Tom Kelly
Photo Credit: Phil Soto
Advisory Board Member
As a healthcare administrator and finance executive, Tom Kelly spent 40 years working on acquisitions and mergers, management and human resources, crisis prevention and creative problem-solving.
Kelly is retired now, but he’s contributing that same level of strategic thinking to the next phase of a $1.3 billion light-rail extension on Central Avenue south of downtown Phoenix. The rail line opened in June, but decades of development in the Corridor likely will follow.
“What can we translate into action?” asked Kelly, an executive board member of the South Central Collaborative (S.CC), a community group founded to reduce negative impacts of gentrification and displacement in the light-rail corridor, among other goals. “What are the priorities, what can we get done? How do we get enough committed activity, both funded, and with the hands and feet and heads to actually do that?” What’s the definition of success?
The South Central Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Community Plan, approved by the Phoenix City Council in 2022 is a good place to start. Inspired by the hearts and voices of the community, the document serves to attract, guide and prioritize strategic investments in infrastructure, housing, economic development and other areas to make South Central a world-class destination.
But it has Kelly asking, “What’s next? And how do we do it?”
Building expertise
Over four decades, Kelly held various leadership roles at KPMG, Schaller Anderson/Aetna, DaVita Inc., Mercy Health Plans (St Louis), and HealthSmart (Dallas).
One of his many jobs at KPMG brought him to Phoenix. Beginning in 1984, he worked with Bruce Babbitt’s senior staff and legislative leadership to build AHCCCS Administration (replacing a contractor – McCauto – that hadn’t done its job) and with new AHCCCS leadership – Dr Don Schaller and Joe Anderson – to build a program that became and remains a national model.
In 2006, he returned to Phoenix to join Schaller/Anderson, assist its rapid expansion to other states, and morph into Aetna Medicaid.
Retiring to Phoenix in 2017, Kelly volunteered (teaching ESL) with Promise Arizona, a South Phoenix nonprofit that helps train and promote Latino leaders and encourages civic involvement in its communities. Five years ago, he made South Phoenix his home.
The S.CC, which Kelly joined several years ago, made sure the community’s voices were heard, and the community has stayed well connected to a “pretty dramatic” development process, he said. He is now focused on the challenge of embedding the Collaborative partners’ influence and expertise into the government decision making process.
“The Collaborative’s involvement in major decisions about large-scale development along South Central Avenue and in adjacent blocks is critical.” Affordable housing, small business assistance, the future of the Rio Salado, and preserving the region’s history are top-of-mind for Kelly.
“How do we focus on things like affordable housing so that when we get through this, people have options about staying in the community that are realistic, affordable and reasonable?”
Mobile home parks are one area of concern, he said, noting many are owned by individual proprietors, not residents.
“The owners are going to be confronted with offers to clear their property, and that will tend to mount in intensity and in price. There’s likely to be big developers with bulldozers who will want to convert the property into more expensive housing models. We need an alternative that protects community and avoids displacement.”
The only way to protect renters in those units is to convert them to resident-owned, he said, but that process is complex. In 2023, we watched residents of three at-risk mobile home parks in Phoenix evicted. Lengthy meetings with city officials yielded discussions about long-term solutions, such as incentives for park owners to convert to resident-owned or finding nonprofits to purchase the parks, but no short-term answers were found.
Chicanos por la Causa’s large-scale development on Broadway Road and 3rd Avenue, is a big success. The challenge now is to find the sponsors and the financing to do more.
“How many projects should we have to really make this a more viable, attractive place? Say we’re going to do six or eight or 10 quality developments, maybe 100–300 units per project, so let’s start to figure out where those are going to be.”
And how they’ll be funded. Kelly said traditional funding sources, such as federal and state tax credit programs, are insufficient.
“It’s really ARPA and Housing Trust Fund money in the past few years have provided a boost, but we find ourselves now limited to traditional funding sources that have been outpaced by land and building inflation.”
Small business, health care, recreation
Another issue requiring thoughtful discussion is the equitable relocation of some businesses in the Corridor, for example, he said, auto-related shops on Central Avenue.
“We probably have more tire businesses in the Corridor that any other single place anywhere in Phoenix. You can wait for them not to survive, but that’s not really a thoughtful way to address the set of issues.”
Small restaurants also will need help adapting to increased pedestrian traffic coming from the light rail. To date, however, Kelly said, no focused effort has been made to create a model for helping local businesses.
“We do have places that would like to renovate or do things, but there’s a pretty big gap between what they’d like to do and what the city’s willing to talk about financing,” he said.
Kelly would like to see the city and other partners help small businesses bridge gaps in knowledge so they can take the next step into expansion.
A centralized health care facility, for example with multiple specialties for diagnostic and surgical services, is an amenity Kelly would like to see in the Corridor. The Mary Rose Wilcox Health Center now under construction at 1 st & Hadley is a great start. What else can we do?
He’s also interested in “the single biggest asset in South Phoenix,” the Rio Salado, its Audubon Center and the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area. New business development and expanded activities along the riverbed can convert the Rio Salado into a “major go-to place” in Phoenix, he said.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said of the potential, “but its biggest difficulty is that it’s basically bordered on both sides by industrial activity. When I think of the Rio Salado, I think residential and recreational, not industrial. Thankfully, the City has made a major commitment over the past two or three years to create a master plan and lead the revitalization efforts.
Historic preservation
The South Phoenix Corridor has a rich history to be shared and stories to be told, Kelly said, suggesting design and implementation of an app-based, half-day history trail where light-rail riders can spend time exploring neighborhood treasures.
Potential stops on the tour:
● Santa Rita Hall, near 7th Street and Buckeye Road, where labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez staged a hunger strike in 1972 as a form of protest.
● The Phoenix Union Colored High School, the only campus built exclusively to serve Black high school students in Arizona, near 5th Street and Van Buren Street. It later was renamed George Washington Carver High.
● The Matthew Henson Projects, Phoenix’s first public housing units in Arizona available for rent to the city's Black residents. Opened in 1941 in an area bounded by 7th and 11th avenues and Sherman/Grant streets and Buckeye Road, it reportedly was a model for other public housing units west of the Mississippi River.
● A hospital built by Dr. Winston C. Hackett, the state’s first Black physician. He moved to Phoenix in 1916, and started an obstetrics practice for those often denied medical care elsewhere in the segregated city. After unsuccessfully lobbying for a Black community hospital to be built, Dr. Hackett remodeled a building at 13th and Jefferson streets and opened it as Booker T. Washington Memorial Hospital in 1921. He ran the hospital until its closure in 1943 because of financial troubles, and donated its medical equipment to Saint Monica’s Hospital, on 7th Avenue and Buckeye Road. It later became Phoenix Memorial Hospital.
