"They were trying to find out what we would agree to," says Anderson, "but we were not going to come to them and say, 'This is our bottom line and we'll compromise on this, this and this.' We have the initiative. We think the initiative is the best package for managing growth in Arizona, and we thought it was incumbent on them to come up with some proposals about how they can improve Growing Smarter."
Woods, on the other hand, was ready to deal.
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt
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"For whatever reasons, it was all or nothing [for environmentalists]; they're really wedded to the CGMI proposal," Woods says. "And to me, I didn't care at all whether it was this proposal or that proposal, or who's behind it, or who's in charge, or who gets the credit. What I want is to accomplish these goals and get it done."
On February 12, Citizens for Growth Management announced that Woods had suddenly defected and thrown his support to Hull's Growing Smarter Plus. Hull had certainly been wooing him, and in the end he had been negotiating more as a freelancer than as the head of an environmental consortium. But whether he jumped from one side to the other or got pushed is a matter of some argument.
Woods was on a ski trip to Colorado with his son, hammering out draft language with the governor's people over the telephone. He had his secretary call the Sierra Club to pass on a message that the governor was set to make an announcement.
Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club says the environmentalists blew the whistle on Woods' change of heart because Woods' secretary had said that Woods was taking Hull's side.
"It wasn't a done deal that I was going to," Woods insists. "They clearly jumped the gun." Bahr claims she and her colleagues tried in vain to reach Woods.
"We left messages all over the place for him," she says. Then she called the secretary back to make sure they got the story straight before issuing the press release.
"And by the way," Bahr points out, "he's still never called and talked to anyone [from the environmentalists' campaign]."
Woods considered all the plans on the table. The dealmaker-dealbreaker was Babbitt's plan.
"There's nothing in CGMI that preserves one inch of land," he says.
The 270,000 acres that Hull proposed for her conservation reserve was a scant 3 percent of the total nine million acres of state trust lands. But most of those nine million acres are in remote corners of the state that weren't at risk for development in the near future. It was a start.
But added to Babbitt's 200,000-acre proposal, it looked even better. And there were still other legal tools to continue adding to the open space bank.
For instance, the Growing Smarter Plus ballot initiative also would legalize land exchanges between governments, meaning that in the future Arizona could trade state trust lands in areas worth saving for federal lands worth developing.
In addition, the state can already purchase development rights on private property, a deed restriction that would forbid further development of those lands. Last year, for instance, the state parks department used Heritage Funds to purchase a conservation easement on the 22,000-acre San Rafael Ranch on the Mexican border south of Patagonia; last week the Nature Conservancy, which brokered the deal, sold the property to a rancher willing to operate the ranch under the terms of that easement. Growing Smarter Plus has provisions for purchasing development rights on other private properties, though it has not yet appropriated funds to do so.
Under the Growing Smarter Bill in 1998, voters dedicated $220 million as matching funds for municipalities that want to conserve open space by purchasing trust lands.
And then there is the Babbitt plan.
"The governor committed to me that she would seriously consider this with the secretary," Woods says. "They had a meeting. I talked with Bruce afterwards. I talked to the governor afterwards. They're putting staff on it. We'll see if we can move it to the fast track."
Contact Michael Kiefer at his online address: michael.kiefer@newtimes.com
