Tempe Oral History Project
Narrator: DON HULL
Interviewer: JOHN H. AKERS
Date of Interview: August 9, 2001
Interview Number: OH - 174
Don Hull was born on August 24, 1926 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a
graduate of the University of Wisconsin and a veteran of World War II. He
started his planning career in Wisconsin and Michigan. Don Hull was the
planning director for the City of Tempe from November 30, 1970 to August 8, 1987. He is credited
"with creating the vision that transformed Tempe from a quiet little town
on the Salt River to a thriving city whose orderly growth and planning are the
envy of the Southwest." The City of Tempe established the Don Hull
Award for Environmental Excellence to honor projects that most aspire to the
high quality that Don Hull expected.
Don Hull died on November 5, 2002.
For more information, see Don
Hull's obituary.
In this interview he talks about his background and career with the City of
Tempe. There were some minor problems with the tape recorder used for the
interview, which resulted in some minor gaps in the interview. These are
noted in the transcript with "[unintelligible]".
FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT
Copyright © 2001 Tempe Historical Museum
AKERS: Today is August 9, 2001. This is John Akers for the Tempe
Historical Museum. Today I am interviewing Don Hull in his house in the
Lakes in Tempe. Don worked for the City of Tempe for about 17 years in
the planning department. I know that the department went through
different name changes. We could talk about that. Starting off, what was
your planning background before you came to Tempe?
HULL: Well, I went to the University of Wisconsin and studied
landscape architecture and planning, which is [not] a very normal thing
in those days. There were only two or three colleges in the United
States that had just an exclusive planning degree. So I got about as
much planning education as you could get at that time. Then I worked two
years as a landscape architect, and I then became employed by the
Milwaukee County Regional Planning Department, which is kind of
interesting because Pat Flynn, who is now assistance city manager, came
from that organization.
I worked for about year in one of the famous greenbelt towns,
Greendale, Wisconsin, that was perpetuated by quasi-public interest,
namely, Ellis Chalmers, Curtie Threcker, and Boston Store Foundation.
They just didn’t want the community after it started or after they
disbanded the program to fall into the hands of speculative realtors.
They wanted to continue the planned concept.
AKERS: These were the planners who set up this greenbelt community?
HULL: No, there were the financial people, the people that actually
owned it. From there I went to Livonia, Michigan.
AKERS: What was the name of that town?
HULL: Livonia, right out of Detroit. It was a pretty nice community,
or became a rather nice community with tremendous industrial power. We
had a Cadillac plant, a Chevrolet Spring and Bumper [plant], and the
largest food warehouses in the world. The only trouble was, when the
city bought their [warehouse] bonds or invested in it, and they lost it
[the investment].
AKERS: That must have been an experience to be there during that
incident.
HULL: It went belly-up after I left, not that I would have had an
interest in it or responsibility. It’s just a kind of word to the wise
that every time a municipality invests in private speculative venture,
it doesn’t mean it’s all going to turn out economically feasible.
AKERS: It’s a good lesson that’s still applicable today?
HULL: Well, I think it is. I’m not critical of the city here in any
way because I admire the fact that the council is as aggressive as they
are. I don’t think they always make the 100% right decisions, but they
do things. They don’t sit on their haunches. One of the things I found
out that was rather disappointing there [Livonia] was you couldn’t get
the council to do anything, they just sat. They didn’t take any
oversteps; they thought planning was just a negative process to keep
things out of the city.
At that time I was appointed to the State Board of Registration for
Community Planners in Michigan, and I sat on that for quite a few years.
It’s one of the few states that register planners. But I had also been
active in a planning organization in Wisconsin. I was president of the
Wisconsin planners (I forget what you call them), and under my
administration they brought in and became a part of the American
Institute of Planners [Wisconsin Chapter of the American Planning
Association].
AKERS: These are the positions you had previous to coming to Tempe?
HULL: Yeah, I think so.
AKERS: How did you learn about the position in Tempe that you applied
for? Was that title "Planning Director" or "Director of
the Planning Department"?
HULL: Planning Director.
AKERS: Do you remember how you heard about the position since you
were in Michigan?
HULL: It was advertised in the American Institute of Planners
Bulletin, a newsletter they send out. I applied and was successful.
AKERS: What interested you in the position?
HULL: It was more a desire to move West, than it was anything
negative there or anything positive here. I just wanted to get into the
land of great trout. [Laughter] I always kind of romanticized the West.
I made very good money at the time, although I was the highest paid
person in Michigan. I mainly came because I wanted to move West. I liked
the whole idea of the West. I would have been willing to go to Wyoming,
Montana, Idaho, or even Oregon or Washington. I was interviewed by Ken
McDonald. I think part of it was he believed in the principal of really
interviewing people in depth, so he came out to Michigan.
AKERS: Oh, really. He traveled to you first.
HULL: Well, I think he traveled around to several people, but he’s
a Canadian, which most people don’t know. I think he was a Canadian
citizen until the day he died. I found him to be a very pleasant person
who wanted to do good things for Tempe, bring in the right forces, if
that be the right word, to do the right things. I think somewhere in
that mix the council, either consciously or unconsciously, made a policy
decision that they wanted a quest for something better than mediocrity.
I think they envied the kind of development Scottsdale was getting
[compared to] the poorer type of development they were getting at the
time and other cities in the area were getting.
AKERS: What kinds of things did Ken McDonald emphasize things to you
when you were hired? What kind of projects? Did he say this is something
I want you to start on immediately?
HULL: No, he didn’t. He really didn’t interfere. He wanted to run
a good show, a good program, but he didn’t put his nose into your
business, who you hired, what your individual department policies were.
He gave you freedom to do the right things. That was a very good thing.
AKERS: You answered directly to him?
HULL: Yes.
AKERS: So, just one step removed from the top, from council. What was
it like coming to Tempe in 1970? That was a pretty heady year for the
city?
HULL: It was a heady year inasmuch as we were getting a tidal wave of
development. I think we had, one year, about that time (I don’t know
whether it was that year or the next year or what) we had like 15,000
homes built in one year, which was a tremendous rate of growth and
development. I think it kind of scared them. But I might not be the
smartest guy and not have all the answers, but I was accustomed to
working in rapidly growing communities. Like Livonia was the fastest
growing city in Michigan, if not, of course, the United States. And
Greendale was probably the most rapidly growing little village of any in
the state of Wisconsin. Working for Milwaukee County Regional Planning
Department, which I think I mentioned, we had a tremendous rate of
growth there too. So I was accustomed to working with rapidly growing
communities in area. So it didn’t bother me. I knew what tools we had
to enact in order to regulate the growth and development in the best
interest of the community. Didn’t always have tremendous support for
that concept, but I like to think we knew what we were doing, which
incidentally was very controversial and subject to great controversy.
AKERS: It seems you started in November, so you missed the
controversy over siting of city hall.
HULL: That was determined, yes.
AKERS: You missed the controversy with where the library was going.
You came in right after that.
HULL: I probably wouldn’t have disagreed with it. I think the
council probably made the right judgments at that time. It was a very
good council at that time.
AKERS: How many people were in your department, or about?
HULL: Four or five. Terry Day was there. I don’t know if you want
names?
AKERS: That’s fine.
HULL: Terry Day was kind of my right-hand man to begin with. Then he
succeeded me as director, and I think he did a very good job. He had a
young marine officer named Bob Scruggs, who was a real whiz with
paperwork. I don’t know how much combat he saw, but he could really
turn out the paperwork. There was a lull in there before I got there and
took over, but all those minutes were floating around on scraps of
paper. He did a tremendous technical job of getting some of the
important things codified and shaped to run an organization.
AKERS: Where was the department located in those days?
HULL: It was in Danelle Plaza.
AKERS: Right there at Mill and Southern?
HULL: Yes.
AKERS: It seems like a lot of city departments had offices there.
HULL: They all did–the whole city operations, I mean, outside of
the fire department and police department.
AKERS: Must have been some cramped space?
HULL: No, it was quite adequate. It was kind of conveniently
congested. By that I meant that the administration of the city, namely
the city manager, was in very close contact with each of the
departments. He walked by or you’d walk by and have a cup of coffee or
sit down and visit or he would come in. It was a good symbiotic
relationship at that time, better than at the present city hall where we
would be in the perimeter, and the manager would be on the third floor,
and we didn’t have (I’m not saying we didn’t have a good working
relationship), but what I say is that it wasn’t as close.
AKERS: He wasn’t passing by every day.
HULL: So, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
AKERS: You talked a little bit about the growth that was going on
when you started and what you’ve done. Can you tell me a little bit
about your approach to planning when you came in?
HULL: Well, I was kind of an old planner in a way. I had like 25
years of pretty darn good planning experience at a very comprehensive
level. A lot of planners plan by shuffling paper and are not prone to
making hard policy decisions and regulating that growth and development
in a manner that is most beneficial to the overall city. I like to think
I understood that and spared no horses in fighting through that, which
was quite a bit to fight through. A lot of people in the city had the
idea that bigger was better. Bigger is not better. It is not the
quantity of growth that’s the accolade to the city, it is the quality
of that growth. We tried very had to get good development. I think to a
large degree we accomplished that, but it is kind of a complicated
process in the city because we had the three boards and commissions. We
had the Design and Review Board concerned with the aesthetics and
logical development. We had the Board of Adjustment that grants
variances from the conventional standards set forth in the zoning
ordinance, and we had the Planning Commission that was concerned with
the overall well-being and the city’s growth and development.
AKERS: You started the Design and Review Board.
HULL: No, I didn’t. They had all the tools in order including many
ordinances but all those ordinances and so forth, the boards and
commissions, are just paper unless they are stringently administered.
And we stringently administered them. We fought tremendous battles in
the process because there were so many people that were so
pro-development it was hard to prevail. But we got to the point where we
had just a tremendous working relationship with the council. It was
very, very good at the time, very fine people. [They] really sustained
the department very well, first of all, by funding it adequately;
secondly, by sustaining our recommendations. You know, a planner has
very little power in his own hands. His power (if that be the right
word, and I am not sure that it is) comes from the ability to convince
people that do have the power in their hands to do the right thing. We
were quite successful and eventually had a good rapport and relationship
with the council and the boards and commissions, but there is always a
few foxes in the chicken coop [laughter], if that be the right analogy
who had their own agenda. I guess that’s the kindest thing you could
say about people who own great quantities of land and people in real
estate or builder that are not the ideal commissioners because they have
a vested interest before they even start. We didn’t have much of that.
We had some of that.
AKERS: When you came to the city, was Elmer Bradley mayor?
HULL: No, he just left. Dale Shumway, but he was a wonderful mayor
and a wonderful person. I had a great relationship with him. And then we
had [William J.] LoPiano, and then we had (I think it was) Harry
Mitchell because Harry sat for so long. He was a very wonderful guy who
was really interested in the well-being of the city. They all get a
little pressure here and there, and they don’t always do the right
thing. But I think the record of the mayors doing the right thing was
pretty consistently good. Shumway is a very high-type guy. Harry is a
very high-type guy. LoPiano was a very hard working mayor. He’d be
down in the department walking through city hall at 7:00 or 7:30 in the
morning to mainly see if the department heads were there or the staff
was there and functioning at 8:00 when the city officially started. They
were all pretty good mayors.
AKERS: It must have been convenient to have three mayors in the 17
years you were there?
HULL: I guess that’s right. Harry being mayor the longest, and for
good reason. Harry was a good mayor and a fine person. Fine wife, fine
family. The whole bit.
AKERS: I read when you started you had a mandate for strict zoning
enforcement, and I think I got that from when you got the Pioneer
Planning Award, which I will ask you about, since I have been reading
the application that the folks wrote, and they were talking about this
issue over strict zoning enforcement. I think you talked about how you
have things on paper but you need to implement that.
HULL: That’s the thing. You know, planners are mostly egghead. They
are, and I am not one. I maybe wish I was or was a better student or
more astute, but I’ve had a lot of practical experience before I ever
came to Arizona. My idea, or my thought process, said that we should
have 100% enforcement. There should be no violations in the area of
violations in the zoning ordinance or anything. And we tried to achieve
that. One of the mayors came down and gave us a pep talk at one time
saying that’s there no reason why we should be held in the good graces
of the city because we don’t have any enforcement authority like the
police, and to a degree, the fire department. But there is a lot of
enforcement vested in the hands of the planning department and in the
hands of the building inspection department and so forth.
AKERS: Were there a lot of zoning violations prior to you coming on
board? What was the zoning environment, I guess, when you came in?
HULL: Well, see, I accumulated a lot of responsibilities as I went
along. One of the real hot potatoes was the sign ordinance, and that was
in the hands of the building inspection department.
AKERS: That was separate from your department?
HULL: Yes, it had no jurisdiction over them, and then I was handed
that responsibility, and we really had some terrific sign people, both
men and women, than enforced that ordinance. [They] did a tremendous
job, and it was high-profile. It was very controversial. It wasn’t
helped by the sign industry either, or the billboard industry. We passed
a billboard ordinance, and we constantly modified the sign ordinance to
accommodate about what you’re seeing today. No signs over eight-feet
high and nothing larger than 24-square feet, which has been emulated
throughout the country. We had many requests for our ordinances from
other jurisdictions.
AKERS: So, is Tempe the first city in the area to go with the sign
ordinance?
HULL: No, they all have sign ordinances.
AKERS: Right now, but they all did at that time?
HULL: I think so, to a greater or lesser degree, but it’s not a
thing as having a sign ordinance. It’s the thing of having a sign
ordinance that sets up standards that are in sync with building a
desirable community. We have had a lot of desired emulation of
Scottsdale. Scottsdale has done a pretty good job of regulating their
growth and development and getting a good design and review board and so
forth. So we’d like to say we were out on the point doing everything
because of me or Tempe or what have you, but Scottsdale set a pretty
burning standard in those days.
AKERS: So, were they seen as pretty progressive in those days?
END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE A
BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE B
HULL: –high profile meeting, or whatever you want to call it.
AKERS: Great. So you said, aesthetically pleasing, and what was the
other criterion?
HULL: Well, in sync with the capital improvement program of the city.
AKERS: By that you mean you have enough services to adequately...for
your population?
HULL: Right. We also want to be in sync with the education system. I
don’t know how it stands now, but Tempe at the time had a great, and I
guess they still do, a rallying point around the university in the
education system. We were probably one of the few cities where you could
go to kindergarten and go all the way through to a post-doctoral degree.
You can go all the way through ASU and get a master’s, a doctorate,
and study beyond that, which I think is kind of unique. We have a lot to
be proud of with our university and our school system, which I think
even to this day, is pretty well-administered. We had a wonderful head
of the school district in John Waters, and a wonderful head of the
elementary school district in Ralph Goitia. He’s a Basque. A very
wonderful guy. I have to throw kisses to the educational function of our
city as well. Which we had little to do [with it], but we wanted to stay
in sync with the demands on the school system. We’d hold out school
sites and so forth from development when they didn’t have money to pay
for them, and that caused a lot of controversy too, or a lot of gnashing
of teeth, at least, by the people owning the land.
The city had a pretty sound public works and engineering program too,
which we had nothing to do with, but I think they deserve some
accolades.
AKERS: When you started in the Planning Department was redevelopment
a separate department at one point?
HULL: Yes, it was. I assumed the added title of community development
director, and I like to think we’ve done a good job in that way too.
It’s a big responsibility. We added like an $16- or $18 million budget
in that department, for which I got 5% for being the [director]. It didn’t
add so much to me, it involved sufficient funds in it because of other
reasons. It wasn’t that monetary remuneration was the big issue, but
it was certainly an added responsibility. We were fortunate in having
found a very fine community development director in our department, who
administered that part of our program. Before it was Steve Bachelor, who
was a full colonel in the Air Force and could fly anything with wings,
including the U-2. He was just a fine man and a very good administrator.
When he wanted to retire, we wanted to have his assistant, Archie Brown,
who was also a colonel in the Air Force. He had had a lot of combat
experience, but he didn’t want it. So we interviewed across the nation
and came up with Dave Fackler, who is quite a guy. He’s done quite a
good job.
AKERS: Did you bring him in or what he...?
HULL: Yeah, I brought him in. We was working in Boise, Idaho. He’s
a very intelligent guy. You’ve probably met him. He’s got a head on
him as big as a pumpkin, but it’s all full of brains. A very
intelligent guy. And now he’s the director of community development,
or whatever they call it now. But a very capable man.
AKERS: I think it is interesting that you were in charge of the
planning department in those days, and there was a separate
redevelopment department, but today we would tend to think of those as
the same thing.
HULL: Well, they were the same thing then too. It was run by Theron
Rust who was the director of community development, a very nice guy. If
he had a fault, it was that he had a hard time making decisions. I don’t
want to cast anything in any negative light, but I think the council got
fed up with not having solid recommendations. He would vacillate back
and forth. He was very competent; he knew his business and was a very
fine man.
AKERS: Redevelopment was put into your department, was that about
1976 or ‘77. But there was reorganization, right?
Hull: I can’t remember, but they called it community development
which included housing and redevelopment.
AKERS: What brought that reorganization about, or that desire to
integrate all those into one unit?
HULL: Again, I think the council was a little upset with Theron for
vacillating back and forth. Whether they liked me or not, I didn’t do
much vacillating (if that be the right word), but I don’t want to say
anything negative about Theron because he’s a pretty fine man.
AKERS: But it might have been the council had a perception that he
wasn’t as quick to respond as they would like?
HULL: Yeah, I guess you could say that, but maybe a better way of
saying that is it is a complicated business and it deals with vast
amounts of money. I think they had a budget of $18 million, I believe,
mostly if not all federal money, but Al Long was very good. He’s an
older fellow and wanted to retire, and Archie Brown, a very capable
assistant, but he wanted to retire.
AKERS: How did you feel about having these added responsibilities of
these other departments?
HULL: I cared a lot about what happened to the city of Tempe, and I
knew I could do a better job than was being done it they gave me the
horses to do it. And the council has been very good in that regard. I
think most people would be dumbfounded to find out that the council had
given me an award here or making it Don Hull Day or whatever, but the
truth of the matter is the council has been very good to me. They have
given me the budget I’ve needed. In the early days you couldn’t get
anything through the city without my favorable recommendation, so it
made it easier in a way for the manager, even the council, to adopt that
policy, and then we started getting a few foxes in the chicken coop. We
didn’t have that tremendous report in my last few years.
AKERS: Was that because the nature of Tempe’s growth was changing?
HULL: No, I think it was just the nature of the people that ran for
office, got appointed to office.
AKERS: Tempe became landlocked, I think, in 1974 when Chandler
annexed to the south. Did you see that coming?
HULL: No, I couldn’t. Joe Dwight, who is now deceased, was a very
wonderful guy, and a good council member. He was kind of old and
probably had a few ailments that [impacted his health], but he did
[unintelligible]. He was a very sincere, very good, decent man, and he
believed that we had a gentlemen’s agreement with Chandler that we
weren’t going to annex all the way down there without sitting down
there with them and agreeing on what that boundary would be on the
south. Somehow we thought we might go to Williams Field Road, but they
annexed all the way down to Williams Field Road and maybe beyond that.
We thought so much of Joe that we weren’t going to argue with what he
preached all the time. He always preached that we had a gentlemen’s
agreement which he intended to enforce, and then they came around the
back door and just annexed it without any discussion. They just did it,
and we were all pretty much surprised. We never had a goal to make Tempe
the biggest city in this area, I just wanted to do a good job and build
a very liveable, beautiful, practical city. He felt very bad about that
as if he had been betrayed, and I guess he was.
We also had the opportunity to annex Ahwatukee if we wanted to, but
the council made a very enlightened judgment by not wanting to because
we didn’t have the utilities or all the infrastructure to provide
Ahwatukee that they would need. So we just wanted to square off our
boundaries and settle for about what we have now.
AKERS: Did you have an opinion about Ahwatukee before the council
made a decision?
HULL: No, their people never asked me. The big controversy was
Guadalupe. I hadn’t developed it, but a consultant by the name of
Simon Eisner, had prepared a master plan for the city, or was preparing
it. And he had shown Ahwatukee in our general plan.
AKERS: Ahwatukee or Guadalupe, or did you say?
HULL: Guadalupe, I’m sorry. I’m getting fuzzy in my old age. He
just made an enlightened judgment. We have an obligation to supply our
own residents with good public utilities, and that was stretching it too
far. They would have had a tremendous demand for water, just as one
entity, that we probably could not have satisfied.
AKERS: You mean in Ahwatukee they wouldn’t have been able to
provide the water?
HULL: Well, they would have, but [providing water] would have been at
the risk of shortchanging our existing residents, our existing
commitments on boundaries.
AKERS: You just brought up Guadalupe. When the planner put Guadalupe
into the Tempe planning area, what was the reaction to that?
HULL: Boy, it was a hot potato, but I didn’t have anything to do
with it. It was fine with me. We didn’t have any need to really annex
them, and it wouldn’t have done Tempe any good. It would probably have
done Guadalupe more good than it would have Tempe, but we just chopped
it off in a logical boundary, being the freeway. It was a logical
thought process, but it wasn’t a politically proper decision to make.
Guadalupe’s a separate entity, and they’re doing a pretty good job
taking care of their own needs as a unit of government, which is fine
with us. I have many friends and many people that I have a lot of
respect for were part of the decision to [let them be] a separate
entity. I don’t think the city ever consciously ever had any desire to
make Guadalupe a part of Tempe. I think the consultant just went ahead
and did it, and then he started dragging his feet, and I had to go and
straighten out the general plan and get them to make some decisions. He
was running around with about six different alternatives of the general
plan that the council can make a judgment on or this or that. You know,
they don’t want to get into that detail. They sent me out to
California to get that thing ironed out.
AKERS: California is where the consultant was?
HULL: Yes.
AKERS: Which general plan was that? Was that the ‘78, or that was
before that?
HULL: You’ve got a better mind than I do. I think it was ‘78. It
was Simon Eisner who was the consultant. He was a good guy. He’d get
these federal contracts, and he would get some money, and he would want
to go ahead and prepare a general plan, which is a requirement of
getting the federal money, and there is not enough federal money or not
enough money to really give a consultant the amount he needs to really
spend a lot of time digging into his mission. That’s the best way I
can explain it.
AKERS: Let’s talk about that general plan of 1978. Looking back at
the city’s history, it seems that that plan is viewed as an important
milestone in the way the city planned for itself. Do you see it that
way?
HULL: Yes. You have to understand what a general plan is. To be very
simplistic in explaining it, it is nothing more than a picture of what
the city wants to be at some given time in the future. It should be an
economic look at it, it should be a sociological look at it, very
obviously a physical look at it. It was. The city has been good about
using that as a backdrop, I think. That early plan had some holes in it,
like the comprehensiveness, but [unintelligible] was pretty good about
the administrative general plan.
AKERS: So, there were a couple plans before that that might have had
some gaps in it and not be as complete?
HULL: Right. You have to remember, a plan is a lot more than a map.
It should be a capital improvement program. How are you going to finance
it. It should be a transportation plan in how you’re going to
implement it. Obviously, the land use–the land both existing and
proposed–and it certainly has economic and sociologic considerations
as well.
AKERS: What was the process like to develop that plan? You mentioned
you had this consultant, but....
HULL: He had a good reputation. He just went ahead and did it. I don’t
know how he did it. He certainly communicated with us, with the planning
commission, but when I put together the last general plan, I pretty much
honchoed that as my stepping out of the city of Tempe.
AKERS: That was the 2000 plan?
HULL: Guess so, yes. Part of it was research and analysis, which kind
of tells you what kind of animal you got. How you’re going to plan for
the future of the city if you don’t know what the city consists of
now, and then it was goal formulation. You got to know what the city
wanted to do. It’s really not up to the planner to establish the goals
of the city. That has been one of the weaknesses in the whole scheme of
things in the city is the goals. They are not too [unintelligible] to
find. When people like what’s going on, they sustain what are goals,
and when they want to do something else, they don’t sustain them. It
gives quite a lack of direction to all the units of the city government.
You start out with research analysis, then you go to goal formulation,
then you go to planning and preparation. You will notice when I left the
city had a plan that succinctly set forth those basic parts plus a
capital improvement or a financial part of it where you figure out what
you want to do. Do you want to buy park lands? You tell them what year
they buy them and how they pay for them by their GO bonds or revenue
bonds or cash on hands, taxes, or whatever. That comes under the head of
plan implementation and effectuation. Here you’ve got this nice
picture of what you want to do, then you’ve got to tell them how to
change it from paper to tangible results on the face of the earth. That’s
the way it was set up, and I don’t know. They’ve been tinkering with
that thing and have changed some parts of it, but the previous planning
director didn’t like the plan very much. The guy they fired–what’s
his name? Randy Hurlberg.
AKERS: He came in [before] you?
HULL: Yes, he was before Dave Bachelor, but even with the older form,
it still won the Association of Arizona Planners award for the best
general plan prepared, and that’s largely accredited to Atis [Krigers,
Principal Planner].
AKERS: Atis Krigers?
HULL: Yes, he is largely responsible for legally....
AKERS: Do you remember what the reactions were when this plan came
out? Was there a reaction?
HULL: Yes, we like to dream a little bit, but there were very
practical considerations in the plan, namely, land use, and tangible
things that affect the well-being of the city and the long-term
consequences, and we had some fun. We recommended an Eiffel Tower
structure with a heliport on it in relocating city hall to Southern and
Rural. They got rid of that pretty fast. It is not as crazy as it seems.
At that time we had people that wanted to buy city hall and turn it into
commercial office space. It really is the geographic heart of the city,
and it would have done a fantastic job if they would have followed our
dreams, but they didn’t and probably for very practical reasons. It
wasn’t as farfetched as it seemed. People would have purchased city
hall and probably paid sufficient remuneration to compensate for the
city and then some for their investment.
AKERS: Do you think part of you or the Department was using the
plan as a way to test ideas like that to see [phone rings]....
HULL: No, we did a lot of work. We had a program where the city would
go into each and every neighborhood and make a presentation and have a
relationship with the people of that area. That used to be the city’s
program.
END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B
BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE B
AKERS: –the plan process. You were talking about getting public
input?
HULL: Yes. So there was a lot of neighborhood input. Then we put out
a little document like a preview of the general plan, and I think we
mailed them to every household in Tempe. It was what were their
considerations for the future of Tempe. When things are going good you
get very few of the little inputs back, but I mean we tried, we tried
very hard. It cost the city some money, you know, to put together maybe
a 20-page document or whatever it was with a questionnaire. And then the
city–I don’t know if they still do it–when I left I didn’t hang
around much. It was so damn much fun I’d still be there, but the city
used to have retreats every year, and they did a pretty good job of
soliciting a cross section of the population of the city at the time to
participate and ask any questions they want, have things explained, and
get whatever was a broad cross section of the population’s idea of
what they thought Tempe should be, wanted it to be. You get a lot of
public apathy when things are going pretty well.
We had a lot of trouble in those days because the areas where most of
the development was going on was not overly populated, and you didn’t
get citizen support or dissent. I mean, your recommendation is the sole
thing that is governing the thing that’s going to happen. You go to a
council meeting at sit there from 8:00 until 1:00 in the morning, which
is fine, but became very, very difficult because cases would drag on for
so long. It was not just something that happened two weeks ago that is
now on the council agenda. It might have gone through the commission six
months ago, or the design and review board. So you walked in there with
a stack of files like that, and one thing that was wrong was that the
daily modus operandi was the kind of beat the staffs’
recommendations down and shoot holes in it, and then do whatever you
want to do in the council or the board or commission, so it was very
hard. It’s like going to court, instead of just going to a meeting. It
was very difficult. It can be injurious to your health.
AKERS: [Laughter] I can imagine. You put a lot of emphasis in getting
public feedback when you did the 1978 plan. Of course, today we say it’s
common sense. Of course, you get input from the people in your
community. It seems a little novel at the time you did it, though, to
the extent you had public participation in the plan.
HULL: Well, we strove for it, or we did what was right, but to be
honest, not enough people really conveyed their sentiments back to us so
we could codify them and formulate the general direction in which to go.
You’re still flying by the seat of your pants; at least we did the
right thing.
AKERS: Did you find that really frustrating?
HULL: I had been in planning 25 years before I came here, or
something like that. I knew what the ball game was.
AKERS: Something else about that 1978 plan. I was flipping through
it, and I saw there was an open space component, or an emphasis on
creating open space for Tempe. That’s another one of those things
where open space is a major issue in the last couple of years. But 20
years ago you were advocating for that. Was that common in planning
circles or do you think that was a newer thing that you added into this
plan?
HULL: My background...I worked in Greendale [with] the greenbelt
concept. Those greenbelt cities which probably are not practical in the
economic reality of city government, but greenbelt communities add up to
about 50% open space, but that is not so difficult to implement because
it was all cluster development. Instead of having 5,000 half-acre lots
or acre lots, you get that many apartments or townhouses or what have
you, and you still have the same component of open space. It’s hard to
maintain and hard to prove, but open space doesn’t mean it all has to
be manicured parkland where people can play softball or touch football.
It could have been permanent agriculture or something like that.We
recommended probably more open space than the city is going to
implement. That is one of the things that makes the city rich in quality
of life is having open space.
AKERS: Then before you left you said you worked on the 2000 general
plan. How was that different from the ‘78 plan? By that I mean your
process, your approach, what did you want to do differently with that
one?
HULL: Well, number one, the council was very good in giving us people
to work on it. I think I had three full-time people besides myself
working on the general plan, so we had more time, more ability to not
have economic or logistic constraints on your preparation. In general,
whether everybody agrees with it or not, it was what the city should be.
It was aimed quite specifically at the quality of life. A lot of
considerations like a bicycle network, an equestrian network, open
space, economic stability by a lot of industrial and office development.
At one time Tempe was getting more industrial development than the whole
state of Arizona. We got it from good people, CW Jackson and those kind
of developers that has some [unintelligible] consideration who would
think of the well-being of the community right along with their own
economic needs. I don’t know that that answers you as specifically as
you wanted me to.
AKERS: That’s fine. What made Tempe attractive for this industrial
development? You look in the last 30 years....
HULL: A nucleus of good industrial development.
AKERS: Meaning local Tempe businesses.
HULL: It’s got a lot of things that industry and business like.
Number one, a good university where they get technical help, and "untechnical"
help, or whatever the word be, people to work. And a lot of open land at that
time. Proximity to the airport, good freeway access, good economic
stability, and I think the fact that we’re going to institute a
program where we had a program of protecting people’s investment. We
made them put in a lot of landscaping and design a good building and
this and that. They might have been pretty teed off, they wanted to do
it as cheap as they could. [Interruption by Mrs. Hull]
AKERS: We were talking about this program of protecting investments
when a developer....
HULL: They knew that if they maybe spent $10,000 or $20,000 more to
do a first class job the guy that went in next to him was going to be
held to the same standards. So that kind of sugarcoated the bitter pill.
And it has worked out that way. We got a lot of very good industrial
development and office development mainly because of being a uniform
program and because the desirability of Tempe–and I meant to emphasize
stable government and economic viability as a political entity–because
they knew we would administer a uniform program where they had
confidence in it.
AKERS: I want to ask you about some specific things that you were
involved in, but two little final questions before we do that. The first
five years you were, the city grew incredibly. I think you added like
30,000 people from 1970 to 1975.
HULL: I am sure of it.
AKERS: What was it like to work and plan in that kind of growth
environment?
HULL: For me it was nothing extraordinary because I came from, as I
mentioned, one of the fastest growing counties in the United States.
Milwaukee County had a tidal wave of growth and development. Greendale,
which was a small political entity but with a great tidal wave of growth
for its size, and then Livonia, Michigan that had a tremendous rate of
growth and development, too. So if I am a specialist in anything, I like
to think I am a specialist or skilled in the art of handling and
regulating rapidly growing cities or a rapid rate of growth and
development, in developing the tools necessary to accomplish that end.
AKERS: And those tools again [includes] a good zoning ordinance?
HULL: Yes, we had to revise the zoning ordinance. The Design and
Review Board, which I didn’t instigate, has done an outstanding job,
and it was a very viable tool for getting good development, a good
capital improvements program. You buy land in Tempe to develop, and you
could be relatively certain the next period of time you’re going to
have the necessary capital improvements to develop it.
AKERS: When Tempe did become landlocked in ‘74, did that impact
your thinking at all or your approach to planning or the way the city
did business?
HULL: Well, no it didn’t. Maybe it’s to my discredit, but I kind
of suspected that Chandler was going to violate that agreement when
nobody else thought it was. I kind of planned for what we knew was going
to happen rather than what was kind of pie in the sky or not tangible. I
planned for what I tangibly knew was going to be the boundaries of
Tempe, not what I thought Tempe might be. I think if there is any
accolade found in the department, Terry Day. He deserves a lot of
credit. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful staff, and I’ll take the
accolade of developing them. Planners are first of all eggheads, but
they usually have some sort of an ego. They come out of school and they
think they know everything, and after X period of time, they find out
they don’t know everything. Then they get kind of submissive and
develop all sorts of complexes and so forth, and then at a certain point
they very often find that the people that are their superiors aren’t
even as knowledgeable as they are or as competent as they are, and that’s
the most dangerous point. You have to learn how to work in that arena
just as well as you have to work when you find out you don’t know
anything.
AKERS: So you have to make sure they never reach that point.
HULL: Well, you try to. I have been very fortunate, and maybe as an
accolade to me, but I never had any trouble really to speak of with my
staff, for a couple of reasons. One, I know the business by being
marinated in the human manure pile of mediocrity for so long as a
planner, I know the business, I knew it well. Secondly, because I
treated people well, and I promoted people that nobody else would
promote probably. I didn’t take strictly planners out of school. I
took people with engineering backgrounds, landscape architects. I have
five architects working for me at one time who make wonderful planners,
and guys with economic backgrounds, geography backgrounds and stuff like
that. I always had great staff support, and I had great citizen support
too. When they found out we were for real and we weren’t hired guns
from out of town and we knew what we were doing. There was such a hue
and cry for a regional shopping center in Tempe. That was a ruby jewel
in everybody’s eye, but when we didn’t get one as rapidly as they
thought we should, they blamed me because of holding such high
standards, I guess. But the fact is the Planning Department has no
authority or no vehicle to cause things to happen. Their only function
is to regulate that growth and development in a matter that is most
advantageous to the city, and part of that is a negative process of not
letting undesirable things in. Looking ahead you’ve got a controversy
that they’re having a strip club. Did you hear that?
AKERS: Strip club in Guadalupe, right across the street on Baseline.
HULL: See, that’s so easy to prevent. I don’t think you can do it
in Tempe without somebody prostituting themselves or something. We made
that kind of use subject to a use permit, so it takes another official
action of the city before that can happen, subject to a public hearing.
You got to give the city the tools through the ordinances to regulate
the city as best they want it to be. I think we did a pretty good of job
that. My predecessor, George Rogers, was a good technician. He had some
pretty good tools in the city. One of the revolutionary things is the
zoning ordinance which I certainly had something to do with, but George
Rogers also did because he did all of the zoning districts, all planned
commercial, planned residential, which meant that they get the
development right to the land use that was specified for the area, but
it would be tied to a specific development plan. They couldn’t get off
the hook without the city letting them get off the hook for what they
proposed at the time of development. You know why that is because they
must have wanted to build $10 million boutiques shops or something in
Tempe. Everybody had all these fanciful ideas, but all they do is say we’re
going to build this gorgeous shopping center and hold up a picture, and
then if you didn’t tie them to the picture or that proposal, they go
out and build something pretty mediocre.
They had a farewell party for me, and the different [bands?] that I
belonged to which was a wonderful bunch of guys, and one of the groups
got up and sang my accolades and then Jerry Vaughn, I don’t know if
you know him–he’s been active in the community as a developer and a
good citizen and a good, solid guy–said, "And I am here
representing the development community. I am here alone." I made a
lot of enemies with developers. You kind of remember, and people didn’t
remember. They get taken out for lunch, and then the developer thinks
they own them. Some of the people they curried favor with felt they were
obligated to do what they wanted to do rather than just look out for the
best interest of the city that they possibly can. I made it almost an
ironclad policy to never go out and socialize with developers. I have
gone out with a couple, most of them engineers, but I usually paid for
my own lunch. I am not economically strapped; it’s not a big deal to
have somebody buy my lunch and two or three martinis and then talk
business. I don’t like doing it, and I don’t think it’s right to
do it, and I just didn’t do it for which I received some very negative
feelings by people.
AKERS: And, of course, today there are all kinds of guidelines
against doing that very thing that you’re talking about, about
accepting meals...
HULL: I don’t know what the ground rules are anymore, but it would
have been easier to go out and play footsy, go on fishing trips with
guys. I just didn’t do it. A lot of people thought these developers
who would want to put in mobile home parks or do this or do that were
knights in shining armor to come into the city and do great things. I’ve
had enough experience to know that that shiny armor is somewhat
tarnished. Their goal is mainly to make money. It’s not categorically
true; there are some good developers, some people who have that elia
masenari consideration, meaning for the good of all, rather than
just monetary consideration. I see C.W. Jackson was one of them. He did
a lot of our industrial development, and after awhile, he did very good
development. Industrial development didn’t used to be covered by the
jurisdiction of the Design and Review Board.
END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A
BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B
HULL: Then, Ellis Suggs, he was a fine man that did a lot of
residential and other development. They would be examples of good people
for the city to do business with.
AKERS: It’s interesting today that people like Suggs, or the
Suggs-build homes, are very much in demand on the resale market. People
advertise those and they mention it. They don’t do it for all the
other residential developers.
HULL: Well, he was a good one. The truth of the matter is we had
control over the subdivision, how it was designed and where the streets
went, and all that, but we didn’t have any jurisdiction, and we still
don’t, over the design of residential homes or what they put on the
subdivision lots. I think this is alright most of the time. The market
at the present time is dictating pretty quality housing. People will
settle for nothing less. They’ll go where the good developers are
operating and building. And they’ve really got to want to live in
Tempe. It is just a little more expensive to live here than it is in a
lot of the adjacent communities.
AKERS: You’re right. It’s cheaper if you move to the fringe.
HULL: The developers were required to contribute some stuff to the
schools and to the overall infrastructure of the utilities.
AKERS: Looking back after you retired, what would you say is your
greatest achievement or accomplishment in Tempe?
HULL: Well, I think the downtown has turned out better than most. It
could be better than it is, but it has turned out pretty well. I’ve
not had as much to do with that as I had with the everyday,
bread-and-butter, conventional planning activities of the city, but it
was always under my jurisdiction, and it didn’t go too far wrong, but
if it did, it would have been my responsibility. Al Long did a
tremendous job and Dave Bachelor has done an excellent job, Archie
Brown. I think that’s one of the jewels of the city. There are a lot
of cities that get good individual building and developments. You don’t
have to go too far to see some very wonderful buildings in Phoenix or
Scottsdale. Downtown Tempe, as we envisioned it and as it is unfolding,
is pretty much an environment that people seem to for the most part
like. They made some mistakes. One mistake is building an environment
there to accommodate people that have got money and want to dine in a
reasonably sophisticated atmosphere, and you play rock music over the PA
system or something that attracts the kids to bebop all through
downtown. That is usually rectified, but sometimes that’s poor
judgment. Those things happen.
AKERS: What was you role with Rio Salado? Your influence?
HULL: I can’t take too much credit for it. It was really started by
the ASU architecture department under Dean Elmore.
AKERS: That was about ‘66, before you came.
HULL: That idea was inculcated in the hearts and minds of Tempe
residents for a period of time prior to me. So, I would give most of the
credit to Dean Elmore and his students who worked on it. I think it’s
great, and we always supported the Rio Salado, but he certainly didn’t
give it its genesis. And I think there are mistakes that are happening
there too. It’s not the perfect process, and I think the mistakes are
that sometimes we have the tendency to put ten pounds of peanut butter
in a five-pound bag. They have goals of developing that thing at a
pretty high-dollar intensity, and I’m not sure that that’s desirable
to add that much intensity of use to the quality of life for the broad
cross section of the population. But they’ve done a great job. They’ve
spent too much money, and maybe it’s a little too intense in its
vision. I’ve always been pro-Rio Salado, and John Kimoto of our staff
prepared a study on that. It was a terrific study even though it had had
its genesis with the architecture department, I think he prepared the
best study on Rio Salado they ever had.
AKERS: So, nearing the end the time you were with the city–wasn’t
it 1986 when there was the countywide proposal to develop Rio Salado?
HULL: I don’t know; I just can’t remember.
AKERS: But that was defeated then when Tempe decided to go on their
own.
HULL: We were just trying to work with Phoenix to continue it through
Phoenix and with Mesa to get them to develop it through Mesa. It was
maybe myopic, but that was kind of the extent of our overt action to
make it more than it is. But that would be pretty good to get it through
Phoenix, and it would be pretty good to get it all through Mesa. And the
Indian Bend Wash. I don’t know as much about stuff as you may think I
do because, for one reason, I have been fairly ill for a good part of
time since I left the city, and when I retired, I retired. If there is
anything I hate is when I was working, people would hang around trying
to have input when they no longer had viable input to give. So I didn’t
want to be one of those guys. So I dropped out.
AKERS: Did you miss planning when you [retired]?
HULL: Well, planning is a lot of fun. It’s a wonderful profession,
but so much of planning at the level of a director is knocking heads and
fighting so that your staff can theoretically do what they have to do. I
miss the purer aspects of planning, like developing a general plan,
evaluating development plans, processing plans that have a great impact
on the city, but I don’t miss at all that head-knocking and hypocrisy,
I suppose is a word that could be used. The philosophy to go out and do
a great job in the best interest of the city and do great things but don’t
make anybody mad is impossible. So, I don’t miss that. I liked drawing
plans, making lofty statements, and so forth, but I found it very
difficult to function at about the time I retired.
When my health started to give way, I had three wonderful years of
travel and fishing and having fun in my life. My wife taught at Corona
del Sol High School, and I think she retired about two years after I
did, so I’d go up in the White Mountains and spend the whole week up
there when there were not as many people around and fish and commune
with nature and do beautiful things. Then I would come home on the
weekends. I had a pretty good life there for the next period of time. We
traveled a lot together. Our daughter lives in Scotland and has her
family there, but I have two other children who are here, one in
Chandler and one in Ahwatukee.
You think they’re regulated here. And they think Tempe regulates
them to a higher degree than anywhere else, and I guess we do, or we
did. They really do regulate people in Europe, especially in the British
Isles. You take a little community way out in the middle of nowhere, and
you’ve got to get special permission and architectural consideration
and everything else before you can just build a single family house in
some of the places, namely Scotland. And design and review they think
that’s such a new controversial concept, but I think it’s
Charleston, they had design and review back there 200 years ago.
AKERS: They were certainly the first city, I think, that wanted to
manage their historical resources.
HULL: I went by their office [that] housed the design and review
board at its inception 200 years ago until the present time. The Design
and Review board has done a lot in the best interest of this city. It
deserves a hell of a lot of credit. A lot of good people sat on it. I am
pleased that the Council has seen fit to give me a little kiss and a
formal resolution that will declare my birthday as Don Hull Day in
Tempe.
AKERS: You say that is August 24?
HULL: Yes.
AKERS: Also, in 1998 you got an Arizona Planning Association
Historical Planning Pioneer Award? Do you consider yourself a planning
pioneer?
HULL: Yes. Well, I’m old enough to be a pioneer, but I brought a
lot of ideas from my previous jobs emphasizing total control and
development. One thing we brought in was floating zones. You had an area
zoned multifamily and put a floating zone on it that requires twice as
much landscaping and white buildings and additional aesthetic features,
or quality of life features. That’s a pretty new concept out here.
We had a wonderful city attorney, Dave Merkel. You know, most city
attorneys won’t stand behind conditioned zoning, and he would. We
could condition zoning and things like that, and you wouldn’t think of
doing it without the city attorney’s sanction, and he stood behind it.
He let us condition zoning in a manner that was in the best interest of
the overall city, I think. So, we had the added tool of conditioned
zoning.
AKERS: Was there anything else you wanted to mention or talk about?
HULL: Oh, I just want to give a kiss to Terry Day and my previous
staff and the fact that there has been great staff working for me all
the years. I’m still proud of Dave Bachelor and Fred Brittingham, and
especially John Kimoto, who is probably the most unsung hero in the
city. Great talent, great ability. He had a quest for excellence, a guy
that wants to do the right thing at every turn in the road for the city.
And I do give credit to a lot of the elected and appointed officials
over the years. There have been some foxes in the chicken coop, but
there’s been a great preponderance even to the present day of very
wonderful people serving this city in appointed or elected positions. I
just see a better future. I think Will Manley has the potential of being
the best city manager the city ever had. He’s a man of character and
integrity and honesty. He’s damn smart.
I’m very pleased with the fact that the city has seen fit to go
within their ranks to look at candidates for city manager rather than
just running outside. Randy Gross would have been a pretty fair city
manager. He’s a fine young man. Pat Flynn is an excellent man. I can’t
even remember who they all considered for the city manager’s job.
AKERS: I think you basically said all of them. There’s [Rich]
Oesterle.
HULL: He’s a wonderful guy, too.
AKERS: I think he was a finalist, right?
HULL: I just remember him as being a very fine young man and capable
young man, but I don’t know how he has matured or if he has quite the
experience. And I think Dave Brown is considered–you know he’s a
policeman. Nothing wrong with being a policeman. Maybe it’s as good as
being a library director, I don’t know. I somehow don’t think that
that area of expertise is beneficial to the background of a city
manager.
Don’t have much more to say. I’m pleased to be with you and meet
you, and I’ve enjoyed talking about Tempe with you, and I’ve said
some things that are perhaps a little controversial, but I tried to be
honest.
AKERS: Well, congratulations on getting the proclamation from the
City Council.
HULL: I still want to see it before I start extolling my virtues.
[Laughter]
AKERS: Thank you very much for talking to us today.
END OF INTERVIEW
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