A developer's proposal to put 48 apartments in a four-story building on La Cañada Drive drew a standing-room crowd to Thursday's planning commission meeting, along with a scale model, two competing traffic studies, and one telescoping pointer that changed hands several times under circumstances still being sorted out.
The project, called The Alameda, would be the tallest building in Sahuarita by one story. Supporters — several of them young, several of them renting in Tucson and driving down — spoke about the housing shortage. Opponents spoke about neighborhood character, parking, drainage, and, in one closely reasoned five-minute presentation, the afternoon shade the building would cast on a mature saguaro at the corner of the adjacent property.
“That cactus was here before all of us,” said resident Maribel Ochoa, to sustained applause. “It will be here after us. It did not ask for a shadow.”
The developer's representative countered that the saguaro would receive full sun until approximately 2:40 p.m., “which is more sun than most of us get,” a remark the chair asked him to withdraw.
The parking analysis occupied the middle hour. The developer's study found the 62 proposed spaces adequate; a resident-commissioned study found they were not; a third resident, unaffiliated with either study, stood up and counted the commission's own parking lot from memory.
The commission voted 4–3 to continue the matter to September, a motion that surprised no one, including the applicant, who was seen filling in the date on a pre-printed sign before the vote concluded.
Colleen Vasquez covers town government. The saguaro could not be reached for comment.