ABSTRACT
The growth that Peoria experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacular though it seemed at the time, was dwarfed by its growth in the latter part of the 1980s: population grew at the rate of several hundreds every month. Peoria is primarily a residential community with a very large retirement and nursing home population. Political activists, including Bill and Carol Stout from Glendale, and some leaders of greater Phoenix's Hispanic community, began to campaign following the 1985 mid-decade census for conversion of Peoria's at-large system to a single-member-district form. The City Council believed that the new districts must support and promote a sense of community, which they perceived to be threatened by Peoria's rapid growth. The City Council expressed pleasure with the plan on the grounds that the new districts would support and promote the sense of community. Even Councilman Johnny Osuna recognized the essentially nugatory testing of Acacia's boundaries against the concept of "retrogression."
