After Paul Tice graduated from the University of New York at New Paltz in 1978, he joined his parents at their new home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, while applying to either get a master’s in clinical psychology or go to law school. In the meantime, he took a job with the town to help write a long-range land planning document and fell into his true calling.
Two years later he’d become the planning director over a staff of four, and he completed a master’s in community development at the nearby University of Louisville soon after that. After several years leading the planning departments there and the neighboring community of Radcliff he moved to Colorado Springs in 1985 and held several positions in that city’s planning and development department over the next 22 years.
His early retirement didn’t stick for long, and he became Casa Grande’s planning and development director in 2010. Since then he’s led the city’s efforts to accommodate demand for new homes, stores, restaurants, factories and the other building blocks of a fast-growing community. He sat down recently with ROX Group’s John McGuire to talk about the process behind all those decisions.
Grande LIVING: Do you work for the mayor and council, or do you work underneath the city manager?
Paul Tice: As the planning and development director I’m a member of the executive leadership team and I report directly to the city manager, Larry Rains. So not a political appointment, I’m under the normal hiring system of city employees.
Grande LIVING: Do you have considerable interaction with the elected officials, though?
Paul Tice: Yes, all the time. Planning in every community becomes political at some level. When we’re processing various types of land use applications for changes of zoning or general plan amendments, all of those have to go to the city council for their final approval.
If you look at any council agenda, you’ll see that I or my staff typically have some items on every council agenda. We’re making presentations to council on development applications that have been submitted to us, reviewed internally to determine if the request complies with our various land development rules and then presented to either the planning commission, and/or council for the final approval or denial.
Grande LIVING: What does a city planning department do?
Paul Tice: So, city planning departments typically are responsible for creating the general plan or the comprehensive plan that sets the guideline and the vision for where the community wants to go, at least for 10, 20, 30 years. Planning departments are often required to create land use regulations to implement that plan. Lastly, planning staff process development applications that involve individual requests for changes to one’s property, whether it’s a zone change or to subdivide it or to have a special use.
Planners spend a lot of time in processing land use applications, reviewing them for compliance with all the land use regulations, and then presenting them to the planning commission for a review and recommendation, and then often onto city council for their final decision.
Grande LIVING: Now, is the planning department responsible for the actual development and monitoring of the development of those approved plans? Or is that a different department in the city, like the building department?
Paul Tice: Generally the planning department would be responsible for inspecting completed developments to make sure the right amount of parking has been provided, the landscaping followed the plan, the building setbacks were correct, the building height was correct. All of that is typically done by the planning department in conjunction with the building department.
In Casa Grande, the planning and development department includes the building department as well as an engineering review team that reviews civil plans for horizontal construction — such as grading, drainage construction, street construction.
So the Casa Grande Planning and Development Department in an integrated department with all of those various disciplines, which works quite well because all of those disciplines really need to work together as developments are approved, constructed and occupied. We often refer to our office as the Development Center or a one-stop shop for development services.
Grande LIVING: And as director, that probably makes your day somewhat more interesting, reigning over all these different departments that all have to work together to have a nice city in the end, which is what the end goal really is, right?
Paul Tice: There’s never a dull moment in my life. My professional life, at least. Different problems come at me every day, from something small as a property has weeds and it’s looking ugly to Lucid needing to get their paint line going so they can start painting cars again to approving a new mega-mine in the community.
Grande LIVING: A lot of what we hear in the community is the citizenry somehow believes the city and the planning department or the planning commission are the people who choose and decide what projects come to the city at what location. Is that true? How is that process determined and how does the planning department help?
Paul Tice: That particular belief or criticism drives me nuts. I hear, “Why are you approving another car wash? Why are you approving another Mexican restaurant? Why don’t we have more grocery stores?” Planning, by and large, doesn’t control any of that. What we do is we zone an adequate amount of land in the community to meet the need for commercial businesses and services.
Whether or not someone builds a Whole Foods or a car wash on a properly commercially zoned site is not determined by the planning department or Planning Commission. If both uses are allowed in the commercial zoning district and the development proposal meets all of the planning regulations then they are allowed to construct the use. It’s the market that decides what’s going to be built in the community. The city planning department’s role is to have adequate property zoned for these uses, but we’re not at the level of deciding the specific use that someone can build as long as it’s properly zoned and constructed.
What we do is we make sure there’s adequate parking, it’s well landscaped, that the building architecture is good, that setbacks are right, the building doesn’t exceed the height limitations. We have regulatory control, but we don’t control the actual specific use.
The exception is industrial development. The city does engage in incentives for certain industrial users, and we will incentivize certain users and not others.
For example, we may incentivize industrial users that have a high wage for their employees, because one of our goals is to increase the average wage in the community. We avoid incentivizing industrial uses that use an excessive amount of water. We’ll consider giving incentives to industrial users that meet those objectives, which kind of drives which uses locate in Casa Grande.
Grande LIVING: And is the idea behind that hoping that by incentivizing the right and certain types of industrial users, the other commercial and residential amenities that the community needs will follow those better jobs with better income and better things that we need in the community?
Paul Tice: Absolutely. Our General Plan includes a goal to drive growth through quality industrial development, quality new jobs. Casa Grande is not intended to be a bedroom community. Obviously we have a significant population of winter visitors or seasonal residents and we have retirees, but most of our growth is driven by creation of new jobs and in-migration of people taking those jobs.
Grande LIVING: Given your viewpoints regarding the public’s perception of how this process works, what do you feel the planning department’s role is in public outreach and education?
Paul Tice: We currently promote public education through our Leadership Academy program where we invite the public to come in and learn, not only about the planning program, but about the work of all the other city departments and how the city operates.
As to public outreach, we provide public notice of every new project being proposed through our development application review pipeline. So if someone submits an application to us to rezone or a major site plan to build a new apartment complex, a new commercial building, an industrial building, a new subdivision, we reach out and send notices to people within 300, 500, sometimes 1,000 feet of the site, providing them with information on the application that is under review, inviting them to contact us, review the plans and share with us any concerns they have, and educate them about how they can effectively interact with the program.
We provide public notices at least twice during most application reviews before we even get to the public hearing before planning commission or city council. We publish ads in the paper and require development applicants to post a big yellow sign on the sites that you might’ve seen as well. The purpose is to let people be aware of what’s going on and invite them to participate in the process.
Grande LIVING: If you had more resources, would you like to dedicate more to the overall citizen understanding of the process? Do you wish you had some more ability to really reach out to all the citizenry, not just the specific project-affected people, so that they understood some of the concerns that you voiced earlier about “why are we getting another car wash”?
Paul Tice: Absolutely, John. And I think technology really is the answer to that level of additional communication. We have experimented with some online versions of posting information on every project that a planning review and every project that’s going through the building permit process. We want people, if they see a site being graded and they want to know what’s going on, to have a place they can go to get some information.
But that’s very technology-based, and we really didn’t have the resources to successfully sustain that effort.
Hopefully in the very near future we’ll be able to once again launch something online that educates the public about all the projects going through our system and gives them the information they need and gives them the contact information they need to do a deeper dive if they are interested.
Grande LIVING: In the meantime, the big way information gets disseminated to the public is through social media groups of various types, Facebook, X, Nextdoor; there’s a myriad of them. People ask questions about what’s happening in the city, what’s being built, rather than going directly to the city. Do you think these social media groups are all good, all bad for getting the information out there?
Paul Tice: I’ve recently noticed a trend with social media whereby the public doesn’t engage with planning staff to express their concerns regarding a proposed development but rather just show up at a public hearing and try to stop developments from being approved. This trend is kind of disturbing, as a planner, I really believe that public input makes a better product. As we process applications, we want public input into our reviews to understand what public concerns are. Through my years of experience I’ve found that most public concerns can be addressed through redesigned projects.
We send all these postcards early on in the development application review process and try to reach out so that we can understand what public concerns there are. We solicit public input for these applications early on in the process, where we can actually make changes, influence changes to the design, mediate between the surrounding property owners and the applicant, and try to reach a consensus on what could work.
But what I find today is often we won’t hear any opposition to a project, even though we’re reaching out to all these stakeholders, until the public hearing where a number of people will show up in opposition, and we weren’t aware of it as staff. And we cannot negotiate changes to a plan during a public hearing. The public hearing stage is not a constructive point in the process to make changes and redesign to address the public’s concern.
What happens is it puts both the planning commission and the city council in a position of either having to approve the project or deny the project versus letting staff try to resolve those issues internally between the adjoining property owners and the applicant before we get to those hearings.
So that’s pretty frustrating, and I’m blaming social media for some of that.
Grande LIVING: Which kind of leads into my next question, which is how much input does the public really have? You hear the term NIMBY, “not in my backyard,” and when people do come to public meetings or even earlier in the process and are just completely against something whether it’s legitimate or valid concerns, whatever that process brings up, how much impact does the public actually have in the denial or approval of a project?
Paul Tice: Or in the revision of a project. So the public is a key player, the key stakeholder, in this process. You have the regulations and the city staff, you have the applicant and what they want to build, and we have the public. And we’re kind of all equal players. And so the public has an immense ability to influence a project.
My hope and desire is that the public input actually makes proposed developments better. A good, functional development review process allows the public to express whatever concerns they might have, and the design is revised to address those concerns, which I think in the end often makes projects better.
I embrace public input. I don’t embrace NIMBYism. I embrace constructive public input, not public input that’s based on bias and prejudice. Public input is important to evaluate and resolve use-to-use compatibility issues, because in the end that’s what planning is about — allowing a variety of land uses with the community but making sure they are compatible.
Grande LIVING: Let’s talk briefly about a couple of the big projects we’ve had in town, Lucid Motors, Kohler. These large-scale, hundreds or even thousands of job-creating projects, are they difficult for your planning staff?
Paul Tice: They are challenging. On the planning side we have adequate industrially zoned land that can accommodate them. We also have a lot of potential for adding industrially zoned land into our inventory. So that’s not a big issue. Roadway improvements to handle the additional traffic is a bit of a challenge for public works, but it’s kind of routine. It’s just money to build the new roads. Same thing with sewer infrastructure and water infrastructure, but it’s pretty routine.
But for the building department side, it’s a real challenge because what these new businesses want to do, because they have such a short time from the time of starting the project to wanting to get into production, is engage in what’s called design-build, which is a different way of reviewing building plans.
Typically, a standard building review is the applicant’s architect will do the full design for the building and our city building plans examiner will review it for compliance with building code, and once we confirm that the building design meets the various building codes we issue the building permit and our building inspectors inspect the construction to confirm it is built per the approved plan.
In design-build, the concept is that there is not enough time to design the whole building before starting construction. So a portion of the building gets designed, let’s say the shell, and we’re going to permit that and the contractor is going to start building the shell while we figure out what’s going to go inside. And so you’re doing it a bit on the fly, and sometimes you don’t have the opportunity to make sure everything is working together perfectly from a building and fire system kind of approach. There are lots of revisions on the fly.
And so the new Lucid building, for example, instead of one or two or three building permits, I believe they had something like 50 building permits for that one building for various aspects of the construction. So now my staff has to manage 50 permits versus two or three that we might have back with more traditional building practices.
Grande LIVING: And that, I imagine, takes lots of staff time and resources away from other things you wish you could spend some time on.
Paul Tice: It does. In our shop, we have one building inspector who mostly focuses on most of the industrial buildings. It’s also a challenge for our fire inspector and our fire department because we try to provide inspections with next-day service. We have to do a lot of inspection prioritization, move things around. People have to be flexible in our work group. But everyone’s been able to handle this.
Grande LIVING: What is a project or program or something that you’ve done you’re most proud of?
Paul Tice: For right now I’m most proud of the completion of our 2030 General Plan. I was the project manager for that, my staff and I wrote many of the plan elements. A consultant assisted us with part of it.
I’m proud because it took a totally different approach to planning in Casa Grande. We wanted to take a very realistic look at how much water we had to support new development. In the past that hadn’t occurred to any great degree. Prior planning was kind of done in a vacuum separated from the water resource issue. Obviously we live in the desert, water’s a sacred and limited commodity.
So our last general plan had a build-out scenario of a city of 500,000 to 750,000 people. There’s no way we have enough water to support a city of half a million people in Casa Grande. So our new plan took a very realistic look at the water resource and then determined how much development we could support with the known resources we have. And that’s about a city of 150,000 to maybe 200,000 people. So we’re going to double our size over the next 30 or so years.
The beauty of that was it also told us we don’t have to sprawl development, we can infill. Casa Grande has a lot of land area. It’s over 100 square miles, of which only about 30 square miles are built. Around the city you can see these large tracts of land that have development all around them that are vacant.
The new plan focuses on trying to build on those tracts of land interior to the city versus on the fringe, which happens to be very cost-effective for the city to provide services to. And good solid planning, good solid fiscal management.
I’m looking forward to hopefully the adoption of our Florence Boulevard design concept. I’m anticipating some positive changes in the Florence Boulevard corridor in terms of landscaping and artwork and multimodal kind of transportation improvements.
Grande LIVING: On the general plan, I think I can say you were proud of the public involvement during that process. I think you told me that’s one of the most publicly engaged projects the city has ever done.
Paul Tice: Oh, absolutely. We had a great steering committee, we had a technical advisory group, we had a lot of public input, a lot of public support. And in Arizona, which is the only state I’m aware of that this occurs, the public has to ratify the general plan. In Casa Grande’s case, we had an over 80% positive vote on public ratification of the plan, which shows me that the public was really buying into the vision and in the direction of growth for this community.
Grande LIVING: Are there any other larger projects or things you still want to accomplish before you decide it’s time to go fishing forever?
Paul Tice: My list is actually quite long. But I’m going to just talk quickly about two things. The first is to really make our review process more efficient, to make it take less time and fewer resources while still accomplishing all the public engagement things we want to accomplish and the thorough reviews.
The state Legislature recently passed a bill that allows communities to push some of the development reviews currently being done by boards and commissions and councils to the staff level and allow staff to make those decision on an administrative level. We’re going to look at doing that where we can within our zoning code, allowing more staff-level decisions, but still preserving appeal rights if the applicant or the public is not happy with the decision, they could appeal to planning commission or council and get a review of the staff decision.
The other thing is we’re continuing to try to figure out what we can do from a regulatory standpoint to facilitate more affordable or attainable housing.
One of the things we’re working on right now is changing the code to allow accessory dwelling units. They could be cottages in the backyard of a home or it could actually be a smaller living unit attached to the home itself. A lot of times those are known as multi-generational homes, where there’s a main living area and a smaller separate living area that’s actually attached to the home.
But we’re going to try to broaden that out communitywide. So most of our single-family lots in many of our neighborhoods could actually become two-family lots with the cottage or the smaller accessory dwelling unit that’s attached.
We continue to look at tiny homes and other things that might work on our smaller infill lots. And we have a lot of little infill lots in our older neighborhoods that have all the water and sewer infrastructure, but aren’t big enough to accommodate the standard single-family home. So we’re going to be looking at some alternative housing types.
Grande LIVING: Last thing here, anything we missed that you want to make sure our readers are aware of?
Paul Tice: I’ll say this. One of the things we hear people talking about are all the new apartment complexes being built in Casa Grande and some of the new-build-to-rent projects. First off, Casa Grande is clearly a community in change, primarily, in my opinion, due to the jobs we’re creating and the in-migration changing the demographics of our residents, which we need to provide new and alternative housing choices for.
But people have to keep in perspective that we have not built a new apartment building in Casa Grande since, the last phase of Tierra Pointe was built, I think in 2012, 2013. So we’ve been 12 years without any apartment construction. Clearly there was pent-up demand.
We did permit a lot of apartment units in 2023 in Casa Grande, almost 1,000, which is clearly a huge increase from what we’ve done historically. And we haven’t permitted any in 2024, because the ones under construction now, they’re not going to be completed till probably the end of 2024, and they’re going to take some time to fill up.
So my crystal ball is we’re not going to be seeing a lot of additional apartment construction over the next 18 months or 24 months. But a certain percentage of our population needs and wants apartments, a certain percentage needs and wants the build-to rent bungalows, the cottages that you might see being built, and a certain percentage want standard single-family homes. So we need to provide all of that housing stock for our community and make sure we’re building it appropriately in the right locations.
