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A Lost World? Canoa Ranch Is A Litmus Test For Supervisors. By Susan Zakin THE RANCH HOUSE isn't a ruin. It's more melancholy: a ghost. Vines clasp the old adobe's windows in a strangling embrace. Packrat sign is everywhere. Still, this house is a vivid picture of how people should live in Arizona. Old adobe walls fend off the heat of summer. The kitchen is huge, with mesquite cabinets. Behind the living room is a den with a stone fireplace. A picture window the size of most people's living rooms faces the Santa Rita mountains. To the west is what appears to be an endless sea of rolling hills. Biologists believe these hills and arroyos could be a key migratory corridor for jaguar, animals that have recently hinted they might return. This is Canoa Ranch. Fast-forward to reality. David Williamson, the Scottsdale Baby Boomer who owns Fairfield Homes, is fighting conservationists and residents who oppose his plan to build a city of suburban houses and strip malls on the 5,954-acre ranch. Canoa Ranch has become the line in the sand for urban sprawl. North of the ranch along I-19 are nothing but tacky developments. South is Arizona as we knew it, even five or 10 years ago, a horizon that stretches to infinity, or at least Mexico. The fight, which has been going on for more than five years, could be decided Tuesday when supervisors are expected to vote on a deal brokered by Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry to amend the county's comprehensive plan. But the battle over Canoa has become something more than this ranch. It has called into question Pima County's ability to regulate sprawl and, specifically, its commitment to the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. The fight over Canoa Ranch also has caused conservationists to question the ethics of Chuck Huckelberry, whose plan includes a bid to pay Fairfield Homes up to $15 million--more than the appraised value of the entire ranch--for 3,178 acres while allowing high-density development on 1,482 acres, including strip malls, a golf course, and an 800-vehicle RV park. The money for the purchase would be raised through an innovative tax mechanism, the legality of which has recently been called into question. The agreement would markedly increase development pressure on two of the area's most beautiful ranches, the Marley and the Sopori. Along with the section of Canoa west of I-19 that would be developed under this plan, the Marley and Sopori ranches provide a corridor for large animals that migrate between mountain ranges to keep their gene pools healthy. This domino effect is one reason county supervisor Raúl Grijalva has been solidly against developing Canoa, where his father once worked as a cowboy. At various times, most of the major players have joined him in calling for preservation of the ranch, including Huckelberry. In 1999, Amigos de Canoa, a citizens group opposing the project, which at that time called for more than 6,000 houses, was joined by Union Pacific, the Tohono O'odham Nation and the Smithsonian Institution. Now supervisors Sharon Bronson and Ray Carroll, who have been on the side of the citizens, may be wavering. The vote will be a litmus test for these two supervisors, whose conservation voting records are not as solid as Grijalva's. The ranch's past certainly contains more romance than its present circumstances. In 1775, Canoa was the first campsite for the Anza expedition from New Spain to California. In 1820, an unknown Spaniard scratched the letters S I D L C, for San Ignacio de la Canoa, into the dark-brown desert varnish on a chunk of basalt that marks the ranch's southeast corner. The present-day Canoa Ranch was only a small part of this Spanish land grant, which once stretched from the Santa Ritas to the Baboquivaris. That rock is another ghost. Today it lies behind a barbed wire fence, but from the fenceline you still have a clear view to Baboquivari Peak, one of the most distinctive features in the Southern Arizona landscape of long sloping valleys punctuated by volcanic mountains. Time speeded up in 1994, when Fairfield Homes bought Canoa Ranch for $6.4 million. A pro-development majority on the Pima County Board of Supervisors amended Pima County's much-abused comprehensive plan to allow 37,000 houses to be built on the ranch. But the company still needed to get zoning changes to develop the land, which was zoned for one house per 4.13 acres. In 1997 a controversial rezoning allowed construction of 500 homes and a nine-hole golf course on the ranch's northernmost 300 acres, adjacent to existing suburban sprawl. Those houses now obscure ridgetops up to the border of the undeveloped part of the ranch. Rolling hills look as if they are literally disappearing into a maw of pink stucco. Some communities have outlawed building on ridgetops, but in Pima County there are no such prohibitions. Grijalva tried to persuade his fellow supervisors to buy the rest of the ranch, considered a key part of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. The county's $28 million open space bond issue contained $3.5 million for purchase and restoration of Canoa, but this was only about a third of its appraised value. The Trust for Public Land, a national land conservancy specializing in urban areas, tried to help. In 1997, the trust wrote to David Williamson, asking for a meeting to discuss a possible purchase. Williamson refused, saying the land wasn't for sale. The conservation group also tried to talk to Huckelberry. He turned them down, too. That refusal changed everything. "We were shut down," said Kelly Huddleston of the Trust for Public Land. "Chuck Huckelberry appeared to want to have more control over the situation as opposed to an outside third party." According to Huddleston, the group received a clear message from Huckelberry that their services were not welcome in Pima County. From that time on, Huckelberry did indeed control the process, a goal that critics like Ellie Kurtz and Rob Kulakofsky of the citizens group Amigos de Canoa believe outweighed his dedication to preservating Canoa Ranch. In 1999, a new, more conservation-minded majority on Pima County's supervisors turned down a Fairfield bid to amend the comprehensive plan to allow more than 6,000 homes. This was the first major development denied by the board of supervisors since 1973. Later that year, the supervisors followed up by actually tightening the comprehensive plan, dropping the number of houses allowed on Canoa to under 1,500. But Dan Eckstrom, a then-supervisor who had received campaign contributions from Fairfield, made a wild card motion to consider condemnation. Although it seemed hostile to the developers, Eckstrom actually set up a win-win situation, giving Fairfield either a chance at a big money settlement or an opportunity to bring a lawsuit against the county. Fairfield threatened legal action. This gave Huckelberry the cover he needed to cut a deal with Fairfield. Stakeholder meetings last spring served only to infuriate citizens, who felt that Huckelberry's assistant Maeveen Behan, who was running the meetings, gave them no option but to endorse Huckelberry's deal. The pressure to go along with Huckelberry's proposal has only increased. Green Valley may incorporate soon, which would give it jurisdiction over Canoa. Fairfield's owners reportedly have a hammerlock on Green Valley politics. That may be why opponents have softened their approach, abandoning a no-growth position to one that would allow 1,100 homes on 528 acres near existing homes. By turning down Huckelberry's proposal Tuesday, the supervisors would be giving this plan a chance. That might be the best anyone can do. In some ways, Canoa Ranch is just another example of Arizona politics, with the usual assortment of narcissistic nouveau riche developers, ineffectual environmentalists and Machiavellian bureaucrats. Certainly the way Chuck Huckelberry handled Canoa Ranch deserves further scrutiny. If he once called for preservation, why is development acceptable now? Huckelberry's role as the Cardinal Richelieu of Pima County reaches far beyond Canoa ranch, and will show up in upcoming parts of this series. "Canoa is a mythological place," says Raúl Grijalva. But there is something different about Canoa Ranch. Maybe it is all the Hohokam activity that took place around the spring near the old ranch house. Perhaps it is the ancient scent of jaguar or wolf, or simply the graceful curve of hills that will be buried under cheap construction and bad architecture. People lived here and they lived well. It's not a house or a hill or even a wild animal, but an entire way of life that we would lose if the developers have their way with Canoa Ranch. In its place we'd have something that couldn't possibly be called better.
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