I belong to the Pinal County Emergency Communications Group
Welcome aboard
Do you have the ARRL Repeater book? Fry's sells them if you don't have one. Or you can go to www.arrl.com. They're about $8... There's also The Superstition Amateur Radio Club up there. They meet in Mesa from what I know of them... Good group. Maricopa also has an EmComm group but they are more geared to working events like bike races and stuff like that. They do have the Palos Verdes Nuke plant siren test coming up in a couple months too.
As far as the requirement for code disappearing, that might happen. It's in "committee" so to speak. And, that's for the General Class license and above. You still don't need to know code for the Technician Class license which covers quite a few bands. Just nothing on HF.
73
KE7***