Steeple won't crown Mormon temple in Foothills

A seven-acre site in the Catalina Foothills will soon be home to Southern Arizona’s first Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple.

This Mormon temple, to be built near where East Ina Road curves into Skyline Drive, won’t have a steeple piercing the sky, like many do. Instead, the signature golden statue of the angel Moroni will perch atop a cupola, or dome structure.

The church submitted plans to Pima County for a two-story, 34,000-square-foot temple in 2013, according to Star archives. The groundbreaking ceremony is invitation-only and scheduled for 10 a.m. Oct. 17.

The mission-style design complies with Pima County’s zoning code, which allows for a church building to be 44 feet in height, not including a cupola, said Chris Poirier, the county’s assistant planning official.

The building and platform for the dome will measure at roughly 43 feet in height, with the cupola adding about 27 feet, plus the statue, Poirier said.

The land is already zoned for religious buildings, but early plans including a 95-foot steeple would have required the church to apply to the Boards of Adjustment for a variance.

“What we did early on is advised the church to work with neighbors, even though if they’re able to design to our regulations, they don’t need to,” Poirier said. Insisting on a spire would have required a public hearing, he added.

A group from the church met with the board of the homeowners association in the Shadow Roc neighborhood, where the temple will be located, for the first time in 2013, said association president Stan Kartchner. The dialogue continued, with the most recent conversation this February.

For the most part, neighborhood response has been positive or neutral, said Kartchner, who is a member of the LDS church.

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“I don’t think there is any secret that the concerns of association members of any project have to do with typical things like height, color, traffic patterns and lighting,” he said. “(The church) responded and addressed all of those issues.”

Traffic, for example, won’t go through the neighborhood, and lighting will dim to “security-level” around 10 or 11 p.m., Kartchner said the homeowners board was told.

The church also invited neighbors to tour Gilbert and Phoenix temples before their dedications last year. The Tucson temple will be the sixth in the state. Church membership in Arizona is estimated around 416,000, according to an official LDS website.

Temple doors often open to the public before dedication. Unlike the meetinghouses where Mormons worship on Sundays, temples, once dedicated, are considered sacred spaces to be entered only by church members in good standing.

The craftsmanship of the Gilbert and Phoenix temples impressed Kartchner — a preferable alternative to the office complex Shadow Roc previously fought, he said.

“The office complex would have occupied much more of the land and been much nearer to the neighborhood,” Kartchner said. “The temple will be situated in such a way that there is a large buffer between the temple, its land and the adjoining neighborhood.”

The church purchased the land in 2010 for $1.6 million, along with a nearby house for $390,000, Star archives show.

The development will include a 260-space parking lot.

The temple will likely serve five Tucson stakes — which are made up of smaller congregations — and three in the surrounding region, though the church has not officially made that announcement.