State Trust land initiative backers to fight disqualification

Environmentalists say they will fight Secretary of State Jan Brewer’s decision to disqualify the initiative that would set aside more than half a million acres of State Trust land for conservation.

Brewer said the proposition — the third to be tossed from the Nov. 4 ballot — lacked enough valid petition signatures.

“It’s unprecedented the numbers of signatures being rejected,” said Pat Graham, state director of the Nature Conservancy and chair of the campaign for Proposition 103, called Our Land, Our Schools.

The campaign is only challenging signatures from Maricopa County, where about 58 percent of the signatures were counted as valid. In most other counties, 80 percent were valid, Graham said.

A petition signature can be disqualified for a number of reasons, such as an incorrect date, if the signee changed addresses or is not registered to vote.

Graham says they are going through the process of getting the signatures added back on, and should know by sometime next week if their effort pays off.

“We’re still moving forward with the expectation that we’ll be on the ballot,” he said.

Graham was one of several environmentalists who spoke at an event held last week at Empire Ranch in Sonoita to educate area ranchers about the goals of Proposition 103.

It’s main purpose would be to ensure that 570,000 acres of the state’s 9.3 million acres of Trust land could never be sold for development.

The ranchers who already lease that land would not be adversely affected, Graham says.

If passed, 50,135 acres in the Santa Rita Experimental Range would be conserved, along with 2,073 acres in the West Desert Preserve, 30,172 acres in the Sahuarita Mountains, 8,768 acres in the Santa Cruz Wildlife Corridor, and 3,072 acres adjacent to Patagonia Lake State Park.

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