PHOENIX — Phoenix voters will decide next November whether they want to borrow almost $22 million for a new Latino Cultural Center.
The center has been almost a decade in the making, after several stops and starts.
The timing seems right, with the Valley's Latino population growing twice as fast as non-Latinos. Arizona is projected to become a majority-minority state within the next decade.
"We have such so much talent here, so many artists," said Jose Andres Giron, a working artist for 50 years whose studio is at the Arizona Latino Arts and Cultural Center downtown.
Giron was on a City of Phoenix committee that recommended the site for a new Latino Cultural Center.
"Performing arts, music, food - these are the three elements that we need," he said.
"We have a little flavor of our own right here in Phoenix."
The preferred site is the Phoenix Center for the Arts in Hance Park, just north of downtown.
The historic Santa Rita Hall south of downtown could also be in the mix.
"That's a blank canvass to me," Giron said. "You look at Santa Rita and you look at the potential that it has to create a significant destination."
Civil rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez staged a 24-day hunger strike there in 1972, drawing national attention.
City officials say the existing Arizona Latino Arts and Cultural Center downtown hasn't been ruled out.
"We hope to expand out and grow with whatever is being proposed," Giron said.
The space, across Adams Street from the Hyatt Hotel, is home to Giron and other artists' studios, as well as display areas, an event room and a gift shop. Expansion might be possible, into the two former restaurant spaces next door.
"We would look at that funding as what we could do again on a new site or on the current facility," Mitch Menchaca, executive director of the Phoenix Office of Arts & Culture, said at a hearing last September.
The $21.7 million earmarked for a new Latino Cultural Center is one of dozens of civic improvements packed into a half-billion-dollar Phoenix borrowing package known as the GO Bond:
- Four new fire stations
- New affordable housing and renovated senior centers.
- Street, sewer and flood-control projects.
The bond isn't expected to raise property tax rates. Phoenix voters will have their say in a special election on Nov. 7.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the GO Bond would fund work on the new Phoenix Police Department headquarters.
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