First Person: West Desert Preserve supporters make case for Trust land reform

Since moving to Arizona from Connecticut in the 1990s, Bill and Marylee Adamson have explored the state’s famous back country just like all those wilderness tramps before them.

They have hiked, weighted down with heavy packs, along the dry rocky trails deep in the Grand Canyon, forded the cold meandering streams on the way to ancient Anasazi ruins hidden in Tsegi Canyon on Navajoland, and wandered through the woody deserts and pine-scented mountains throughout the state.

A few weeks ago, Bill, at 70 the very definition of the active retiree we hear so much about, got it in his mind to ride his bike a hundred miles or so out into the desert, training for a monumental ride through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado this summer. Marylee, who is also 70, has the hiking stride of a 21-year-old and the calves to handle it.

But despite their tough, inner-gorge resum/s, these last few years the Adamsons have spent much of their hiking and biking time in a more accessible stretch of desert just a few hundred paces from their front door in Green Valley.

Recently they invited me to huff and spit behind them on a four-mile walk through the 2,000-acre swath of Sonoran life between this retirement village and the open-pit copper mines to the west and north — a kind of wild desert park that the Adamsons and their many allies call the West Desert Preserve.

The land is controlled by the Arizona State Land Department and is part of the more than 9 million acres of State Trust land that the federal government gave to Arizona at statehood to be used in various ways to raise revenue for public schools and other institutions.

To generate this revenue, the department sells or leases Trust land, and the natural resources thereon, at public auction, and must, according to its constitutional mandate, obtain the “highest and best use” from the land.

Few would disagree that the idea of what is the highest and best use of land in Arizona has changed since 1912, when the majority opinion not only here but also throughout the West was that desert land had intrinsic value only insofar as it could be mined, grazed, and irrigated.

For many years, conservation groups and citizen coalitions have been trying to amend the state constitution to allow a small portion of Trust land to be permanently removed from the auction block and preserved as open space, which is a concept that didn’t really exist at statehood, when all that wild open space in Arizona was, understandably, something to be bridged and filled rather than celebrated and saved.

The Adamsons are on the front lines of this effort, which has found a new and optimistic life in the form an initiative for which supporters are now gathering signatures in hopes of a statewide vote in November. Bill believes that to have usable open space within walking or biking distance of his home is essential to the good life, and it is this belief that has immersed the former aerospace engineer and marketing executive in the murky, often disappointing world of State Trust land reform for the last several years.

“To be able to just walk out your door and for a few hours be out in all this…, ” he says as he sweeps his hand across the horizon, taking in the whole wide scope of the thick desert, “… it’s really important. I like civilization, I have always lived and worked where I can go shopping easily—I’m not some isolationist that wants to live far away from other people, but I do want to get out every now and again, and who wouldn’t want to come out here?”

Since 2006, the Adamsons and many others in Green Valley have lobbied the state, the county, the media, and just about anyone else who would listen to have this modest stretch of open desert added to the list of Trust lands proposed for immediate conservation. They have been successful in this effort, even if the larger goal of amending the state constitution has thus far failed.

The current initiative, filed in April, proposes to permanently conserve about 570,000 acres of the most sensitive Trust land—about 5 percent of the total—and provides a mechanism through which cities, towns, counties and state agencies can purchase Trust land for conservation purposes without going to auction. The West Desert Preserve is on the current list of the most sensitive land.

While it doesn’t exactly appear out of place on that list, this little plot of desert, with its skinny trails and thick stands of ocotillo and scrub, its 250-year-old, multi-armed saguaro and its rare and endangered Pima Pineapple cactus, lacks the flash of some of the other acres up for conservation. Many of the other lands on the list are adjacent to famous national and state parks, federal monuments and well-known mountain ranges and recreation areas—places with names like Kartchner, Homolovi, Ironwood, Dragoon, Saguaro, San Pedro, and Grand Canyon. And while it’s a good idea to protect the state’s last best places—places that draw millions in tourism dollars—from having overbuilt mansions and big box retailers right next door, the West Desert Preserve made the list because it provides a more modest, but no less important buffer for a community that is running out of space.

“The public is changing,” Bill said. “The public sees uncontrolled growth and doesn’t like what it sees.”

In the past, the land department has responded, within the bonds of its constitutional mandate, to changes in the economic life of the state.

Since statehood, according to the department’s own history, the idea of what the “highest and best use” of the Trust land is has changed from mining to grazing to agriculture to residential and commercial development in accordance with which industry was ascendant at the time.

“As the economics of the state have changed, land uses have changed,” said Ben Alteneder, a spokesman for the land department, “but our mandate has always been to get the highest and best use of the land.”

And yet, even though the mining and ranching industries could hardly be considered as vitally important to the state’s larger economy as they once were, some 8 million acres — more than 90 percent — of Trust lands currently have grazing leases, according to the department.

“Almost all of the lands are under one or more leases for natural resource uses and commercial development purposes,” the department’s Web site confirms.

It would stand to reason, supporters of reform say, that open space and conservation —two concepts that enjoy widespread public support these days — could be considered the highest and best uses for at least a small portion of Trust land.

“We have tremendous local support,” Bill said, adding weight to the argument that the general public supports conservation, even if most people aren’t as active and directly engaged with the desert as the Adamsons are.

“We have the support of about 75 percent of Green Valley; people say that they want this area (and others like it) preserved even if they’ve never been out here and will never come out here. They feel good knowing it’s here.”

This time around, Bill, who describes himself as an eternal optimist, is even more optimistic than ever about the chances that the reform initiative will pass.

A recent trade-off between Gov. Napolitano and the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, which has long opposed State Trust land reform and helped defeat a more ambitious reform measure in 2006, convinced the home builders not to oppose the new measure.

The governor removed provisions in a transportation improvement initiative that would have put some of the burden for new roads on developers, as was reported by Capitol Media Services and others in early May, in exchange for the home-builders’ promise to remain “neutral” on Trust land reform. The state teachers union, which necessarily opposes any initiative it sees as a potential drag on school funding, has also reportedly agreed not to oppose this year’s effort.

And while that’s certainly good news and reason for hope among the initiative’s supporters, the whole debate seems a bit out-of-touch, even moot, when you’re actually out here on the ground, walking at a good clip, looking for peace among the thorny fauna and hearing all that shifting and scuttling life that thrives, hidden and secret, on this humble little plot of easy desert, bounded by mining waste rising like mountains, and yet still so far away.

Freelance writer Tim Hull is a former Green Valley News reporter and assistant managing editor. Contact him at trhull@gmail.com.