Guest Comment: County should butt out of Rosemont Mine controversy

Pima County can’t afford to finish a voter-approved city-county courts building downtown, pay its promised dues to the Downtown Tucson Partnership or tackle new projects this fiscal year.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry has said so.

Times are tough. The Board of Supervisors cut departmental spending by 5 percent and may have to chop more when it learns the full impact of the state budget on funds traditionally passed down to counties.

But Pima County apparently does have money to spend telling the U.S. Forest Service how to study the environmental impact of the proposed Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains east of Green Valley and Sahuarita. The county wants a major role when the federal agency decides whether to approve the mine.

Augusta Resource Corp. owns the mineral rights and bought the land after the county turned down its chance to own it.

And federal and state laws don’t authorize counties to decide whether mines can start producing. Arizona counties are creatures of the state, generally limited to doing only what the Legislature or voters have authorized them to do.

The Forest Service, Interior Department and other federal agencies have handled mines since well before Congress enacted the 1872 federal mining law.

Pima County still tries to establish itself as a major water power although it provides no water and has a few problems treating sewage.

Now it wants the world to think it’s a major player in mining.

In its official comments to the Forest Service about the Rosemont Mine’s federal impact study, Pima County tells the federal agency to consider the mine’s possible impact on everything from buried artifacts to military flights to underground water to housing throughout Southern Arizona.

The county also asks the feds to make it a “cooperating agency” so it can work more closely with the Forest Service than ordinary folks and have its every utterance given special consideration.

And if the mine is permitted, the county wants to help oversee whatever Augusta does.

Let me again ask two questions:

1. Why is a Democratic-controlled Board of Supervisors, which claims to support high-paying jobs and stronger unions, working so hard to kill a high-paying project on private land on the other side of the Santa Rita Mountains?

2. And why do all five supervisors contend that extending the Central Arizona Project pipeline to Sahuarita is an evil plot if Augusta pays for it but wonderful if we taxpayers fund it?

You may have noticed that Green Valley and Sahuarita have thrived for 40 years near several open-pit copper mines. The mines aren’t beautiful, but they haven’t ruined the neighborhood.

More than 30 years ago, as county assessor, I pushed to file a lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Revenue.

My staff and I firmly believed that Pima County home and business owners, whose property values we set, were paying too much in property taxes because the state had set ridiculously low full cash values on the mines near Sahuarita.

Like Huckelberry and the current supervisors, I was sold on the brilliance of trying something that had never been done in Arizona.

It was a disaster.

Think of George Armstrong Custer, or tales of Jubilation T. Cornpone’s only battle in the “Li’l Abner” movie and comic strips. But substitute my name for either general.

The first court to consider our lawsuit spent about five seconds before firmly telling me and our lawyers that counties can’t challenge state decisions or meddle in mining matters. Informal inquiries to other judges produced the same advice.

My bright idea didn’t work, so we went back to doing the same old things over and over, but we did them well.

Huckelberry and the Board of Supervisors should do the same.

Steve Emerine is a columnist for Inside Tucson Business. His newspaper career includes four years as editor and co-owner of the Green Valley News. The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily this newspaper’s.