State Farm’s New Tempe Office Complex Sparks Traffic Concerns

By: Emily Zentner

Cronkite Special to AZLatinos.com

Downtown Tempe has long been a blend of college town culture and traditional suburban atmosphere; but it will soon be home to one more thing: State Farm’s new office.

The complex will bring up to 8,000 of State Farm’s employees from locations around the Valley right into the heart of Downtown Tempe. However, some Tempe residents are concerned about the effect that this development will have on traffic downtown.

“It’s definitely going to have an impact, there’s already a lot of come and go around Mill,” Isabel Ruiz, a Tempe resident and the secretary of the Tempe Los Vecinos group, said. “I live on University, and this would mean I would have to go a different way to get to the shops in Tempe.”

The State Farm buildings will be part of the new Marina Heights development near Tempe Town Lake, which will include five office towers, three or four retail buildings, a lakeside plaza, and 8,600 parking spots. The $600 million, 20-acre complex, built by Ryan Companies in conjunction with Sunbelt Holdings, will be completed by late 2017.

Almost two million square feet of office space within Marina Heights are leased to State Farm. One of the State Farm buildings is already open, with about 1,500 employees working there, according State Farm spokesperson Victor Hugo Rodriguez.

“State Farm is already in Tempe, we have our old buildings around the area,” Rodriguez said. “The new buildings are to expand and consolidate what we already have.”

At a meeting of the Los Vecinos group in Tempe on Jan. 25, Tempe City Council candidate Ernesto Fonseca offered a potential solution to the traffic the complex’s employees will bring to the area surrounding Tempe Town Lake.

Fonseca said that he would propose to State Farm that they stagger the times that their employees arrive and leave work in order to soften the impact on traffic. He suggested that some employees would start work at 7:40 a.m. instead of 8 a.m., and finish at 4:40 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. to reduce the amount of cars on the road at a time.

Fonseca said that even a five-minute gap between employees leaving could make a substantial difference to traffic flow downtown.

State Farm is taking action on its own to encourage employees to utilize alternative methods of transportation to get to and from the office.

According to Rodriguez, he was provided with a free Valley Metro pass by State Farm as incentive to use public transit to get to work. Rodriguez also said that the Marina Heights location was chosen specifically due to its proximity to the light rail.

Rodriguez said that all State Farm employees in Tempe are provided with either free or discounted access to public transportation, and that the company is also working to provide convenient bike parking for employees. However, these solutions are not enough to ease all of the resident concerns.

“They say that employees will bike to work, but what about all of the employees that live out in Chandler and Mesa?” Ruiz said. “They’re not going to bike to work.”

According to Nikki Ripley, a public information officer for the city of Tempe, the city itself did not conduct a traffic study before construction began on the development. However, the city did require Ryan Companies to conduct a traffic study before ground was broken on the development.

The city is also currently working on its own study in conjunction with Arizona State University. This study will look at a broader area, focused around Arizona State University’s campus and athletic facilities, and will have results available in about six months. Information from the study will be used to provide short- and long-term strategies for the city to take to deal with increased traffic in the area.