Pinal County has infrastructure in place to handle development boom
by Steve Burks | AZBigMedia
Aerial image of Lucid’s development in Casa Grande as of February 15, 2020. Image courtesy of Pinal Partnership Treasurer Darrell Wilson
A little patience and a lot of planning is beginning to pay off in Pinal County.
Public officials and private companies with the same vision have laid the groundwork, literally, for economic growth in the county. The towns and cities in the county have invested millions in infrastructure projects like roads and water and sewer; while private companies also put their money into ensuring there was ample electricity and plots of land to build on. Combined, those entities have created an environment that is ripe for an explosion of development.
“The private sector has really stepped forward and set the groundwork for business development down in Pinal,” said Jackob Andersen, president and CEO of Saint Holdings, which is leading the development initiatives in Pinal County. “Being ready and having shovel-ready projects with infrastructure in the ground, that’s how we win projects like Lucid Motors, like Nikola. It was water, power and sewer, ready to go, right on site.”
Private utility companies like SRP, APS, Tucson Electric Power have put in substations and generating stations in the county in the last decade. SRP’s Coolidge Generating Station, which has a 575 megawatt capacity, was completed in 2011, just 10 years after SRP opened its Desert Basin Generating Station in Casa Grande. And both APS and SRP have a major solar generating presence in the county, with the APS Saguaro Power Plant and the SRP Pinal Central Energy Center.
