less. Documents show that time from dispatch to arriv-
al is still slightly longer than that. Part of Brice’s plan is to eventually build a police substation on Queen Creek’s east side to enable officers to respond to calls more quickly without fighting traffic. “Not to be alarmist, but we are in dire need of some space,” Brice said. “How do you function as a department when you don’t have all the tools you need?” To attempt to remedy the space and storage problem, the town recently purchased
see POLICE page 6
Super soaper
BY MARK MORAN Tribune Staff Writer
GETOUT ................. 24
Q
GET OUT .................... 24
ueen Creek is bringing its cultural and historical roots into its present and future master plan for the arts, envisioning downtown gathering spaces where people learn about the town’s evolving story, can reflect on it or take a selfie by it. It is called placemaking and it is the centerpiece of the town’s Master Arts Plan. “The Downtown Arts and Placemaking Advisory Committee was established to work
CLASSIFIEDS .............27
see ARTS page 4
QC thespians shine in ‘Secret Garden.’
COMMUNITY ............ 15 BUSINESS .................. 18 OPINION .................. 20 SPORTS .................... 22
Ezekiel Pacheco was among the happy youngsters who hunted eggs, immersed themselves in suds and engaged in other fun activities March 25 during the annual Spring into QC event at Mansel Carter Oasis Park. For a look at the happy scenes, see page 15. (Quinton Kendall/
Tribune Contributor)
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