From the Carnegie Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, one may see a rainbow touching down in our Santa Cruz River Valley, framed by two saguaros.

jeffry scott / arizona daily star 2004

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County having second thoughts on Tumamoc bid

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Insults of recent decades do not diminish the value of Tumamoc Hill to Tucson's history or to its future.

Home of the renowned Carnegie Desert Laboratory, site of ancient and historic Native American presence and a wildly popular recreational walking area, Tumamoc Hill is a community icon that must be preserved.

For more than a decade and a half, Pima County has planned, studied, allocated funds and participated in several legal and political efforts to gain control of Tumamoc Hill so the county can preserve it in perpetuity. To date, every effort has failed.

Why is this Sonoran Desert jewel in jeopardy? Its 320 acres are state school trust land, and the Arizona Land Department is charged under the state constitution with gaining maximum value from the lease or sale of this category of land — to help pay for public schools and, to a lesser extent, for other public assets of statewide significance.

To maximize the value of Tumamoc Hill, the Tucson City Council several decades ago rezoned it for residential development at two homes per acre.

Tumamoc Hill is a jewel among sites of great public value that are threatened as an unintended consequence of the constitution's school trust land mandate. Trying to address this problem, the Legislature in the mid-1990s enacted the Arizona Preserve Initiative to let cities and counties purchase designated lands, Tumamoc Hill among them, with conservation easements attached so they have no value for development.

With this tool in mind, Pima County voters in 1997 approved $1.8 million in bond money earmarked for the acquisition of Tumamoc Hill. The county obtained a $1.4 million Growing Smarter grant from the Arizona Parks Department in 2000 to have enough money for the Tumamoc Hill purchase, and asked the Land Department to put it up for auction.

However, a private letter to the Land Department threatened legal action contesting Tumamoc's auction under the Arizona Preserve Initiative as a violation of the constitution. State legal experts decided their position under such a threat was untenable and put the Arizona Preserve Initiative on inactive status, where it remains. The county withdrew its application to purchase Tumamoc Hill in April 2003.

During and after that period, there have been efforts in the Legislature and by citizen groups' initiative to make the Arizona Preserve Initiative viable or to replace it with another state land preservation scheme, but they have not been successful.

Congressman Raúl Grijalva worked with Pima County and local landowners on federal land-swap legislation that would have made Tumamoc Hill available for county purchase from the federal government. That 2005 proposal failed. The county has pursued other avenues with the state Land Department, but its attorneys ruled them all inadvisable.

The recent downturn in the housing market, however, provides the county with a new opportunity to purchase Tumamoc Hill. The county is considering a plan to simply ask the Land Department to put Tumamoc on the auction block in a straightforward sale to the highest bidder. The current market situation renders Tumamoc much less attractive to prospective developers than it was in years past.

Under this scenario, the county would ask the Land Department to note clearly to prospective bidders that if they succeed they will be responsible for cleaning up a long-closed University of Arizona landfill that lies within the 320 acres and is known to be contaminating nearby groundwater. County experts estimate this cleanup will cost nearly $9 million to complete.

The Land Department also would be asked to delineate other costly factors associated with a private developer purchasing this site. Within its boundaries are the remains of Hohokam stone terraces and walls dating as far back as 300 B.C., and dozens of Tohono O'odham burials dating to the early historical period. County experts estimate the costs of dealing with those artifacts and burials, and mitigating inevitable damages associated with developing the land in housing, would run from $3 million to $5 million.

A final deterrent to prospective private bidders hoping to develop the land is the existence of two parallel underground petroleum pipelines that run across its acreage. One transports gasoline and the other jet fuel.

The city of Phoenix has taken this approach to buying land for conservation successfully three times in the past, and it intends to purchase another 900 acres for preservation in this manner next month. This approach allows the county to use Growing Smarter grant funds to help pay for Tumamoc's purchase.

This is an approach that can succeed, finally, in bringing Tumamoc Hill into Pima County's protective fold. The benefits certainly merit it — preservation of ancient and historic Native American artifacts and burials, assured continuation of more than a century of uninterrupted University of Arizona research on Sonoran Desert flora by its Desert Laboratory, and protection of a very popular walking path that helps keep thousands of Tucson-area residents healthy and happy.