How do you make a road dispute in Vail even rougher than it already was? Just add water.
Recent monsoon rains have made a sloppy mess out of Leon Ranch Road and the few dirt tracks that connect to it.
The muddy conditions are further complicating a fight over access between the developers of the Rancho Del Lago master-planned community and the rural residents nearby.
But Pima County officials have stepped in with a solution they hope will serve both the living and the dead.
Under the roughly $100,000 plan, the county will acquire a strip of land from the developers and take ownership of a dirt road long used by local residents and visitors to a historic family cemetery there.
The proposal was laid out in an Aug. 3 memo sent to County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry by Linda Mayro, director of the county’s office of sustainability and conservation.
In June, Huckelberry asked county staff to look into the problem, after he received letters from people concerned about losing safe access to the century-old Leon Cemetery and the roughly two dozen homes surrounding it.
One of those letters came from Alfred Mayer, whose great grandparents and other family members are buried in the modest cemetery.
“What may not be understood by the decision makers and county approvers of the builders’ plans is that a Mexican tradition honoring our pioneer families that sacrificed and help(ed) build Vail is at stake and could be lost forever,” Mayer wrote. “It is a real concern to many of us.”
Road work ahead
At issue is a dirt road that stretches for about three quarters of a mile along the east side of Pantano Wash. Residents have used and maintained it for years to reach their homes off nearby Leon Ranch Road.
The route appears on Google Maps under two different names — Monthan Ranch Road and Pugly Lake Drive — but county records show it as nothing more than an unnamed sewer easement across private land.
Now a pair of new tract-home developments in the area threatens to erase the road altogether, leaving the Leon Ranch neighborhood with only one way in or out: a steep, single lane of rocks and dirt known as Vail Ranch Road that’s too rough at times for school buses, delivery trucks and even some emergency vehicles.
Construction in Vail has left some residents of an older rural neighborhood with only one way out: this steep, one-lane road with a blind spot at the crest. Video by Henry Brean & Jasmine Demers/Arizona Daily Star.
County officials considered acquiring and improving Vail Ranch Road and the patchwork of private drives that connect it to the nearest county road, but that option would require buying portions of about 50 parcels over a much larger area.
Instead, the county is now working to establish an official right-of-way for the existing connector road, possibly by buying portions of three private parcels for as much as $47,000 total.
County transportation director Ana Olivares said her department will then grade and chip-seal the road at an estimated cost of almost $67,000.
“We’re hoping to get all this completed by the end of this fall,” Olivares said.
Annual maintenance of the road is expected to cost about $18,000.
The family plot
With no shortage of street work to be done, Pima County is understandably hesitant to assume ownership of private easements. Officials decided to make an exception in this case to preserve access to the historic cemetery.
More than 150 people from Vail’s pioneering, mostly Hispanic families have been laid to rest in the small, desert plot since 1913. Their descendants now serve as caretakers of the cemetery.
Fred Mayer, Jr., right, and his friend Dennis Ball install a headstone for Mayer’s aunt, Helen E. Figueroa, at the historic Leon Cemetery in Vail in 2011.
Alfred Mayer’s sister, Sarah Mayer Hiteman, said 100 or more family members gather at the site each year during Día de los Muertos to clean and decorate the headstones of their loved ones.
Burials continue there, too, with family and friends still digging graves and lowering bodies into the ground themselves, much the way it was done in the early days.
But those traditions could be in jeopardy, Mayer Hiteman said, if the roads get so rough that hearses can no longer drive on them.
To her, cutting off access to Leon Cemetery is “a means to erase our culture,” she said.
Slippery when wet
Judging from their memo, county officials agree.
“The cemetery remains not only a place of remembrance for family members, but serves to anchor the living community, its heritage, and traditions, and provides an ancestral experience and sense of place to community members,” the memo states.
Marilyn Dailey lives on Leon Ranch Road and has been leading the neighborhood’s fight to protect their main route in or out.
She said the biggest challenge facing the county might be building something that can withstand all the storm runoff that washes down from the tightly packed subdivisions that have sprung up in Vail in recent decades.
Their existing connector road has been “trashed” by the recent rains and “all the water diversions that Pima County has approved” in the area over the years, Dailey said. “It’s pretty bad. We have four-wheel drives that are getting stuck.”
Still, Dailey is glad to see the county stepping up to help with the situation, though she and her neighbors plan to keep their attorney engaged, just in case.
“It all sounds good,” she said of the county’s proposed solution, “but it’s just pieces of paper. It’s all pieces of paper to me.”
Art Leon, left, and Marilyn Dailey pose for a photo at the intersection of Vail Ranch Road, left, and Leon Ranch Road, where a dispute over access has been playing out. Pima County officials have come up with a solution aimed at settling the issue.
