Page City Council stands by their original vote to move forward with the Streetscape formerly known as the Downtown Revitalization Plan.

Citizens were reminded that only the Vista Avenue phase – the area in front of Page City Hall – is ready for contractor bids. There’s still time to influence what happens to Lake Powell Boulevard before final architectural and engineering plans are drafted.

City Manager Darren Coldwell, who has always had an open-door policy, invited citizens to make an appointment and share their ideas and concerns with him.

The well-attended Sept. 27, 2023, council meeting lasted over 3½ hours. Citizens were given time to express their concerns and ask questions. City of Page Mayor Bill Diak told the Chronicle it wasn’t the longest meeting he’s presided over, “but longest for controversy.” 

Some citizens interrupted speakers and council members as they spoke, and some walked out in anger mid-meeting. After local business owner Trent Sutherland criticized the accuracy of a petition circulating to stop the Streetscape, he was verbally attacked by at least one audience member. 

Diak responded by asking for “decorum with the audience.” 

“If I don't get it, I will ask to have that person removed,” he said “I will not allow you to badger anybody. No one badgers some of the other speakers. Do not badger somebody because they're presenting a different view that is maybe opposite of yours. If you can't do that, then I will ask you to leave.”

Page Planning Director Zachary Montgomery said one important aspect of the Streetscape project is not getting attention: upgrading the aging infrastructure underneath Lake Powell Boulevard. 

“I've been listening to all of the comments at two of these meetings, and I think we're missing a very big part of this puzzle, which is the infrastructure,” Montgomery said. 

“Utilities that are under the street, many of those utilities were put in when the highway was built – when it was a highway. Some of that infrastructure has a lifespan of 25 to 30 years. We’re there. Some of that infrastructure has a lifespan of up to 50 years. We’re there. My recommendation is that we do all of those improvements and get everything underground. Where a lot of this money is going, it’s going to be underground, repairing bringing things [up-to-date]. I would prefer that we do it at a much less cost, doing it one time for all the utilities [rather] than coming in as the different utilities fail and cutting and patching into the street at different times. That's a lot more expensive way to do it.”

In sharp contrast to recent meetings, Streetscape supporters addressed council in greater numbers. Many had followed the project from its early stages and gave reasoned, forward-looking arguments for the project’s continuance.

“I've got friends in the room, and I hope we're still friends when I finish,” Former council member Dugan Warner said.

“I was on council when this first was considered, and it was mainly brought on because we needed to look at how we are going to change the city of Page. I've lived here since before that street [Lake Powell Boulevard] was built, and I can tell you that it looks just like it did after it was built in 1959. So, I was very interested in how can we make Page a hometown Page and how can we make it a place where the locals can come, and we can have sort of a center area that would benefit both locals and our visitors at the same time.”

Warner visited other Arizona cities who took similar revitalization steps.

“Two projects stuck in my mind,” he said. “One was Cottonwood, Arizona, that had taken an initiative to do something with its old town, and they did an amazing job. If anyone’s been there, it is a vibrant, very active, very successful project. The other project that stuck in my mind even more so was Tolleson. I was very connected to that project presentation because it resembled Page. I mean, it was almost an identical scenario as what we have.”

Warner spoke with Tolleson’s city manager and his economic director. They told him that since the revitalization project, they now have a community they can call a hometown.

“It's vibrant. it's active, and they've brought in several new businesses and shops,” Warner said.

“I don't know, maybe this plan [Page Streetscape] is not perfect. I know it’s not perfect, but we’ve got to do something along the line of beautification and doing something with the heart of downtown and get the thoroughfare slowed down.”

Citizens are usually limited to three minutes each when speaking at council meetings. Warner wasn’t able to finish his talk. The Chronicle spoke with Warner Saturday for more about his experience in Tolleson, a city with roughly the same population as Page.

“The street goes right through the middle of town,” Warner said.

“They took about two or three blocks and narrowed it down. They hired J2, the same company that did the plan for City of Page. The plans are almost identical; I mean the same idea anyway, the same configuration for the street. But their pressure was coming from their own community.

“They're not really a tourist town. They’re more of kind of a close-knit Hispanic community and just a bunch of people that have been there a long time. And they didn’t have any sort of downtown at all. They had some businesses along that strip, but similar to Page, it was a 40-miles-an-hour speed zone through there, 35 miles an hour. People were just zooming past. And the community wanted a centralized place where they could hold events and create that little downtown atmosphere. That’s what they did. And that little two or three block area has got like, a plaza, and they have concerts down there.”

“They wanted to create an atmosphere that the locals could gather and have more of a downtown feel than [the street] just splitting the town in half,” Warner said.

Trent Sutherland followed Warner and spoke bluntly about opposition to Streetscape. He and his wife own several local businesses, including Lake Powell Marine and Lake Powell Vacations. 

“I'm here in full support of the Streetscape project. I could stand up here like Dugan does, and you know, spend hours giving the benefits of what this would do for our community, but I only have three minutes,” he said.

“I work with thousands of customers, thousands on the lake. They come here every year. Do they ever come to Page? Very rarely do the lake people come to our city. Why is that? It’s because we have nothing to draw them here. We need to be better as a community drawing our visitors from the lake into Page. Our downtown, I hate to say it, but it’s old, it’s ugly, and it needs this project. I might add that this project has already been approved, and we should keep moving forward with it.” 

Sutherland said fewer than 25% of Page visitors return.

“That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, when we have a million people that return to that lake on a yearly basis,” Sutherland said.

“We only get a 25% return – we need to do better. I encourage everybody in this room to drive up and down Main Street tomorrow. Ask yourself the question, ‘Should we revitalize and make our community better?’ Your answer should be ‘yes.’ The people that don’t say yes are the people that have been here for so long and they feel entitled to their view. We’ve got to get past that. We’ve got to be truthful to ourselves. Do we really have a traffic problem? No, we absolutely do not have a traffic problem. In this town, when this is completed, I will still be able to get anywhere in Page in under 10 minutes – absolutely in under 10 minutes. So, the traffic argument is nonsense, just like that petition is nonsense. I can put a petition together that drops all of the specifics. So counsel, that petition is garbage.”

Sutherland said the project should encourage other businesses to improve their frontage and that the project would increase their property values.

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