Jun. 27—Canadian-based child care giant BrightPath is planning an expansion of its sprawling daycare center network into Arizona with seven facilities across the Valley in 2024.

The expansion plans include two proposed BrightPath locations in Mesa and one each in Gilbert and Queen Creek.

The company has over 140 locations across Canada and the U.S. with daycare centers currently in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Ohio and Kentucky, according to documents submitted to the City of Mesa.

When the company was sold to a U.K. child care company in 2017, the Toronto Star described BrightPath as "big-box child care."

BrightPath describes itself on its website as "a world-class and innovative provider of early childhood education that follows a unique curriculum."

The company's Mesa locations are planned for Val Vista Drive and Brown Road in the Citrus Sub-Area west of Falcon Field, and Guadalupe and Signal Butte in southeast Mesa.

The facility planned for Val Vista would have 14 classrooms with a capacity to hold 240 children.

The Val Vista location was the first to face a public hearing during a Design Review Board meeting June 13 and it did not go well for the BrightPath. Board members demanded the company return to the drawing board to develop a more suitable design for the area.

The board's reaction suggested that as BrightPath expands into the Valley, the company may need to adapt its designs more radically to match the aesthetics of local communities.

That was one of the Design Review Board's messages to BrightPath's architect during the hearing as multiple board members criticized the Val Vista facility's look.

They said the building needed to blend better with the architectural styles current in Arizona as well as the unique features of the city's Citrus Sub-Area.

That district has special design guidelines intended to preserve the historical citrus-grove character of the area and maintain the feel of a low-density suburban neighborhood.

The Citrus Sub-Area features some of Mesa's grandest homes, with large residences spread on multi-acre estates.

"In my mind, putting a two-story primarily stucco building on this corner ... feels like it just doesn't work," said board Chair Tanner Green.

Green said the building's shape and structure was wrong for the area and that it should "address" the corner of the intersection and nod somehow to the neighborhood's character.

The architect for BrightPath, who said he lives in New Jersey and has designed 250 daycares around the country, also got an earful from two residents who live near the proposed facility.

One said the 15,000 square-foot building was "reminiscent of a cheap extended-stay hotel."

She said the neighborhood was beautiful today because of decades of vigilance by the residents.

"The project design flies in the face of 30 years of neighborhood activism, planning and efforts to maintain the citrus, estate-home character" of the neighborhood.

Multiple design board members said they knew the corner well and said its prominence in the Citrus Sub-Area required conscientiousness for the surrounding neighborhood.

The architect's took the pounding with grace, chiming in only briefly between critiques for clarification on technical points.

"I know the money that goes into this. I'm an architect. I do this for a living," said board member Dane Astle before commencing his appraisal.

"When I see something that doesn't seem to be following the future of Mesa, I don't want to be quiet about it."

One board member said the color

selected for the exterior looked too

"orangey." Another said, "I can't see that this matches anything in the area."

One of the few areas where the board offered some praise was the effort to incorporate citrus trees into the landscape plan, as required by the Citrus guidelines.

"The feeling I'm getting from the board and in general, is a ... general distaste for the building," Green concluded.

The day following the meeting, the architect submitted updated renderings of the facility.

The application now heads to planning and zoning, where the planning board will decide if the revisions are adequate to address the Design Board's concerns.