PHOENIX — The city of Phoenix filed a lawsuit Tuesday, asking Maricopa County Superior Court to keep the city of Tempe from allowing the construction of 2,000 apartment units by the owners of the Arizona Coyotes.
For more than a year, officials from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which is owned by the city of Phoenix, have gone back and forth with the city of Tempe and the Arizona Coyotes about a proposed development on 46 acres on the northeast corner of Priest Drive and Rio Salado Parkway, just south of the Salt River.
The project in question would include a new arena for the Coyotes, retail and office buildings, hotels and high-end apartments. It is expected to cost around $2 billion to develop. Tempe voters will decide the fate of the proposed project through a special election in May.
At first, the airport expressed concerns about the height of the proposed arena and height of cranes used to construct the project, but as of late, the airport has focused on the residential element of the proposed project.
“Low-flying aircraft are noisy. People are annoyed by noise, especially noise at their homes,” Phoenix wrote in its legal complaint. “And so, for many years at the cost of many millions of dollars, experts in aircraft, like the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) and the professionals who run our nation’s biggest airports, have worked very hard to keep homes away from low-flying aircraft.”
Phoenix is suing Tempe for breach of contract of a 1994 agreement that Phoenix says Tempe has violated and has asked the court to rescind Tempe’s recent zoning and land use changes and prohibit future residential uses in an area that the FAA says is incompatible with residential development. Tempe has long said that the proposed project would not violate the 1994 contract between the two cities.
