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Editor's Note: Because the Aug. 21 issue of the Star's East Side section did not reach some Vail and East Side residents, this story is being reprinted.

Nan Cowly and Sherri Stinnett didn't stifle their feelings. Instead, they drove through their Vail neighborhood waving a victory sign and beeping their car horns repeatedly.

The women and their Southeast Side neighbors were excited after winning two victories before a state commission on Aug. 18.

The Arizona Corporation Commission rejected one section of a proposed Tucson Electric Power Co. power line and a substation. Residents also got a second planned substation moved away from two existing subdivisions.

"I am totally, totally stoked," said Cowly, a 44-year-old photographer and mother of two. "I'm ecstatic, excited, elated. I don't know exactly which word really describes what I am."

Cowly has lived with her family in New Dawn Estates for about four years. She said that if TEP had been able to carry out its initial proposals, her family would have had new power lines running near its property.

"Our neighbors up the road would have been more affected by the substation," she said. "It just made no sense for them to have it there."

Residents in New Dawn Estates and Vail Vista Estates — north and south of Dawn Drive, near Colossal Cave Road — had asked if the substation could be built west of Colossal Cave Road instead of where TEP initially proposed, which was near their subdivisions.

The commission voted 4-1 against a proposed nine-mile power line and accompanying substation that would have landed in an area that county officials want to preserve.

Commissioners generally agreed with residents and a developer in the area who said TEP had failed to prove the line would be needed to serve growth.

But TEP attorney Matt Derstine said that if the power-line approval is delayed several years, the effects on landowners will be magnified as more homes are built. "Do we wait for growth or plan for it?" Derstine said. "Do we wait for increased demand, for people to build, for people to move out there, and then when demand outstrips the power, we come in and build on back fences?"

Defeat of that power line and substation will give Pima County time to buy land in the Cienega Corridor, commissioners said. County officials so far have bought only one major parcel, the 1,700-acre Bar V Ranch, in 2005.

"We need to give Pima County a chance to go out and make a play for this land," Commissioner Kris Mayes said. "If we were to approve this line, we could make that almost a moot point."

But commission Chairman Mike Gleason said the county has had years to buy this state land, and hasn't even taken the first step. He was the lone supporter of TEP's plan on the commission.

Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said afterward that the county would try to buy state land in that area if a package to overhaul state law to make conservation easier were approved by voters and the Legislature.

Much of the surrounding land, which includes thousands of acres of state-land grazing leases, would be preserved under a proposed statewide initiative that would save 570,000 acres of state land. The measure is in limbo now, because it didn't have enough signatures to make the November ballot.

Residents Cowly and Stinnett, who both live in New Dawn Estates, worked with another Vail resident, Elizabeth Webb, to negotiate with TEP.

Webb, 40, said the outcome is what they sought, but it was costly for everyone involved in terms of both money and time.

"I never expect for anything positive to happen because I'm a cynic," she said. "I never expect to win when I'm engaged in these kinds of things."

Stinnett, 45, moved into the subdivision last September with her husband and son. Neither phase would have been in their backyard, but Stinnett said she still was concerned.

"As a community, we wanted to support all of our neighbors," she said.