CRAIG McFARLAND CG Mayor Reflects on How the Big House Reached the Big Time

Interview by Rock Earle

Casa Grande Mayor Craig McFarland was born and mostly raised in California, though he moved around a bit as part of a Navy family. His father went to work for Anheuser-Busch after leaving the military, and he followed suit after graduating from California State University-Fresno in 1976.

During the next 26 years, he worked across its sales, distribution and marketing functions in six states, moving 10 times with his wife Nancy and their two children.

In 2005 he was hired away by Golden Eagle Distributors, which brought him and Nancy to Casa Grande. They now have five grandchildren, who live with their parents here and in Phoenix. He retired as Golden Eagle’s vice president of sales in January 2015 and almost immediately got into local politics, winning the first of his four two-year terms the next year.

GRANDE LIVING: At this point in your political career, we want to look back on your legacy. We want your ideas on your time in office leading this great city and your hopes and dreams when you started, your successes and later we’ll talk about what you still have to accomplish. We also want to talk about what you think about your future.

Mayor Craig McFarland: The scary part.

Since, he’s sat on 25 local and regional boards, spearheaded efforts to widen Interstate 10, worked with others to find a long-term solution to the area’s looming water shortages — which have already hit the agricultural industry — and overseen the economic expansion that has brought Lucid Motors, a new Kohler plant, several semiconductor industry suppliers and waves of new residents, for starters.

More city amenities have come online too, most notably the Casa Grande Community Recreation Center.

I was there as Craig began his journey into local government eight years ago, and as he begins his final two years in office due to term limits I wanted to check in with him about how the city has been transformed over his tenure and what the future may hold for him.

GRANDE LIVING: It wasn’t this conference room, but it was a similar conference room, where the idea first came up of becoming involved in local politics and you showed up.

Mayor Craig McFarland: It was two months after I retired from my previous life, in January 2015.

GRANDE LIVING: Thinking you were going to head out in an RV and retire, play golf all day?

Mayor Craig McFarland: Yes, exactly. I was going to buy this RV and start traveling around the country. And then because my wife dragged her feet, it was sold before I could make an offer on it.

GRANDE LIVING: So you ran for mayor?

Mayor Craig McFarland: I told her: “If you’ll let me buy the motor home, I won’t run for mayor.” We went to my brother’s wedding in California and on the way back she goes, “OK, you can buy the motor home if you don’t run for mayor.” The minute I get back I called the guy, and he’d sold it the day before.

A couple weeks earlier you, me and the then-Mayor Bob Jackson and a few other people were sitting around a conference table similar to this, having a conversation about who we were going to get to run for mayor.

GRANDE LIVING: Who would possibly want to take on that job?

Mayor Craig McFarland: Exactly. And so I kind of mulled it over as we were sitting there, and I think I raised my hand. I said, “Well, I’ll run for mayor if you all, guys and gals, will support me.” And you all were a bit aghast at first but ultimately said, “Yes, of course we’ll support you.” So that’s where it started.

We sent out a questionnaire, a survey. Collected about 500 surveys back out of 4,000, tallied up all the results, and from there we built the platform. We already had ideas but wanted to hear what people had to say. We used that along with things we thought were important for the city like education and workforce development.

We even formed a committee on education and workforce development, and the education piece spun off as Achieve Pinal, which became part of the Pinal Alliance for Economic Growth and is still active and quite frankly, doing an amazing job on third-grade reading and also on Careertopia.

GRANDE LIVING: That’s amazing. So back to your first race in 2016, I remember we had a slogan and we had pins and we had all sorts of things and yet you ran unopposed then and every subsequent time.

Mayor Craig McFarland: We had this conversation, and we thought, “If you come out early and you raise enough money, maybe we’ll scare people out of the race.” It worked.

Once you’re in there, then you’re the incumbent, right? And one thing about Casa Grande is, as long as you’re doing a good job, I think they like consistency. It certainly is healthy for the council to have consistency. One thing about Casa Grande that I’ve noticed is they don’t really turn over their council very often, or their staff.

Now, voters just approved term limits for the council. So now it’s 12 years maximum, it’s three, four-year terms. So we’ll have turnover but someone can still be on council for 12 years. And the current council is grandfathered in, so some of them could be in for another 12 years, if they wanted. Mayors are different, so I’m already limited to four, two-year terms, and I just started my fourth.

GRANDE LIVING: So looking back on all your terms, what do you recall as your first big success or big issue that you made your own stamp on in the City?

Mayor Craig McFarland: Probably working on Interstate 10, widening of I-10. I have been a thorn in ADOT’s side in trying to get I-10 widened and our city name signage changed on I-10. That was the first probably real big accomplishment, meaning something everyone could see. I also think the updating and improvement of our strategic plan is a major accomplishment.

We kind of dusted off the old goals and then took four or five subjects that I ran on like education and workforce development, safety, making Casa Grande easier to do business with, economic development and incorporated them into the strategic plan. It really was the Council’s influence of putting that into the strategic plan that made a big difference. It gave the City direction, it gave staff direction. So those were probably the two biggest things in my first term.

GRANDE LIVING: What about the next two years? I can think of one big elephant in the room: economic development.

Mayor Craig McFarland: Economic development was always on my radar. It was that and customer service, those two things with the City. And so early on we had conversations on how things were done, and the City Manager Larry Rains and I had several conversations about our City’s customer service. Our customers are our constituents, our businesses, our industries and builders/developers, and our attitude wasn’t, I would call, customer friendly.

And then also in the first term, Larry and I went and visited every builder and every developer in the state. We took the dog and pony show to the builders and developers because we couldn’t figure out why Maricopa was building houses and we had 10 permits a year. It was very frustrating.

GRANDE LIVING: You did it like the marketer that you are.

Mayor Craig McFarland: That’s my background, sales and marketing. And it was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, too.

GRANDE LIVING: So what year did the economic development landslide first hit here? In terms of jobs?

Mayor Craig McFarland: Well, early on, we had PhoenixMart, and Atessa. We had the Dreamport Villages and we had Lucid. And so Larry and I commented to each other, we just need one of them to land. We know what happened with Dreamport Villages and Phoenix Mart.

Atessa’s coming along, the Podium Club is now a real thing. There’s a real track out there. It’s just taking a little longer. And then there’s Lucid.

And, I’m not going to take credit for all of the economic development.

Was I able to help and talk with people and put Casa Grande in a good light in terms of it being business-friendly? Yes. But, there were many before me, people like Donovan Kramer Sr. and others back 40, 50 years ago, who first envisioned Casa Grande being a center for industry with Hexcel and Frito-Lay and Abbott. I mean, we’ve had the bones there and the desire to make it go.

GRANDE LIVING: Well, let’s talk about development before the big names like Lucid. In the years before that, you had private developers like Tim Smith and Jackob Andersen doing things like the Central Arizona Commerce Park (CAZCP), which led to Tractor Supply Co. coming. That was not insignificant.

Mayor Craig McFarland: Sure, and the Walmart Distribution Center.

GRANDE LIVING: There’s a host of industries that aren’t necessarily game-changers, but they started to build things up. Tractor Supply was the reason CAZCP really got started on the south side of Peters Road, which led to the Lucid availability.

Mayor Craig McFarland: I agree; the desire has been there for a long time. And I think you have even said it, you’ve always thought that Casa Grande would be that place that was eventually going to get there. I think we finally have gotten there.

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