Plans unveiled for Mesa-Gateway area

The Mesa City Council is being asked to approve an ambitious plan to bring 100,000 jobs and a "new city" to the Valley.

The plan envisions high-tech businesses, luxury hotels, shops and homes on the acres and acres of vacant land that now surround Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, the former Williams Air Force Base.

"What we are looking at doing is, literally, creating a city within a city," said Mesa Mayor Scott Smith. "Our hope is that people will live, work, play, be educated, everything, right there in that city."

The master plan includes Gateway 202 Airpark and the massive Gaylord Resort. Smith also hopes to attract more businesses from the aerospace industry.

"We have literally hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who work in the aerospace or aerospace-related industries," Smith said. "And so, once again, it's an existing strength."

There's also plans for a movie studio. The presence of Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport is a plus there, Smith said.

"It's an easy commute, really, between the center of the film industry, which is of course southern California, and the studio that will go up in south Mesa."

The development would create thousands of jobs and it could grow for decades, said Smith.

"It has a business center, it has an employment center, it has some urban-residential that I think is appropriate for being beside an airport," Smith said. "It would mean high-density urban-type living and it also has things such as hotels and other things that work together to create that kind of employment-living-entertainment center that will feed off the airport."

Gary Gibbons, a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, said the Gateway 202 Airpark could become the East Valley's economic anchor.

"This is the design wave of the future as far as they're concerned in terms of development, a sort of congregate area that includes an integrated residential-commercial use type or project," Gibbons said. "It would provide very much an anchor in all of those areas for the East Valley, and it could represent a steady supply of jobs over the next 10 to 20 years."

Gibbons said the fact the project could take 20 years to reach completion shows how well it has been planned.