PEORIA, Ariz. — In the next five years, the city of Peoria will more than double it's 3,800 acres of public land to over 8,000.
Chris Calcaterra is the city of Peoria’s Parks and Recreation director. He says this land acquisition will bring in more hiking, biking, horseback riding, and other activities.
“It’s really an opportunity for us to blossom. We have about 1,100 mountainous acres. Now we’re going to essentially triple that by the way of this new inventory.” Calcaterra said. “We have about 60 miles of trail currently. We have 20 miles on the flatlands and about 40 miles on the mountain trail system.”
It’s taken about two decades to develop the land, but now Peoria is acquiring it from development agreements in phases within the next five years.
“From a topography standpoint, the new land is unique in its aspects," Calcaterra explained. "All sorts of hillsides, top of mountains, these are going to be trails that will lead you up to vistas and peaks.”
And the new land could include trails systems that could be right in residents’ backyards.
“Multi-modal transportation. We’re allowing people access from their home to the space," Calcaterra excitedly explained. "That is something where we pride ourselves on in Peoria with our current system already in place.”
The parks and recreation department wants to add M.O.R.E. That’s mountains, open space, and river ecosystems. That’s the name of it’s new division that starts July 2025.
“We’ll be diving and conquering some of the opportunities that we have and that’s going to be one of the challenges we have," Calcaterra said.
The M.O.R.E. division will be a three to four person department overseeing both the current and future acreage. However, a volunteer seven member board of citizens will decide what to do with the land.
“A lot of that's gonna go through our parks and recreation citizen-led board," Calcaterra said. "That'll help us devise the plan and methodology on how to approach those each individual circumstances.”
Peoria is growing in more ways than just its land, but the thousands of new acres will just add to the West Valley.
"We have a lot of good amenities already," Calcaterra said. "The compliment of this is the development of areas in Peoria that were underdeveloped until this point in time. If you love the outdoors Peoria, Arizona is the place of the West Valley that you can come and really enjoy for the future.”
If you want to learn more about the project you can click here to visit their website.
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