WE HAVA-HISTORY
The IDD Governed Us First—
City Government Incorporated in 1978
 

Excerpts from Today News —-

          LAKE HAVASU CITY—Four months before heavy equipment began moving the desert around to create Lake Havasu City, its founders began laying the groundwork for the city's government.
             In November, 1963, city planner C. V. Wood Jr. brought Charles C. Royall and his wife Dorothy, to Lake Havasu, hoping to infect Royall, then an assistant Arizona attorney general, with the enthusiasm Wood felt about the land to build a city in the desert.
“Charlie became convinced this would be a successful and exciting experience for all of us,”  Wood told Roger Johnson, when Johnson was writing his book, “New City, Old Bridge”. 
          City Founder Robert P. McCulloch met Royall, who started his political career in New Mexico, while McCulloch and Wood were negotiating with the Arizona and U. S. governments to put together the 16,250 acres by the lake to build a city.
When McCulloch Properties Inc., a subsidiary of  McCulloch Oil Corp., purchased the city-size parcel on the lake at a public auction in Kingman for $73 an acre, Royal was an advisor to then Gov. Paul Fannin, assigned to the Arizona State Lands Department.  But he gave up his position with the state to help give birth to Lake Havasu City.
“He had to go to Fannin and (Barry) Goldwater to find out how to create a town.” said Lake Havasu City Pioneer Bill Blanchard, marketing director for MCO Properties, Inc.
Royall’s advisers told him the first thing the infant city’s parents must do was form an irrigation and drainage district.
            They needed property owners to vote in an election to create the district, so McCulloch gave property to some potential voters.
The Irrigation and Drainage District for Lake Havasu City  was created in late 1963 after the city’s six registered voters cast their ballots, and Wood and Arnold and Carla Dutton were appointed to the IDD Board of directors.
          Robert Krechter, an old friend of McCulloch, was  named  general  manager of the  IDD  that  would be Lake Havasu City’s only form of government until incorporation in 1978.
             Although some have questioned the methods Wood, McCulloch and Royall employed to turn an idea into an ideal city, Blanchard said that criticism is misplaced.
             “It is easy to be critical of how things got started years ago, but it was something new.
             “The new city’s second election was conducted in late 1963 and Wood, Arnold Dutton and Aristotle Paris were elected IDD board of directors.  Dutton resigned in June 1964 and was replaced by Glen Anderson.
          Gerald Robechaud, a retired McCulloch employee, Anderson and Wood were elected to the board again by eight registered voters in November 1964, a month after the first post office was established in Arnold Plaza, home of the city's first commercial building.  Until then all Lake Havasu City residents had the same address: PO Box 1080, Kingman, AZ.
          “The mail was picked up by a McCulloch Employee, delivered to their trailer office in Havasu in a bushel basket and distributed as well as possible when individuals stopped by for their mail,”  wrote the  late Sharon Ashby in her combination history and cookbook. 
           A year later, Wheeler Park was dedicated to the first Arizona soldier to be killed in the Viet Nam War.  In a media interview last fall, Wood remembered how nature almost spoiled the dedication ceremony, but a creative solution saved the day and ruined a senator’s shoes. 
             We had Senator Carl Hayden, who was the dean of all senators, in history, coming and we put that sod in there a couple of days beforehand,  Wood said.  “But  it turned yeller, I mean yeller  as 

hell and on Friday night I looked at that thing and I said, “Gosh darn, we just can’t do it.” 
          “We painted  that grass green that night, but it didn’t dry and (the next day} here comes old Senator Hayden and he’s got on a white suit, white shoes, and I see him walking to the stand and those shoes were just green all over.  The bottom of his pants was green, everything  was green, he kept lookin’ down and he didn’t want to say nothin’.  I didn’t want to say nothin’ either ‘cause those pictures were goona look good with that green.” 

           “Oh, God that was funny.  We were so proud of our little town here, we didn’t want pictures going out of here with yellow grass,”  Wood recalled.
             He said he and McCulloch wanted the city to incorporate and “let the people living here run it” long before the incorporation took place.
             It was Royall, longtime manager of the IDD, who persuaded legislators to pass a bill that increased the limits of bonded indebtedness for a city that wished to incorporate, making it possible for Lake Havasu City.
          He became city manager after the incorporation and the Mohave County board of supervisors appointed Gene Pinto, who was later selected to act as mayor, Ed Brady, Richard Cauley, Pat and Ray Creason, Sam Nichols and Rick Stephens to the city council.
There were 24 candidates for city council seats in the first regular election here in May 1979, and Marcus Bannerman, Ed Brady, Gene Pinto, Ed Davis, Joyce Harman, Ruth Mills and Jim Rosensweet were elected.
           But things got rough for the new city officials, who caused community outrage when some of them wanted to establish a 1 percent sales tax, a charge for trash collection and a sidewalk construction project.
          The city’s second election was one of the earliest recall elections in Arizona and resulted in the ousting of Bannerman, Davis and Pinto.
Bannerman was reelected two years later and politics became less turbulent in the city Royall managed until a year before he died in 1983.
Lake  Havasu  City  Mayor  James  Spezzano
was the first mayor to be elected directly by the voters.
           Before the 1987 election, mayors were chosen by the city councilmen after each election.
          Wood said he was pleased with the government of the city he helped create. “I’m sure they (residents) bitched at ‘em like they used to bitch at us when we ran it, but overall, I think they’re doing a hell of a job,” he said last fall.