Excerpted from the Vermilion Flycatcher
By Christina McVie, Kendall Kroesen, Scott Wilbor and Paul Green.
Protecting Arizona’s Rivers, Wildlife Habitat, and Agricultural Heritage
Aaron Citron, Project Manager, Arizona Land and Water Trust
Arizona Land and Water Trust (ALWT) has protected over 30,000 acres in southern Arizona since 1978. It provides a bridge between preservation-minded landowners (often farmers and ranchers) and conservation buyers. In 2004, ALWT began to recognize an opportunity to better connect land and water conservation mechanisms to benefit rural areas by addressing both natural resources and working farms and ranches. Land and water are often inextricably linked components in land conservation projects—especially in the arid Southwest. Historically, however, water rights have not been central to land protection projects. To address this issue in the face of the twin stressors of drought and growth, ALWT launched its Desert Rivers and Riparian Heritage Initiative in 2007. The Initiative highlights the connections between water for people, the environment, and rural agriculture. The focus is on strengthening these connections by working with willing landowners to identify conservation tools and implementation strategies that can balance the health of desert rivers with sustainable agriculture. As a first step in this process, ALWT recently released Benefitting Landowners and Desert Rivers: A Water Rights Handbook for Conservation Agreements in Arizona.
Connected, protected landscapes such as working ranches and farms often allow for effective groundwater recharge which protects regional water supplies while providing local food and wildlife habitat. With the Water Rights Handbook, ALWT aims to offer landowners information about options and best practices for water management that will benefit their operations. At the same time, these management options are intended to help firm up Arizona’s water supplies and enhance environmental flows for future generations.
To provide the most valuable and useful information possible, early in 2010 ALWT will embark on a listening tour to better understand the needs of Arizona’s landowners and its regulatory community. By working to provide information to all interests, ALWT hopes to open a dialogue that will promote healthy watersheds sustained by working desert rivers—rivers that support healthy floodplains and riparian habitat—flowing beside working landscapes. Through diverse partnerships we can ensure that the future of Arizona’s water is planned for and managed to protect our rich agricultural and riparian heritage.
We invite you to contact Arizona Land and Water Trust if you would like to be included in our water rights for conservation listening tour: Aaron Citron, Project Manager, Arizona Land and Water Trust, 577–8564, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Wildlife Bridge and Underpasses Will Link The Tortolitas and Catalinas for Wildlife
Carolyn Campbell, Executive Director, Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection
Exciting news! On December 10, Pima County’s Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) approved the first wildlife overpass structure in southern Arizona, and largest in Arizona, utilizing over $8 million of RTA funding for a bridge and two underpasses designed to move wildlife safely between the Santa Catalina and Tortolita mountain ranges! The funding comes from a 20-year $2.1 billion transportation package that county voters approved in 2006 that included $45 million for wildlife-related infrastructure.
This latest step in helping to ensure wildlife connectivity follows years of efforts by the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection and all its member groups in working with local jurisdictions and state and federal agencies on regional conservation planning.
The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) proposal was developed jointly by ADOT, the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, and Coalition member groups Sky Island Alliance and Tucson Audubon Society. The wildlife infrastructure will be included in the design of the next phase of an on-going highway widening project of Arizona State Route 77 (Oracle Road), an urban street in the Tucson metropolitan area that becomes a rural highway as it moves north out of Pima County and into the adjacent, more rural Pinal County.
This is an exciting step in our efforts to protect the incredible biodiversity that still exists at the urban edges of Tucson. Over the last decade, conservation groups have focused a coordinated effort on the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, and through that effort have been able to accomplish acquisition of habitat to expand mountain parks, take steps with multiple local jurisdictions to assure open space through land use planning, and obtain assured funding sources for wildlife infrastructure.
The wildlife crossings will be built on a road that bisects the protected open space between the Coronado National Forest and Catalina State Park in the Santa Catalina Mountain range and Pima County’s Tortolita Mountain Park. Located between the two protected areas lie 9000 acres of state land, which recently went through a cooperative, multijurisdictional land use planning process that designated over 5000 acres as an open space Wildlife Corridor. The design was developed by Northern Arizona University’s Dr. Paul Beier, a pioneer in science-based approaches to wildlife corridor designs.
Much thanks goes to the hard work of Tucson Audubon’s Conservation Chair Christina McVie, Janice Przybyl of Sky Island Alliance’s Wildlife Linkages Program, and Siobhan Nordhaugen, Wildlife Connectivity Special Projects Manager for ADOT. The final design phase begins in March 2010, with construction scheduled for 2013. Stay tuned for more successes in this area, as Coalition representatives are now working with ADOT and the Town of Marana on design of wildlife crossing infrastructure in the Tucson Mountain—Tortolita Mountain linkage area!
Updates
Senator John McCain has successfully struck a deal with Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Chair of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, to pass, by a voice vote and without debate, the Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto) land exchange bill, S. 409, as amended, along with a bundle of 31 other bills. Passage of the bill brings us closer to making the Oak Flat Land Exchange a foregone conclusion. After holding up Senate confirmation hearings, and advocating for a quick resolution favoring the wealthy foreign owned mining company, McCain also disregarded the commitments made to Native American tribes to consult prior to moving the bill forward. Conservation groups who have followed this issue closely, and submitted testimony to Congress, were excluded.
This action comes on the heels of the news that Rio Tinto has been charged with war crimes and will soon be defending itself in federal court. The Los Angeles District Court has ruled that, due to the “universal” nature of Rio Tinto’s crimes, Bougainville islanders do not need to exhaust legal options in Papua New Guinea and, under the US Alien Tort Claims Act, can seek legal remedy for crimes against humanity, war crimes and racial discrimination committed by the mining giant in the 1980s and 1990s. The plaintiffs allege that Rio Tinto created extensive environmental damage at its Bougainville mine, paid Black workers less than white counterparts and instigated a violent civil war, leading to the deaths of roughly 10% of the island’s population.
The “compromise” benefiting the $300 billion dollar mining consortium appears to circumvent NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) requirements to consider reasonable alternatives and impacts in advance of an action and contains a number of other clauses that are tremendous setbacks for Native American communities, climbers, naturalists, and citizens.
This “compromise”:
Allows Resolution Copper to
• immediately commence and continue directional drilling to explore under Oak Flat for three years and install a drilling pad within it, prior to NEPA compliance or tribal consultation. Oak Flat was determined to be a native sacred cultural site and withdrawn from mining by President Eisenhower’s Executive Order. This sets a precedent undoing and making vulnerable all lands previously withdrawn from mineral exploration nationally.
Removes previously agreed to
• commitments to the recreational climbing community, including finding a replacement site that would provide an equally world class climbing site.
Removes the mandate to provide
• an alternative camp site for citizen recreational use and ignores the need to provide another traditional acorn gathering location for tribal cultural activities.
Leaves unchanged the provision
• that allows the Town of Superior the chance to buy (at full market value) land that, without the interference of Rio Tinto, the Town would have received free of charge from the US Forest Service.
Leaves tremendous wiggle room
• for the appraisal process to cheat the US taxpayer out of full payment for the tremendous natural and mineral resources we would lose.
Allows Rio Tinto’s subsidiary, BHP,
• to develop up to 35,000 residences on land it owns along the lower San Pedro River, potentially dewatering and devaluing lands included in this land exchange and imperiling other conservation lands mitigating for impacts to endangered species downstream of the proposed development. These mitigation lands are for impacts resulting from the construction of the Roosevelt dam, and subsequent lake, which provides water to the city of Phoenix via the Salt River Project.
Tucson Audubon has long advocated for the creation of a National Wildlife Refuge along the lower San Pedro River precisely because it is home to threatened and endangered species and would benefit from management by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency mandated by federal law to specifically address threatened and endangered species issues. The new version of the bill only mentions the possibility of a National Conservation Area, which would be managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the same agency that did not initially defend their own conservation easement on the lower San Pedro, at the Schwennesen’s road crossing near Dudleyville (see below).
It would appear, by virtue of the “compromise” negotiated by Senator McCain and Senator Bingaman, that, though the Secretary of Agriculture could still find the bill not in the public interest, the Senate is sending a strong message that it wants the predetermined outcome of the bill to benefit a foreign mining company and not their constituents —the US taxpayers who own the land.
In further news regarding the lower San Pedro River, we may be near a settlement regarding our lawsuit against Pinal County for their violation of the conservation easement held by the BLM on the Schwennesen’s road crossing at the San Pedro River near Dudleyville. The BLM has decided to defend the conservation easement they hold, fulfilling their legal obligation, and the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) has cited the county for violation of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, because the county dredged and filled the river and did not consult nor get an appropriate permit prior to taking actions which adversely impacted a designated Water of the US and, possibly, an endangered species, the Southwest Willow Flycatcher. If the county is actually held accountable for its illegal actions, this will be a great victory for us and our partners, without whose efforts the BLM and the ACOE might not have fulfilled their legal responsibility to pursue this issue in a timely fashion – it could have languished for years or worse yet, been ignored.
Sign up for updates
To sign up for email updates from Tucson Audubon, follow this link or send your name and email address to Jean Barchman.