Arizona’s newest 'college town' says farewell to Mayor John Giles
ASU President Michael Crow and Mesa Mayor John Giles tour the Mix Center in downtown Mesa. ASU photo
A few short decades ago Mesa, Arizona, was considered just another quiet little suburb in the Phoenix metro area. Today, the city has surpassed Miami, St. Louis and Atlanta in population size and consistently makes national news cycles for its innovative economic policies.
A driving force behind the city's remarkable growth and transformation is none other than the innovative Mesa native Mayor John Giles. Now, after a decade of leading the city to new heights, his term of service has reached its conclusion.
One of the many sectors Giles left his mark on is education, particularly higher education; in addition to developing a stronger commitment to longtime community asset Mesa Community College, he forged a new relationship with Arizona State University, bringing the state’s largest public university into the city's core and laying a foundation that has already begun to bring private investment to the Mesa's historic downtown.
"Increasing educational attainment is an important priority for our city. ASU’s commitment to Mesa has opened doors to unparalleled educational opportunities for our residents and our entire region,” said Giles. “From the state-of-the-art MIX Center downtown to programs at ASU Poly that prepare students for future industries, ASU is playing a big role to ensure that Mesa’s workforce is ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow."
Along with ASU’s Polytechnic campus in East Mesa, Giles’ work with ASU has positioned Mesa as one of the most technologically agile cities in the country.
“John Giles has transformed Mesa’s trajectory and put it on a very significant slope toward economic competitiveness," said ASU President Michael Crow. “He is a transformative mayor; his 10 years of service have brought the city to the point where Mesa will be one of the greatest cities in the United States going forward.”
Giles played a key role in facilitating the growth of the ASU Polytechnic campus, helping it become a national leader in engineering studies, as well as the development and building of the ASU Mesa Center for Creative Technology in the heart of downtown Mesa. For the past five years, Giles has also somehow carved out the time to teach an ASU law school class on legal issues in state and local government.
The precipitous growth of the city has run parallel to both Giles’ time in office and Mesa’s new branding as a “college town.” In 1996, Giles was beginning his first year on Mesa City Council and ASU Polytechnic campus was just opening its doors. Fast forward nearly 30 years and the new innovation district at the Polytechnic campus is expected to bring over 500 jobs and more than $800 million in economic impact. Thirty-three thousand ASU students have graduated from the campus since it opened, and that number will continue to grow as the new Fulton School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks opens its doors, a first-of-its-kind college in the U.S. This comes at a time when the Phoenix metro area leads the nation in major manufacturing announcements totaling $100 million or more, bringing nearly 15,000 new jobs to the Valley in the coming years.
“John’s leadership relative to expanding access for ASU has been around the fact that we now have an unbelievably successful Polytechnic campus, which he has contributed to mightily. The building of the innovation district on the Polytechnic campus, the advancement of the infrastructure of that campus, has allowed Mesa to have one of the leading technology campuses in the country,” Crow said.
A recent study notes the rapid growth of the city’s gross domestic product (GDP) by nearly 38% between 2018 and 2022, and an employment growth of 2%, along with a 34% uptick in infrastructure. And this growth will likely continue on its upward trajectory; ASU and Mesa have already announced plans for continued expansion across the city.
“ASU’s university charter acts as a commitment to the communities we serve, and we are extremely grateful to Mayor Giles for his stalwart focus, his ever-present intellectual engagement and his adaptive, creative way of getting things done,” Crow said. “John has been a fantastic partner, and ASU is a better university and Mesa a better city because of his contributions.”
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