‘A 28,000-home development in Benson could add up to 70,000 more people to the town’s current population of around 5,000, all of them dependent on the pumping of groundwater.”
—Tim Steller, Arizona Daily Star
“Benson council gives unanimous OK for Vigneto”
–Star headline, July 20
“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork.”
— Edward Abbey, author and environmentalist
Now the fine folks in Benson, the Gila Bend of Cochise County, mean well. When you’re a small town on the ropes and a slick fellow like developer Mike Reinbold comes in, promising Benson will boom when his 28,000-home Vigneto master plan is built, well, heck, your ears perk up.
It’s perfectly enchanting to believe him when he says, “Tucson will become a suburb of Benson!” And it’s perfectly reasonable to believe in movie fantasies like “Field of Dreams” and say “Yup” to building a ready-made ghost town of homesteads out among the creosote and ghost towns.
“If you build it they will come.”
Why, all this fuss about water is just nonsense put out there by environmentalist do-gooders who hate progress and apple pie. If you just believe — there’ll be jobs and thousands of newcomers and Benson will boom! And that silly old river will be just fine.
And once professor Harold Hll’s musical instruments arrive, you’ll have a genuine marching band and River City’s kids won’t be hankering to get the hell out of Dodge.
Gila Monster spit. You may as well believe javelina can fly. An enraged Ed Abbey must have spun like a July dust devil in his grave over this reckless threat to the magnificent San Pedro River.
And then, this week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suspended its permit to proceed, putting the project on hold, believing the impact on the nearby critters and creek merit further research.
It’s just a temporary reprieve.
How much money did Reinbold say would fall from the sky? Twenty billion dollars? How many city slickers did they say were itching to move to Benson — 70,000? Really? Scan the horizon with your binoculars, ladies and gentlemen. See those billowing clouds of dust on the horizon? Hear that rumble? That’s the throng of newcomers thundering Benson’s way like a stampeding buffalo herd.
Sold! To hell with the San Pedro River. After the ribbon-cutting, let’s rename it the San Pedro Sandtrap. The next question is when will Kartchner Caverns go dry and how long before it can go condo?
It’s a lovely coincidence that our buzzards in the Legislature cut the state water department’s budget so it doesn’t have the resources to create a final computer model of the area’s hydrology, just in case any cowboy was wondering what the impact of Chernobyl Estates would be. Who needs that? Certainly not a fine developer itchin’ to wring gold out of the sand by sticking 28,000 straws in the ground next to the fragile San Pedro.
House Speaker David Gowan and Rep. David Stevens greased this grab with such skill these fine pimps of paradise deserve to be fed to bobcats. That may be a bit extreme. At the very least, I suggest these fine Christian soldiers look up the word “stewardship” in their Bibles. That is, if these fine servants of special interests aren’t too busy backslapping each other.
It doesn’t matter to the hucksters that the beautiful San Pedro River is a rare thing, a band of precious fresh water snaking through Southern Arizona, shaded by shimmering cottonwoods and full of life. In this age of climate change, these misguided Arizonans are showing the way off the cliff. May as well plunder what you can while you can. The desert is the future of the world.
The good people of Benson, and much of Arizona, are happy to dismiss the lesson of the saguaro, a role model for how to thrive on the forsaken land beneath our air-conditioned feet. If you want to endure for centuries, take only what you need. If you want to outlast the Hohokam, conserve. If you want to be around longer than the Anasazi, grow with wisdom and patience.
I’m sure the city fathers and mothers of Benson are defiantly proud of their vote in favor of their extravagant groundwater gamble, confident this ruckus caused by the feds over some river will dry up and blow away like a Tombstone tumbleweed.
And surely they’re a little perplexed by the westerners who feel differently. Geronimo once said, “I should have never surrendered.” Neither should those who love the San Pedro River.
