Jackie’s Vision for Buckeye
The people of Buckeye value their communities and want to build on the base of the Buckeye’s great heritage, ensuring that it changes and grows with effective planning, ensuring safe communities that have a solid economic future. Jackie’s goal is to target these these objectives:
1. Build a Solid Economic Future
- Actively pursue commercial and industrial businesses to create a strong financial base and provide jobs for Buckeye residents
- Creating local jobs would allow Buckeye residents to spend less time commuting on the freeways, resulting in more time with their families.
- Attract and secure local sports, entertainment and arts venues in Buckeye
- Goodyear, Surprise, and Glendale have Cactus League Spring sports facilities—why not Buckeye?
- Aggressively pursue college and universities to locate in Buckeye, thus increasing educational opportunities.
- Goodyear has both a community college and a University—Why not Buckeye?
2. Ensure Buckeye remains a safe place to live
- Provide temporary police substations in communities such as Verrado, Tartesso, and Sun City Festival until permanent stations can be built.
- In terms of fiscal responsibility, this saves the time and expense of travel between downtown Buckeye and distant communities.
- Implement community policing, where the officers and community develop a relationship.
3. Foster unity among all Buckeye Communities
- Open communication with the residents of Buckeye—Make agenda available for residents to view.
- Tap into the knowledge and expertise of Buckeye residents who have experience in fields such as business, construction, education, etc. to form advisory committees.
- Hold meetings with community and advocacy groups to address issues and concerns throughout Buckeye.
- Consider how to value downtown Buckeye
- Evaluate an effective “business center” for Buckeye
4. Provide for a community that has a quality infrastructure
- Enhance water and sewer system quality
- Prepare infrastructure for continued growth
5. Ensure effective leadership to address current and future growth
- Attract and retain a qualified city manager
- Work with the council to create job description and expectations
- Nationwide search with league of cities to find qualified person
- Look to nearby cities for input
- Identify a group of people with current and prior experiences in city growth, management, business, etc to form an advisory group
- Enable department heads to provide effective leadership
- Provide police and fire departments with competitive salaries, and attract quality personnel.
- Provide training and state of the art equipment so that they can provide the best services.
- Good communication – Meet and confer to resolve issues before they become problems
6. Preserve the natural resources of Buckeye
- Preserve open spaces, especially the White Tanks and Maricopa Mountains
- Expedite agreements with Bureau of Land Management to bring these areas into our parks, trails and recreation system.
The city’s current population of 90,000+ is predicted to balloon to over 200,000 in the not to distant future. We have seen that the status quo is not working, and we need to change with the times. We need to embrace our past and build for the future.
I want to create a “unity of communities” spirit throughout the entire City of Buckeye so that we can build a great city. This requires leadership.
As mayor, I have actively listened to the constituents and strongly encouraged their participation, while remaining focused on the “big picture” of moving Buckeye from being a small town into the great city that it has the potential to be.