25 years after Tempe Town Lake arrived, 5 mayors reflect on their ultimate legacy project

Written by: Paul Thompson – Managing Editor, Phoenix Business Journal

Five generations of Tempe mayors gathered on a warm October day for a boat ride along Tempe Town Lake, the ongoing legacy project that each had a hand in crafting.

Harry Mitchell (1978-1994), Neil Giuliano (1994-2004), Hugh Hallman (2004-2012), Mark Mitchell (2012-2020) and Corey Woods (2020-present) represent the past 46 years of growth in the city of Tempe.

On this day a swath of cloud cover offers, as if in deference to the longtime political operators, what could only be described as a Chamber of Commerce morning.

Gazing at the southern shoreline of Tempe Town Lake in 2024, it would be easy to imagine that today’s wave of development was inevitable. But on this warm October morning, the collection of former Tempe mayors opened up about a decades-long process the required equal parts determination, vision and patience.

“Because these gentlemen and previous councils pushed forward with this vision, we have what we have now. We’re on this beautiful lake with all this development in the second-most visited tourist site in all of the entire state, except for the Grand Canyon,” said Woods. “You have to really believe in what you’re doing, and you can’t just try to get to Friday.”

Harry Mitchell played a key role in bringing Tempe Town Lake to life. While the origins of the project trace back to an Arizona State University class project in the 1960s, Mitchell credits the arrival of what is now Loop 202 through downtown Tempe with making the lake possible.

“If we hadn’t got the freeway, there wouldn’t be a lake,” he said.

Mitchell’s tenure included some less celebratory moments, including in 1987 when Maricopa County soundly defeated a countywide-measure to approve a precursor to Tempe Town Lake, dubbed the Rio Salado Project. From his perch on the boat cresting the smooth waters of the lake, Mitchell acknowledges that the countywide vote was considered ambitious even at the time.

“It was really Tempe that was going to benefit from it,” he said. “Phoenix has got all the way up to Anthem, all the way to Laveen, why would people vote for it?”

Tempe forges ahead with Tempe Town Lake

In the end, Tempe proceeded on its own to bring the lake to fruition. Even within the more friendly confines of the city’s boundaries, there was pushback. Supporting the construction of the lake often meant putting political capital on the line.

“When we had the meeting to actually vote on pulling the trigger to construct the lake, there were citizens who got up — and you can go find this on Channel 11 — who said, ‘This is a boondoggle. No one is ever going to want to live or work near a fake lake in the middle of the desert. You’re bankrupting the future of the city,’” recalled Giuliano. “And you had to sit there and take that and still do what you think is going to be best.”

At every stage, city leaders needed to be careful about which development projects to approve.

“What people don’t realize is that one of the founding principles when the whole project came together was that the public would always have access to the lakefront itself,” Giuliano said. “Even though we wanted the private sector to partner and build some of these great projects and so forth, they couldn’t come right up to the water. The public would have access to the entire perimeter of the lake, and that was important.”

Even with careful planning, Tempe Town Lake suffered some missteps. For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a 1,000-room Peabody Hotel was expected to become the crown jewel of the lake. It fell through.

“Neil was the first one to say, ‘Here we’ve got this thing,’ and that’s where the Peabody Hotel was going to take a shot. He was harassed to death — I’ll admit it, by me — because I’m a detailed numbers guy, green eyeshade, and we’re arguing over the numbers,” said Hallman. “He got his deal, and I got what I wanted in protecting you, which was if they didn’t perform, we could kick them off. And we did, and it went around again.”

“What was going to get put here had to be to the highest quality,” Hallman added. “Because just sitting here, the lake itself was a $244 million investment by a whole bunch of different people.”

Big wins at Tempe Town Lake

The area once earmarked for the Peabody is now set to be home to another ambitious project: the multibillion-dollar South Pier development. Shepherded by Washington-based The McBride Cohen Co., the project is in the first of multiple phases, with three apartment towers totaling 724 units and 26,000 square feet of retail rising on 3.3 acres. A topping-off ceremony was held Oct. 25 for the three mixed-use towers.

Throughout the lake’s 25-year lifetime, the city had to make difficult decisions about who to do business with. Mark Mitchell, the son of Harry, said that the prolonged construction of Hayden Ferry Lakeside, built out in three phases between 2002 and 2015, was the precursor for all of the development that followed.

But that project also wasn’t easy; co-developer Ryan Cos. suggests on its website that “progress ground to a halt” on the third phase in 2007, at the edge of the Great Recession. Ryan and Parkway Properties Inc., which was acquired by Cousins Properties in 2016, ultimately revived that phase and completed the project. It was an example of the right developer emerging at the right time.

“There were times where we had developers come to us, and we turned them down because it’s not the vision that we had,” said Mark Mitchell. “And that’s basically right now where South Pier is. Some of the people that came…it wasn’t the type of construction we wanted. We’re patient.”

Mark Mitchell was also mayor when State Farm decided to place its regional headquarters along Tempe Town Lake. Though he remembers the pursuit of State Farm as an “exciting time,” he also remembers it turning into a massive undertaking.

“At the time, it was the largest project under construction — at one time, over a million square feet,” Mitchell said. “We had to dedicate a tremendous amount of staff.”

But Tempe brought its typical can-do attitude to the project, Mitchell added, and it was built within two years.

“You can look at all of the mayors here, they have always had that can-do, visionary attitude to really make Tempe successful,” Mitchell said.

The decades of effort surrounding Tempe Town Lake has instilled a “tremendous responsibility” in Woods to keep the momentum going along the lake.

“I think the best is still yet to come,” Woods said. “There is so much more the city can continue to do, and I know as long as people continue to exhibit the leadership that these gentlemen and our previous councils did, the sky is the limit for the city of Tempe.”