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The Great Ironwood Massacre The story behind the county road department's fiasco at Thornydale Road. By Susan Zakin A FEW WEEKS AGO, Pima County destroyed a bunch of the pygmy owl habitat it is supposed to be protecting. This was not generic desert: a radio-collared owl had actually been spotted hanging out in one of the trees that the county contractors sliced up in a woodchipper. Pima County Transportation Department head Brooks Keenan says is was an honest mistake. That only makes it worse. When the county transportation department contractors bulldozed rare ironwood trees to widen the intersection of Thornydale and Cortaro Farms roads, where it plans to place a $90,000 sculpture "celebrating the desert," the misbegotten enterprise became a metaphor for half a century of Babbitry. I don't mean the Arizona homeboy who, as Secretary of Interior, has presided over the country's struggle between greed and morality by cutting deals over endangered species. I mean the original Babbitt. Novelist Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt was the archetypal small-town booster. He has been reincarnated many times right here in Tucson. The Great Ironwood Massacre--and the ensuing outcry by ignoramus citizens calling for nuking the owl so they're not caught in traffic--showed us that it's not just the region's politics, but its culture that needs to change. Letting developers go nuts all over the desert and then hastily subsidizing their greed by building horrible highway-like suburban roads is just the usual "Oops, I forgot to plan!" excuse that's made Tucson synonymous with urban sprawl on the national scene. In fact, you don't have to go back to Sinclair Lewis to trace the roots of what happened at Thornydale and Cortaro Farms. You only have to go back to 1997, when respected mainstream conservationists like Gayle Hartmann and Luther Propst asked County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry to back a $40 million open-space acquisition bond. Huckelberry agreed. But conservationists were outnumbered on the committee appointed to deal with land conservation. The open-space money was whittled down to $27.9 million out of a total of $550 million in bond funds. Most of the conservationists counted themselves lucky. They worked like dogs to get the bond issue passed. There was one malcontent. Rich Genser is a car dealer from New Jersey-turned-developer-turned Sierra Clubber, one of those only-in-Arizona species that could drive a taxonomist crazy. He told me back then that the open space bond was a sideshow. A big chunk of the bond money raised that year, including $350 million for roads that voters approved in a separate election, was going to turbocharge development in this town. Boy, was he right. The saddest part of the story is that real estate prices have gone up so much that the 1997 open-space bond money is only sufficient for purchasing about half the property the conservationists wanted. On top of this it's almost certain that the county will now have to use these already too meager funds to purchase land to make up for the debacle at Thornydale. Now Huckelberry is telling conservationists that the county needs a $100 million open-space acquistion bond. Once again, Huckelberry is lowballing. This wouldn't fund even half of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, unless the plan turns out to be a farce. The least Huckelberry can do, if only for his own legacy, is ask for $350 million to implement the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, the same amount he got for road construction in 1997. Huckelberry has also been resisting interim guidelines to spell out what people need to do to stay within the boundaries of the Endangered Species Act until the county's much-vaunted Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan is complete, about two years from now. Guidelines would give a degree of certainty to everyone, including the Transportation Department. Keenan told me that his staff met with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a year ago to get their OK for the road widening project. But they only talked about the washes. They just didn't understand that the rest of the site was important. It's sad when so many people feel that the place they live has no value. But they can learn. Interim guidelines would start that cultural shift. Interim guidelines would also show a measure of good faith on Huckelberry's part. I can't get it out of my mind that Huckelberry is an engineer, a class of people who specialize in ruining rivers and making animals extinct with their unique combination of ingenuity and tunnel vision. The county administrator seems to want people to believe he's changed with the times. But he's got to walk the walk. We certainly can't afford any more sleight-of-hand, with a pittance tossed at conservationists to distract them from the county's real agenda of funding growth at any cost. That's the real problem here, not the blading of a few hundred trees. The destruction of the Thornydale and Cortaro intersection just reveals the pervasive mentality in Tucson. Tucson acts like a 13-year-old runaway at a bus terminal, saying yes to the first shiny suit that comes along. I'd like to think that people here would hold out for a better deal if they realized the true value of the Sonoran Desert and of their traditional community, with its unique mix of Mexican, Indian, and cowboy cultures. Maybe the whole town should subscribe to Oprah's magazine.
E-mail: zakin@tucsonweekly.com
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