Zoning fight pits growing Oro Valley church against neighbors

A zoning dispute of biblical proportions is now entering its fourth year in Oro Valley, where hot pink protest signs lead the way to the unlikely center of the standoff: a decades-old church at the heart of this suburban town.

The Oro Valley Church of the Nazarene wants to build an indoor multipurpose sports complex and a lighted, outdoor ball field on the property surrounding its growing campus on the northeast corner of Calle Concordia and Calle Buena Vista.

But ever since church leaders launched their ambitious plans to expand their sports ministry in 2020, the proposal has faced organized resistance from nearby homeowners, who don’t want any more traffic, noise or light in their once-rural neighborhood.

Standing in the middle is the Oro Valley Town Council, which will be asked later this year to decide whether to grant a zoning change that will allow the church to proceed with its expansion.

That vote is expected to happen in the fall, after the church submits the latest version of its proposal with updated traffic data the town recently collected in the area.

The matter seems likely to wind up in court no matter what the council decides. Both the church and the neighborhood opposition group have hired attorneys, setting up a potential legal fight with broad implications for the intersection between municipal land-use rules and religious freedom.

“We’re not quitting with the city council,” said Tim Tarris, who has lived across Calle Buena Vista from OVCN for 30 years.

Tim and his wife, Vicky, are the unofficial leaders of the Concordia/Buena Vista Group, a collection of about 150 area residents who have lined up against the church expansion.

“It’s not a religious situation. I want to emphasize that,” Tim Tarris said. “We’re not arguing about their faith or ours. We’re arguing about a complex that they want to put in there.”

Opponents insist the church is already impacting the neighborhood in a negative way.

The congregation has roughly doubled in size since 2015, with Sunday services that typically draw about 3,000 worshippers.

On those days, Tim Tarris said, parked cars line the street in front of his property. But Calle Buena Vista becomes impassable altogether during big events like Easter or the church’s annual Christmas tree lighting, when the sounds of the festivities can easily be heard from inside their house, he said.

“They don’t have the capacity to do what they’re doing right now, and they want to grow this thing four to five times and run it from early in the morning until 10 o’clock at night, seven days a week,” he said.

“Our quality of life is going to be greatly diminished,” Vicky Tarris added.

Lofty plans

Such reactions to the project have caught church leaders by surprise.

“We weren’t prepared at all for the amount of pushback that we’re getting,” said OVCN executive pastor Chris Collins. “And we certainly didn’t expect to be in the seventh revision of a proposal after three years because we continue to make changes that town staff is asking us for and advising us to do based on neighborhood opposition.”

Collins said the church started its youth sports program in 2018 as a way to spread the gospel by connecting with more kids and families.

“Every church at some point probably has to decide how they want to reach their community,” he said. “As we have prayed through this over the last five-plus years, we feel like there’s an opportunity for our church to reach our community through sports ministry.”

Designs for the 75,000-square-foot sports facility include four basketball courts, an indoor turf practice field, a stage and a new youth center featuring a conference room and seven classrooms for Sunday school and other uses.

Directly to the north of that building, the church wants to put in an outdoor field large enough for football or soccer, with 70-foot light poles so it can also be used at night.

The proposed expansion is expected to cost $10 million to $12 million, Collins said.

OVCN’s initial proposal called for the field to be enclosed inside a 50-foot-tall building, but that structure was soon dropped from the plans after backlash from neighbors and concerns from town planners.

Since then, Collins said, church officials have made numerous other changes to ease the impact of the project on surrounding residents. They added an 8-foot sound wall around the outdoor field, moved a proposed driveway to keep the headlights of vehicles from shining directly into a house across the street, and agreed to pay for a new center turn lane on Calle Concordia to improve overall traffic flow.

To limit light pollution as much as possible, OVCN has adopted what Collins called “the most stringent lighting plan for any outdoor field in all of Southern Arizona,” at an additional cost of nearly $250,000.

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The church has also agreed to schedule its events so they don’t overlap with busy times at Canyon Del Oro High School or the town park and swimming facility immediately to the east of OVCN.

But the project’s staunchest opponents remain unswayed. They want the new facilities to be built in some other part of town or not at all, a demand Collins said he simply can’t meet.

“We’ve said this from the beginning: They have asked all the right questions, and they deserve answers from us,” he said. “The problem that we’re running into is they don’t like the answers.”

Ed Clary lives a block west of OVCN on Calle El Milagro. He said if the land were already zoned for what the church wants to build there, he and his neighbors would have no choice but to live with it.

“But if I proposed something like this, I’d be laughed out of the room by everybody. The only reason we’re even discussing this is because it’s a church,” Clary said. “What was Jesus’ second great commandment? Love your neighbor as yourself. Well, I don’t feel the love. I don’t think any of us feels the love.”

Taking on faith

So far, the only public vote on the proposal was held on Feb. 7, when the five-member Oro Valley Planning and Zoning Commission recommended against the church’s expansion in a 3-2 vote.

In a staff report to the commissioners prior to their decision, a senior planner for the town listed a number of reasons why the proposal was incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood. Ultimately, though, she recommended its approval because “federal and state statutes and case law take precedence over local policy and ordinances.”

An attorney for the church has already suggested that the project must be approved on religious grounds, regardless of the town’s zoning rules. To reject the expansion plan would violate OVCN’s religious freedoms under federal law and the First Amendment, the attorney argued.

Oro Valley Mayor Joe Winfield declined to comment on the church’s proposal or the neighborhood opposition to it.

OVCN’s expansion will need at least five votes from the seven-member town council to pass, thanks to an Oro Valley ordinance requiring a supermajority for any zoning change that draws written protests from at least 20% of property owners immediately surrounding it.

Vicky Tarris said all 14 of the landowners surrounding OVCN have protested the expansion.

The dispute has turned ugly at times.

Tim Tarris said one member of their group was threatened by someone driving through the neighborhood, while others have had their yard signs stolen or vandalized.

At the same time, Collins and another OVCN pastor have seen pictures of their homes in Oro Valley posted to the Concordia/Buena Vista Group’s website — and since taken down — along with suggestions that the two men are serving money, not God, and are hypocrites for choosing not to live next to the church they are trying to expand.

OVCN has been in the neighborhood for as long — or longer — than many of its neighbors.

Collins said the church was founded in 1978 and moved to its current location about a year later.

It began with a few small buildings on a 9-acre parcel at 500 W. Calle Concordia. “Then, over the years, as is the case with most churches, our church grew,” Collins said.

Elizabeth Robb can attest to that. She has lived next door to the Tarrises and across from OVCN since about 1997.

“I moved into a nice quiet place, and there was a little church in behind some trees,” she said. “Now I feel like I’m living next to a megachurch, and it’s getting worse.”

A little over 20 years ago, OVCN built a large new sanctuary to accommodate its growing flock. Then about 10 years ago, the church acquired almost 9 acres immediately to its east from another house of worship that decided to relocate to Marana.

OVCN expanded again in 2019, adding a large foyer outside the sanctuary and a dedicated wing for its kids ministry, complete with an elaborate indoor play area.

The following year, church leaders acquired 10 more acres — this time zoned for rural residential use — from a homeowner just to the northeast of OVCN. Within months, the church was requesting a zoning change for new sports facilities it planned to build.

The hot pink protest signs started popping up around the neighborhood last fall, in anticipation of a town council vote that never materialized. They read “Neighbors against OVCN rezone” and include the opposition group’s web address.

More than 40 of the signs now decorate roadsides and front yards within a mile of the church. Many of them have faded from the weather.

“We never thought they’d be up this long,” Vicky Tarris said.