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Op-Ed written by Dan Cotterman, Manager in Transition

Arizona is experiencing one of the fastest rates of population growth in the United States, a dynamic that many California communities know well. Communities across the state, particularly across the Phoenix metropolitan area, are welcoming thousands of new residents each year. Entire neighborhoods that did not exist a decade ago are now home to families, schools and businesses, and the pace of development shows little sign of slowing. While this growth creates tremendous opportunity for Arizona’s communities, it also creates enormous responsibility. The long-term success of our cities will depend on how intentionally and thoughtfully that growth is managed.

Growth does not manage itself. Without careful planning, rapid population increases can strain infrastructure, overwhelm public services and create long-term fiscal challenges for municipalities. For city leaders, the challenge is not whether growth should occur, but how it should occur.

New residents often assume cities decide when grocery stores, retail centers or restaurants are built. In reality, those decisions are driven by private developers and national retailers. Businesses typically require a certain number of “rooftops” within a defined geographic area before they are willing to invest in a new location. That means residential growth often precedes the commercial amenities residents want to see in their communities.

Understanding that dynamic is an important part of managing expectations in rapidly growing cities. Local governments can create the conditions for investment through zoning, infrastructure planning and economic development strategies, but they cannot force private companies to open stores before market demand exists.

This reality underscores a broader truth about growth management: cities must plan for development long before market demand fully materializes. The most successful communities are not simply reacting to growth, they are intentionally engineering it.

Having worked in some of Arizona’s fastest-growing communities, I have seen firsthand how quickly growth can transform a city, and how essential thoughtful planning becomes when thousands of new residents arrive each year.

Infrastructure Must Keep Pace with Growth

One of the most difficult realities in high-growth communities is the timing mismatch between population growth and revenue growth. New neighborhoods can appear almost overnight, but the infrastructure required to support them takes years to plan, finance and build.

When new neighborhoods are built, residents immediately require services: police and fire protection, roads, parks, water systems and public facilities. However, the revenues that support those services (e.g. property taxes, sales taxes and state-shared revenues) often lag behind population growth.

This dynamic creates a difficult balancing act for local governments. Cities must invest in infrastructure early enough to maintain service levels while also ensuring those investments remain financially sustainable over the long term. Growth must also pay for its fair share of the infrastructure needed to serve the new development.

Developers often rely on infrastructure funding tools such as Community Facilities Districts (CFDs) to finance roads, utilities and other essential infrastructure needed to build new neighborhoods. These mechanisms allow infrastructure to be constructed earlier in the development cycle, but the costs are ultimately borne by future homeowners through additional property tax assessments on top of the purchase price of their home. While CFDs can accelerate development, they also illustrate the reality that infrastructure must be paid for by someone.

Strategic capital planning therefore becomes essential. Infrastructure must be sequenced carefully to ensure roads, water systems, sewer capacity, parks and public safety facilities are delivered in alignment with growth patterns. Cities that fail to align infrastructure with development risk creating service gaps that can take years, and significant resources, to correct.

Growth Requires Fiscal Discipline

Rapid growth can create the illusion of financial strength. New rooftops generate construction activity; new businesses bring economic excitement and development announcements create optimism about the future.

But experienced municipal leaders understand that growth alone does not guarantee fiscal health.

Cities must maintain disciplined financial policies, including long-term financial forecasting, conservative budgeting practices and strong reserve policies. Development agreements must ensure that new growth contributes fairly to the infrastructure it requires. Without this discipline, communities can unintentionally create structural budget challenges that persist long after the initial growth surge

Managing growth responsibly means ensuring that development strengthens the city’s financial position rather than undermining it.

The Importance of Long-Range Planning

Effective growth management begins long before the first building permit is issued. Comprehensive general plans, transportation master plans and utility capacity analyses provide the framework that allows cities to guide development rather than simply respond to it.

These planning tools help municipal leaders answer fundamental questions:

Where should growth occur?

How should transportation networks evolve?

What infrastructure capacity will be required over the next 10, 20 or even 30 years?

Communities that invest in thoughtful long-range planning are far better positioned to accommodate growth while preserving quality of life for both new and existing residents.

Regional Challenges Require Regional Solutions

Another reality of growth is that it rarely respects jurisdictional boundaries. Transportation corridors, water resources, workforce development and housing availability all operate at a regional scale.

This makes collaboration among cities increasingly important. Regional organizations such as the Maricopa Association of Governments play a vital role in coordinating planning efforts and addressing challenges that no single municipality can solve independently.

Regional collaboration also requires balancing the priorities of very different communities. Mature cities may be advocating for funding to redevelop aging infrastructure or revitalize older commercial corridors, while rapidly growing communities may be advocating for investment in new transportation corridors and expanding infrastructure capacity. Both needs are legitimate, and successful regional planning requires thoughtful coordination among communities at different stages of development.

Leadership Matters

Ultimately, managing growth responsibly requires leadership from both elected officials and professional city managers.

City councils establish the vision for their communities. City managers and professional staff translate that vision into operational strategy. Together, they must make decisions that balance near-term opportunity with long-term sustainability.

In today’s environment, those decisions are becoming increasingly complex. National and statewide housing shortages have created pressure on cities to “get out of the way” and allow developers to build as quickly as possible. While expanding housing supply is important, rushing development without thoughtful planning can create long-term challenges.

Communities designed around short-term development pressures can suffer decades later. Neighborhoods built without adequate parks, trails or community spaces may save money upfront but often struggle with long-term quality-of-life challenges. Likewise, limiting the ability of cities to thoughtfully guide neighborhood design through zoning and planning tools can produce communities that age poorly over time.

Arizona has several examples of neighborhoods built rapidly during earlier growth periods that later experienced significant challenges because long-term planning considerations were overlooked.

Responsible leadership requires asking difficult questions about infrastructure capacity, fiscal impacts and long-term community design, even when the pressure to approve development quickly is strong.

The objective is not to slow growth, but to ensure that growth strengthens communities rather than strains them.

Lessons That Cross State Lines

While Arizona is currently experiencing some of the fastest population growth in the country, many of these growth management challenges are not unique to the Southwest. California cities have long navigated the complexities of population growth, housing demand, infrastructure financing and balancing development with quality of life.

Communities across California have decades of experience addressing issues such as redevelopment, transportation investment, water management and urban infill development. At the same time, Arizona’s rapidly expanding cities are confronting the challenges of building entirely new communities at a scale rarely seen elsewhere in the country.

These differing experiences create an opportunity for local leaders in both states to learn from one another. California’s expertise in redevelopment and urban reinvestment can offer valuable lessons for maturing Arizona communities, while Arizona’s experience managing large-scale greenfield development may provide insights for rapidly growing regions within California.

As population growth continues to reshape communities across the West, the exchange of ideas between city managers, planners and elected officials across state lines will become increasingly valuable.

Building the Communities of the Future

Arizona’s continued growth presents an extraordinary opportunity. Communities across the state have the chance to shape vibrant, economically strong and livable cities for generations to come.

But that outcome is not guaranteed.

Cities that succeed in the coming decades will be those that plan carefully, invest strategically and maintain fiscal discipline. They will embrace growth while ensuring infrastructure, services and financial sustainability keep pace with development.

Water will also play a defining role in Arizona’s future. Cities that secure and responsibly manage long-term water supplies, Arizona requires 100-year availability, will hold the key to sustainable growth. Communities that cannot demonstrate long-term water security will simply be unable to expand.

Growth is inevitable. Whether it strengthens our communities or strains them depends entirely on how thoughtfully we manage it.

The responsibility of local government leaders is not simply to accommodate growth, but to guide it. When cities approach growth with intentional planning and disciplined leadership, they do more than manage population increases, they shape the communities that future generations will call home.

Dan Cotterman is a proven executive with over two decades of combined public and private sector experience, specializing in guiding highly effective teams through rapid municipal expansion. He most recently served as the city manager for Buckeye, Arizona, where he successfully navigated the unique challenges of leading the nation’s fastest-growing city. Prior to this, he spent nearly a decade in executive leadership with the city of Goodyear, serving as both deputy city manager and director of Information Technology Services.