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By Tony Davis
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
August 6, 2003

Arizona is giving Pima County a chance to preserve more than 4,500 acres of state-owned saguaro and prickly pear desert near Tortolita Mountain Park .

The State Land Department's decision, announced Tuesday, gives the county up to five years to buy and save 4,519 acres east and southeast of the Tortolita Mountains at fair market value.

It caps a four-year campaign by county officials and environmentalists to get the land reclassified for conservation instead of development. They want it for the county's Tortolita Mountain Park and Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan preserve.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said Tuesday that it could take the county five years to obtain the $31.5 million that the land could cost.

He said the county has $7 million available and probably could obtain another $7 million in state matching grants. He hopes to snag the rest from a planned 2004 bond issue and additional state matching money, he said.

Land Commissioner Mark Winkleman said Tuesday that he has put the land into a category making it suitable for conservation. The reclassification puts the land under the state's Arizona Preserve Initiative program, which allows communities to buy state land lying near urban areas and protect it from development. Without reclassification, the state must sell the land to the highest bidder, which is usually a developer, to raise maximum revenue for public schools.

The parcel is bounded by Tortolita Mountain Park on the west, the Pinal County line on the north, Oro Valley on the south and, on the east, by other state land lying two miles west of Oracle Road . The county is trying to get the state to reclassify for conservation that other state land - an additional 4,761 acres - and another 2,320 acres of state land east of Oracle and north of Catalina State Park .

Winkleman also said Tuesday that he has ruled out Oro Valley 's efforts to annex 640 acres of this land. Although environmentalists had feared Oro Valley would try to develop the land, town officials said they had no plans to allow significant development there. They said they wanted the property to even out the town's boundaries and to carry out goals of its revised General Plan.

Scott Nelson, Oro Valley 's special-projects coordinator, said Tuesday that he wasn't surprised or disappointed by the state decision. "We went into it with our eyes wide open," he said.

Once the land is reclassified, the highest bidder will still get the property when the state auctions it. But the buyer cannot do anything with the property but leave it alone. That restriction has temporarily squelched Pima County efforts to buy 320 state-owned acres on Tumamoc Hill near Downtown Tucson. Last April, a Southeast Side resident contended that selling that land with conservation restrictions is illegal, leading the state to cancel the Tumamoc sale. The resident, James Stosberg, said the restriction slashes the amount of money the state can earn.

On Tuesday, Stosberg said he doesn't know if he will protest the Tortolita reclassification. "Just right off the top of my head, one of them seems to be as illegal as the other," he said.

Winkleman said the Tortolita sale should fare better, however, because the Tortolita land lies near other state land, which allows the preservation to enhance the other land's value. The county plans to add the Tortolita acreage to the mountain park and more than double its size. The parcel has been part of a master plan area for the mountain park since April 1997, said Steve Anderson, a planner in the county's Natural Resources, Parks and Recreation Department.

Most of the 4,519 acres fall within the county's proposed Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan reserve. Of that, 309 acres are riparian streamside areas; 806 acres are within the biological core, or the environmentally richest area that isn't along rivers or washes; and 3,373 sit in a multiple-use zone. The scientists who drew up the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan consider the area a critical connection between the Catalina and Tortolita mountains. 

* Contact reporter Tony Davis at 807-7790 or verdin@azstarnet.com.

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