Fort Lowell was a supply base for the United States Army “Apache Campaigns” between 1873 and 1891. Following abandonment of the fort in 1891, settlers moved in and used some fort buildings as residences, or stripped the buildings of useful materials. By the 1930s, much of the fort had fallen into disrepair or had been sold off. Eventually, the City of Tucson acquired a large portion of the old fort which became what is today’s “Fort Lowell Park.” A 5.2 acre (“Adkins”) parcel of the former fort containing several original adobe buildings was still in private ownership, and the 2004 County bond election passed a proposal to acquire the land and preserve the historic resources.

A landmark assessment of infrastructure needs in Arizona was produced by the L. William Seidman Research Institute in May 2008 for the Arizona Investment Council (AIC): "Infrastructure Needs and Funding Alternatives for Arizona: 2008-2032", that addressed infrastructure needs in four categories: energy, telecommunications, transportation, and water and wastewater. The information from the AIC report is a major input to the report that follows. Other types of infrastructure — most notably education, health care, and public safety — also are analyzed here to provide a more complete picture of infrastructure needs in Arizona. The goals of this report are to place Arizona’s infrastructure needs into national and historical contexts, to identify the changing conditions in infrastructure provision that make building Arizona’s infrastructure in the future a more problematic proposition than in the past, and to provide projections of the possible costs of providing infrastructure in Arizona over the next quarter century.