Sharon Bronson
When the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Sept. 6 to approve an agreement between the county, Regional Flood Control District and the federal government for implementation of the Multi-species Conservation Plan, it was the culmination of a community-wide effort over nearly two decades. The plan will preserve our fragile desert ecosystem while also allowing the community to grow and prosper.
I am immensely proud of the countyβs leadership in bringing the entire community together to work cooperatively and craft a plan that brings order to what had been chaos.
One of the primary reasons I first ran for the Board of Supervisors was to be a voice for our environmental community, which was struggling to preserve our beautiful natural areas as we experienced double-digit population growth. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of political conflict in our region was about growth β where we were growing, how we were growing, who should be paying for growth and whether we were growing too fast or not fast enough.
I wanted us to grow, but to grow responsibly and to recognize the economic, ecological and cultural value of preserving and maintaining the biodiversity of our part of the Sonoran Desert. I sought collaboration and compromise.
The battle over growth had become litigious by the 1990s, and in 1997, a federal judge listed the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as an endangered species. The areas impacted included some of the hottest real estate markets in the county, including the foothills of the Tucson and Tortolita mountains.
We soon learned that we could develop a plan and apply for a federal permit that would protect our desert and our economy.
We brought together every group that would be impacted by such a plan and after many years of hard work and a lot of community meetings, discussion and debate, the Board adopted the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP).
There were two key components of the plan still to be achieved β the money to pay for it, and a Multi-species Conservation Plan acceptable to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for it to issue the county a special permit (commonly referred to as a Section 10 permit) that would protect developers from federal sanction if they built in areas that had threatened or endangered species.
In 2004, county voters overwhelmingly endorsed the SDCP when they agreed to an increase in property taxes to raise the nearly $200 million needed to acquire the environmentally sensitive lands necessary to receive the Section 10 permit. In July of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued the county the Section 10 permit and this weekβs vote formalized its implementation.
While the issuance of this permit and implementation of the Multi-species Conservation Plan may seem like the end of a long road, it is in fact the beginning. The enormous, collaborative community effort that has taken nearly 18 years to achieve must still go on.
The Great Recession stalled growth here, but our economy is back on track and housing and commercial development plans that were shelved in 2008 and 2009 are being dusted off.
We will grow again. We will build new houses and shopping centers, and business parks again, but because we came together as a community to seek and achieve compromise about how and where we grow, we will now grow responsibly and without much of the acrimony of the past.
I hope all of you are as proud as I am of what we have accomplished. It takes will and leadership, but we can work together to solve our problems.
