SDCP - Steering Committee
Marriott UofA Park Hotel
8:30am to 11:30 am
Saturday, October 5, 2002

Meeting Notes
 
Participants:  See attached sign-in sheet David Steele, Maeveen Behan and SIMG staff.
 
 Documents made available to the Steering Committee members at the meeting:
* Agendas
* Ad-Hoc Subcommittee meeting notes for September 11th and 25th.
* Steering Committee meeting notes for September 4th.
* Steering Committee study session notes for September 14th.
* Confirmed Steering Committee Meeting/Study Sessions Schedule.
* Business Community Landowner Private Property Rights Recommendations: Mike Zimet and Chris Sheafe.
* STAT Charter

 
Meeting Commenced at 8:30 am
Meeting commenced with 30 Steering Committee members and 15 members of the general public. David Steele opened the meeting by introducing himself, reviewing the ground rules and reviewing the agenda. By 10:00 there were 32 Steering Committee members present.
 
Logistics for the next Study Session:
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Pima County Public Works Building
Conference Room 'C'
201 N. Stone
 
Logistics for the next Ad-Hoc Subcommittee meeting:
Monday, October 14, 2002
3:00 pm to 5:pm
Red Sky Conference Room
1661 N. Swan Road
Suite 118
 
Old Business:
Approval of meeting notes from September 4, meeting and for the September 14 Study Session:
This issue was deferred to the November 6th meeting as there were not enough Steering Committee members for a quorum.
 
Updated Operating Guidelines
Copies were given to the Steering Committee members of the updated operating guidelines that reflect some of the actions that occurred over the last couple of months with respect to quorum and attendance policy.
Discussion and Action:
* A copy of the guidelines needs to be given to the Board of Supervisors each time they are updated. 
* Government Guidelines.  We did meet 4 times by conference call, and I would suggest that in parentheses, add the 4 dates so that they are on record.  Then the next sentence says, this subcommittee has met in person. Government Guidelines.  We did meet 4 times by conference call, and I would suggest that in parentheses, add the 4 dates so that they are on record.  Then the next sentence says, this subcommittee has met in person.
* The Steering Committee previously approved where there were no changes. So that would be a subsequent change.
* Lucy Vitale: In the last sentence, complete sentence at the bottom.  Complete sentence begins, "The mediation group will consider the issue.", my process does not account for a mediation group, the process in February superceded this because we voted the process, and in the process it does not account for mediation, it accounts for us coming to a consensus or finally a vote, so that we don't take up too much time.  That is part of the process that on February, everybody voted on.
* This issue would be deferred for lack of quorum.

 
Quarterly Report
This issue would be deferred for lack of quorum.
 
Economics Consultant Proposal Review Committee Participation
Maeveen Beham gave an update on the economics consultant proposal review committee participation. The RFP's are expected back from the people that are going to be bidding and opened on November 7th. The review committee would not meet until some point subsequent to that date.  The Steering Committee has one study session and one Steering Committee meeting prior to the actual opening of the RFP's, therefore, this issue was also deferred.
 
Discussion and Action:
* At the September 4 Steering Committee meeting, Chuck Huckleberry said that they were going to put together a review committee.  He wanted representatives from the Steering Committee that represented the ranching community, the business, real estate and development community, and the environment and homeowners association community.  He wanted a representative to serve on that. 
* The Ad Hoc Committee discussed this at its last meeting and wanted to recommend to the full Steering Committee that in addition to representatives from those three stakeholder groups that would be determined by those stakeholder groups, that we may have one or two at large members from the Steering Committee.
* This issue was deferred because the was not a quorum present.

Call to the public:
* Alexandra Terry of the Tohono O'Odham Nation gave a brief update on the action the Tohono O'Odham Nation has taken to clean up 113 dump sites on the reservation.

 
New Business:
Draft outline of Final Steering Committee Report to Board of Supervisors
David Steele created a draft outline of the key components of a final report to the Board of Supervisors from the Steering Committee. Some of the issues in the final report draft outline are related to the issues matrix and the thoughts from the stakeholder groups that have made presentations.
Discussion:
* Some members felt that the Steering Committee has to know what the economic appraisal is before the Steering Committee can start writing the report. 
* Others voiced that it is appropriate to begin to outline the ultimate recommendations so that when the Steering Committee does have the economic data and makes some of the final decisions that  the Steering Committee will  have a context and a format in which to put those decisions. 
* I would like to encourage that David and his colleagues be allowed to move ahead, at least on Roman Numeral One, Introduction and Background.  That isn't very controversial information, but it will take a little time to write it, and the sooner they get that ready, I think the better off we're all going to be.  Because what I sense is that we're going to have an incredible time crunch.  November; we may get the final two recommendations from our stakeholders-- December's probably going to be a wash, December always is.  Then we have two months, basically, and this thing is supposed to be ready on March 1st.
* Part of your report I would hope would include a section on key concepts.  These are things that we should recommend to the Board regardless of how many species, regardless of alternatives, there should be a set of concepts that we would like to promote, so please make a part of your recommendation report for that kind of thing.
* There were no negative reactions to the format of the report.

 
Issues Matrix:
Discussion:
* The concept of the issues matrix is to be able to look at it and be updated.  Comments on for the matrix can be emailed to David.

 
Pima County's key underlying assumptions of Draft Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan
·        Cindy Coping made the point at the September meeting, that when formulating the final report there needs to be an understanding of the assumptions that the county is operating under, with respect to the plan.  Then be able to have the Steering Committee provide some counsel on those base assumptions and maybe provide additional or supplementary information.
·        This is a discussion that's going to have to take place in the future. 
·        When discussed  in the Ad Hoc Committee group, it was decided that the Steering Committee  give the county an opportunity to go over these. 
·        Maeveen provided some materials for the Steering Committee to consider, and then the Steering Committee would reserve some time at a future Steering Committee study session to discuss these in more detail to see if the Steering Committee, react to the county's assumptions and then formulate their own, if there are any in addition to those. 
 
Maeveen Behan: Thank you for asking me to be here.  Cindy, I probably have what you have to hand out, if you take a look at it.  This is just a compilation of the goals, mission statement, objectives, of each of the technical teams.  You've seen this before, actually, because this was formed in 1999 and we sent it out for public review as part of the template cooperative agreement that we entered into with all the federal agencies.  It was out for a long public review, and we got a couple comments.  People were concerned about different goals, and was there conflict between the goals of the ranch team and the science team, and that sort of thing.  But it became the basis of the agreement between Pima County and each of the federal agencies.  So in a sense, this is old news, but it may help you see it all in one place like that again.  And I thought I'd give you some tips about how to find out, where did it show up again in documents, so you can see how it was applied.  So if you go to the preliminary plan, you can see that the guidelines and objectives are discussed as a part of each element.  I just opened it to page 35 and page 35 reads, Biological and Riparian Ecosystem Function Goals and Science Technical Advisory Team.  So we always took the technical information and framed the discussion in the technical reports with it.  Another place you might go if you really want to see how it's developed at great length, sometimes hundreds of pages, each element of the plan has a document, the riparian element, the ranch element, the cultural resource, all of its own, and then those were summarized and put into this 2000 document. This is the preliminary plan.  Yeah.  So that's your easiest roadmap for trying to determine, where did these come from, where did they show up again, how are they used?  I can point you to that, but you can look at every report and there's a statement of the assumptions, there's a statement of the data gaps, and so you can just pick that apart yourself, and we would welcome any comments on that.  They're really all out in draft.  I just finished.  You have that kind of guidance on sort of the general planning.  And I think one thing that would be really helpful for the county is to hear, what mission objectives, goals, would the Steering Committee like to add?  If you look at any Section 10 permit, you'll see, like, a statement of principle about, "the land use for the Section 10 permit will be from only willing sellers", something like that.  Or you might see, not expressed but implied, an approach that is more acquisition oriented or more regulatory, and that would be really helpful to hear from the Steering Committee, what approach do you want to take in general.  And I would add a third, which is, to what extent would you like to propose cooperative efforts in addition to or instead of acquisition oriented regulatory approach, cooperative efforts as part of the Section 10 permit.  So there's, I would think, if I were in your shoes, you could have your own mission statement, objectives and goals that would be additive to what exists from the technical community.  But we welcome any comments or anything you want to add or subtract. That's at a real general level, and it's kind of old.  What I thought I would do is make an offer to you and see if this doesn't get you to a more specific level, and I think we need to move from the level of abstraction.  If you think about, how do you start to write this document?  There's some early decisions you can make.  One is, what kind of time frame do you want to cover and what kind of activities do you want to cover?  Those are basic, basic decisions that drive the entire EIS after it.  You can look at the cost model that we put out in May.  What we tried to do was show the whole range from, you know, nothing to everything, and we selected something in between.  But a careful reader of that has the numbers in that document to just turn the dial up or down from where the data is in that document, and see what the effect is.  Since that time, what we've done is, we've taken that cost model, which really could turn into the project of the SDCP at any level, at any level, and we're writing EIS issue papers.  And there's 10 of them out, and I'll just tell you what they are, they're cultural resources, ranching, recreation, fire management, invasive species, environmental justice, utility right of way, water.  And coming out is land availability, mineral resources, service, the effect of the Section 10 permit on service availability, fiscal resources, meaning the tax base, transportation and housing.  And what those really do is just say, well, what if the project really is what we proposed in the cost model?  Then a lot of this data is geo-based and it's a very easy exercise just to drop the lines over the existing resource.  These are all the resources that we scoped as part of the Federal Register notice, and they're good little discussion papers.  Then we come in the end and we compile the results, and you start to get an idea that a strategy of ranch conservation to achieve a Section 10 permit would coincide with the protection of other resources, or conflict, and you can go strategy by strategy by strategy and see that.  I think, if we can come back in November, I would love to hear from other people first, so you don't feel trapped by that analysis.  But it's not that hard to start to move forward.  Fiscal resources, the cost issues, are one of many issues, and the real decision points that you need to make first are, do you want to for example, this is very concrete, what do you want to include?  Do you want to include just county projects?  Do you want to include county projects plus development activity?  Do you want to leave the door open for other landowner activities, where people could opt in, opt out?  These are decision points.  And we have them mapped out, I saw Sue Miller was here from Transportation, and we have all our CIP and non-CIP capital projects mapped, you can see the habitat impact, you can see where they are, inside, outside the conservation land system, and start to say, well, it would take this many acres and it would impact these parts of the community if we were to include facilities management projects, parks project, cultural resource projects, transportation projects, sewer.  And that's all very, very concrete.  And I don't know whether it would make you feel you were going forward, we need your advice in that way.  The reason we're writing the EIS issue papers is to try to break the whole topic of the EIS into digestible parts, because it's enormous, and I think that will help us frame the EIS and we really need your input on the EIS itself.  So there's some pretty easy decision points on this Section 10 permit that you could make that would allow us, we could map your recommendations and come back and they could be very different than what you see from the cost model.  So I just make that as an offer, might get you going.
 
Discussion:
* All the mission statements should be compiled into one place at the beginning so the reader could understand what this is about.
* One concrete vote that the Steering Committee did take was that the Steering Committee recommends the Section 10 permit covers county projects, development services, permits, and also the other municipalities within Pima County, and also the state land department, if they so desire. 
* Wasn't the time frame part of the legal mandate that we started with, that it was 20 years?

Maeveen: Just a short answer to that.  EPA recommended 20 years in their comments.  A series of public review we went through, EPA recommended 20 years.  So we picked up on that, just honoring that recommendation.  But most permits are much longer, and the trend has been towards 30, 50, and then there's a proposal for 100 years.  So 20 is a short term permit, but EPA thought that we couldn't predict some of the impacts because of the rate of growth. I don't know if this will clarify things for you as you think about what recommendations you want to make to the county.  There's two really different types of approaches that have been taken in the past with Section 10 permits, and one is to have ambition only to mitigate take.  And what happens when you see that kind of plan, and I believe Austin's an example of that.  All little HCP's are examples of that.  But when you look at the bigger plans, there's really two philosophies.  One is a mitigation approach and the other is a regional approach.  They have a different standard, there's a different rigor that applies to them.  If you say that San Diego was framed as a regional approach, they were allowed to put forward a body of information that justified their permit that was pretty coarse scale.  They go forward with a goal, sort of biological goal, and I wanted to mention this, Cindy, because when you see these overarching goals, you can see that some plans stay at that level of generality and that's because they're framed in terms of a regional permit.  Now if you take a mitigation approach, the requirement is much more fine scale.  A good example of that that we've already done is the pineapple cactus mitigation bank.  You go out and you count pineapple cactus and you count acres of suitable habitat and you negotiate a ratio and number of credits with Fish and Wildlife, and then that's set up, and people know that when they have an impact, very specific impact somewhere else, they can trade into that bank.  That's a mitigation approach.  And you can see that there's a requirement for more rigor in the biological analysis. The reason why the justification for less rigor in the regional approach is that people believe that the robustness of taking a regional approach offsets the uncertainty that you would have for not doing a fine scale analysis.  When you take all of that histories of HCP's and apply to Pima County, the first thing that strikes me is, there's no region as big as us.  So a regional plan in San Diego, which is 10 times smaller, even though there were 30 governments involved, and people think of it as the grand plan, all of it, all 30 governments would fit in our one Altar Valley watershed, with 113,000 acres leftover.  And so when we say regional, we're signing up for a bigger task.  The requirement that you commit to funding early on becomes important at that point.  If you want a regional plan and you meet the Section 10 commitment to have it adequately funded at the outset, then that's a decision point for the Steering Committee, because you can see how dramatic the difference would be in the price tag.
There's a hybrid approach, which is I think the way they're going with, well, there's a couple HCP's you can look at that take kind of a hybrid approach.  What they do is begin with the mitigation approach, because that's what's achievable, and have milestones built in to the permit, and they work towards this regional approach.  So if your regional approach is unachievable on the day you want a permit, the day you want to commit to a vision, you don't have to give that up. You can describe in the document how you'll work to achieve that.  Then from the interest group perspective or the biological perspective, those milestones better be pretty well defined.  What you do, in essence, is you  move from this sort of micro-management of the landscape, this mitigation, which is pretty choked, that's a pretty choked approach.  I know developers might like that.  They might also fear it because when you run out of mitigation land, then you have to almost go find more or, you never really have the long term certainty.  So there's a benefit to starting with a small plan, working towards the regional vision and really having excellence in the plan about how you define the milestones.  If you take that approach, if the Steering Committee recommends that approach, there's a lot of discussion to have about those milestones.  So I just want to put that out there, that I have never heard these sorts of discussions.  If you wanted to take on any of the issues, there's a lot to talk about and we can bring a lot of information back to you.
 
* When did Pima County enter into agreements with the Town of Marana, the City of Tucson, and  the Tohono O'odham Nation?

Maeveen: The Tohono Nation, that was our very first cooperative agreement, and they signed at a Steering Committee meeting.  You might remember, it was the 13th Steering Committee meeting in that very first year, when the Tohono Nation made their presentation, they signed at that meeting.  They've been solid partners all the way along, kids plan, it's just very nice to work with them.  The federal agreements came in next, and we have agreements with all the federal agencies.  We have an agreement with Game and Fish, which came in, that had never received any publicity.  Then more recently, well, we also have one with Metro Water, I don't know if anyone really knows that.  And the Marana agreement, Marana is to credit for coming forward with the great idea and a proposal that would move us both forward, and so I credit Marana with just taking the initiative and doing that.  That's been a great relationship, I think.  The nice thing about Marana as opposed to any of the federal agencies is they have staff who can just start running.  So they have the GIS ability that's at the level of the county's, and in fact on a fine scale, probably better in ways, and then with Andy Laurenzi and just the interest, it was zero start-up time, so that's going to be really nice.  So that came about with Marana.  With the City of Tucson and Oro Valley, we have been trying for a long time, going back and forth with documents, trying to get into a cooperative agreement, and Congressman Kolbe's office has been helpful in designating in the mark that they'd like to see a cooperative agreement, and actually a year ago we all agreed to the template that's in the Fish and Wildlife Service Handbook, that we would all, if we couldn't come up with something better, we definitely would sign that.  There's not been any publicity about that, but we've all understood that for this period of time.
 
* Have you heard of something called the National Data Quality Act that's going to take effect next month? Would it be a good idea to have a real peer review of the science, the biology here by something like the National Research Council?

Maeveen:  I think a way to get off the dime with this peer review issue is to get some recommendations about how frequent you would like continuous peer review.  Our technical teams have been finished for awhile and they're reformed with the Science Commission and going forward.  There's been just a constant rollout of documents and information, and what we would like is a recommendation about how frequent would you like peer review and what aspects of the plan would you like reviewed?  There's no hesitancy, we will have constant peer review.  It will be built into the permit, but we could start that now.  So any recommendations you have.  Instead of the drama of the one ultimate peer review that makes or breaks the plan, I think that's really a simplistic approach, and I really think to say, we need to have continuous peer review, we need to have continuous revisiting of the standards, and that's just a part of adaptive management.
 
* Have the problems with the Priority Vulnerable Species Report been corrected and is there a revised version of the document?

Maeveen:  Sure.  I know a lot of what you pointed out, you know, if it's semantic issues with the science team, I really leave that for them to answer.  But they have responded, we have responded, I have responded to you.  Probably I should just get those letters for the whole Steering Committee so that there's no mystery about that.  But we're constantly improving the data, constantly.  We issued different revised drafts, Priority Vulnerable Species has come out a few times.  Ultimately it'll be an attachment to the Habitat Conservation Plan. We could issue the updated version now, at any time, really.
 
* Could the Steering Committee have a copy of the pamphlet you mentioned that names ten services that the Steering Committee has not touched on before?

Maeveen: It is.  And at the next meeting, we'll just give it to you all on CD.  It'll probably be 2 CD's now.
 
* From your perspective, could you go over briefly as you see the pros and cons of shorter permits versus longer permits?  You were talking about anywhere from 15 or 20 to 100 years?

Maeveen: Sure.  This has been a long process, but it's been shorter than any that's gone forward.  If you look at Clark County and they took 10 years to come up with their Section 10 permit proposal.  A 20 year permit doesn't look like you've gained a lot of certainty, 10 years of planning, 20 years.  All of the processes have been long, San Diego was long.  This is very accelerated, what we've been on.  So I think that's the main setback of a short permit is that people might feel like they're not getting any relief from it, if that's what they want.  What I like about a short permit is, you can be accurate.  You can be more accurate.  I think it's very unrealistic to promise to the community that the deal you cut today about endangered species assurance and whether or not that will do any good for the natural resource base, going forward.  I think that's, I would bet that each of the jurisdictions that have made that promise, that they'll be deemed to have failed to keep it in the future.  Because when you go through the first time and you have this kind of analysis, it hasn't been done in other places.  There's never been a comprehensive analysis of the resource base in Pima County.  And we have the most passionate people and one of the longest histories of collecting that kind of information, as you can imagine.  So I think that there is room for improvement is terrific, I think that's a terrific aspect of a short term permit.  I think the solution to going forward is to put these milestones in place, and to have the milestones, you can't pass the milestones.  You don't necessarily have to reopen the whole permit in 20 years, but if you haven't achieved certain milestones, then you do have to reopen it.  I think that might be Solomon's compromise to this.  And have those milestones do what Jonathan's asking for, which is, improve the state of the science to everyone's liking and just constantly come to another plateau.
 
* I think that it would be almost inherent in that scope that we are talking about a regional approach rather than a mitigation approach or a hybrid approach, but it might be useful for us to schedule at our next meeting a formal discussion of that issue and a formal decision that we are, which of these 3 approaches we wish to take. It may be useful at our next meeting to schedule a discussion of time frame.  I certainly think that we need to decide that so that we can decide what kinds of economic data we need in order to go forward on policy judgments, as to what horizon we are talking about.  As to the 10 areas, such as transportation, water, sewer, I also think that probably not at the next meeting, but at a meeting to take place fairly soon, we ought to be identifying whatever views we have and whatever recommendations we might be willing to give on those that have broader implications than limited to economic issues. 

Maeveen:  I want to support what you're saying and suggest that there's an interesting fiscal issue that you might task the consultant with that I've never seen in a Section 10 permit before, which is to look at the mitigation, the hybrid and the regional approach, and ask the question about, if you commit to one of these approaches, let's say you commit to the regional approach, will it be less expensive to go ahead and acquire the land sooner than later, as you go through.  If you've made that commitment, then when do you want to, if you're going to take an acquisition approach, when do you want to achieve it.  Because I know from the people who've been through the open space bond, sooner is much less expensive than later.  So there's another task aspect to the economic consultant, and there's just a lot of interesting questions that might really give you the details that you want to make a decision that will be, I guess, judged wise decades from now.  But there's that kind of analysis.  It's really neat, I mean, there's a shallow analysis that you can go through to get through the EIS.  That's not interesting, as interesting as the kinds of questions we can ask now, and I think you're getting at one.  I'd love to see that.
 
* On mitigation and recovery of species.  Acquisition of land is going to be one of the first things that the SDCP is going to have to do.  Also, as far as the milestones that Maeveen mentioned, maybe they should be more like checkpoints.  I know when you write Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions on land, a lot of times there's provisions, like after 20 years or 30 years, if nothing has changed, then they keep going, and maybe some provision like that could be included in the SDCP. 

Maeveen: I'll tell you, one way to think about it is the model of the groundwater code, where they established a general goal that was unachievable at the moment the legislation was passed, and then they worked towards it over a period of decades.  And each of the management plans, for second, third management plan, is a test of whether or not the administration of that program is leading to the achievement of the goal.  You see that the deal breakers early on, water to ag, and the different things that would have made it impossible to accept the legislation, history leaves those issues behind, and each of the management plans, you know, those could be milestones and ours, become almost an easier task.
 
* The Steering Committee decided the scope of the permit would cover private property owners as well and that's a very important point.  Another point in reference to concerns about seeing updates to the scientific information in a timely fashion, anyone can go to any library, and if you get on the Map Guide, you will see the most current species maps.    We received a Map Guide instruction pamphlet from the county, and anyone who wants to look at that can go to the library, get on Map Guide, see what the most current data is for the species, which is constantly being revised as more data is gathered with surveys, etc., on an ongoing basis.
* Mr. Huckleberry a couple meetings ago said that the economic analysis would be for the completion of the Section 10 habitat conservation plan and not for the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan.  Since this body is put together to recommend a proposal to the Board of Supervisors for the adoption of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, aren't we short-shifting the economic analysis?  There's quite a difference between funding or the cost of Section 10 and the cost of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan.

Maeveen: I think the answer to the question is what I suggested to Ernie, that in your own proposals to the consultant about what you'd like to see reviewed, if you come up with a recommendation that you want to see a regional approach now, and you're up against that Section 10 requirement that that regional approach is fully funded or there's guarantees towards when that permit is issued, and believe me, that rule becomes more stringent over time as jurisdictions fail to meet their obligation underit.  Then the reasonable question that you would ask, see, you framed, the Steering Committee has already said, here's the approach we want to take, that's different than what's suggested in the cost model.  But you could task the consultant with asking that and answering it.  To me, the interesting add-on is, sooner or later?  Do you buy the land sooner or later?  I think there will be a real education process for the whole community in understanding what these tradeoffs are and can you go forward right away, is the hybrid approach achieved, a little bit of what everyone wants?  But yeah, all of those cost issues can be covered.
 
Questions from members of the public:
* Peter Tescione: Maeveen, I guess what I want to do is get some clarification.  Now that you've stated or various jurisdictions or entities have supported or bought into the plan, Metro Water, for instance, Oro Valley, Tohono O'odham, etc.  In stating that, how does that change things?  How does that change things for the plan or how does that change things in the effect that the way those entities do business, and what is the practical effect of those so-called statements of support?

Maeveen: If you look at a place like San Diego where there's a perception that there was broad cooperation among the jurisdictions, that didn't mean that they all came under one permit or that they all finished their plans at the same moment, it didn't mean anything like that.  There was the perception of cooperation, but in fact, jurisdictions had very different looking plans, and those were always particular to what approach they wanted to take.  There was one jurisdiction that wanted to take more regulatory approach, and they finished very early, they finished even before the regional picture was painted by the technical community.  And then there's other jurisdictions that may never cross the finish line, and some would take a more acquisition based approach.  So there's a little bit of fiction about what it means to have broad cooperation in other jurisdictions. The real technical point to get to is, how do you structure your permit?  Do you have a broad permit with sort of one, like in Clark County, where all the acquisition dollars are put into one pot and distributed through an implementation team, so the jurisdictions, the cities actually give their money that they committed as part of the Section 10 permit to the county, county runs the implementation group, the implementation group makes the acquisition decisions.  I believe that's how that works, that's how it says it works.  That's something they achieved inter-governmentally that probably won't happen here.  But what I see is, the technical issue is, do you take a broad permit, a broad approach, and do the other jurisdictions sort of tier off it?  You might have the City of Tucson taking a safe harbor approach, if anything, I'm just speculating there, it might be in their interests to do that with their water lands.  You might have Marana taking more of a mitigation approach because they have a few, well one endangered species issue and it's highly quantified.  So each of these plans could look different.  They'll all be administered through the front, if jurisdictions even have them, they'll be administered through their own planning and zoning commission, so none of that changes.  The biggest benefit to cooperative approach, I believe, is that you're gathering information at the same time so that if one of the jurisdictions finds that it can't solve its problems within its boundary, then it can negotiate with another jurisdiction, potentially, because you're thinking at the same time about this topic, and it's a relief valve.  So the cooperation creates relief valves that might not exist.  Just like if you're a small landowner, you have some endangered thing in your backyard, you can't solve the problem in your backyard, you don't have enough land.  That's true of the smaller jurisdictions, too.  So that's what I see as the biggest benefit.  There's some technical issues that I would love for the Steering Committee to know about and give opinions about, they're expressed in terms of, do you tier off, how do you structure that permit.  But those are all open questions. I do think that to make it concrete in this community, Sahuarita and the City of Tucson have pineapple cactus issues, when you look at those annexations, just one fact, when we started this process, PAG(?) was projecting that the county would see 157,000 new people in unincorporated Pima County during the life of this permit, 20 years.  And annexations came about, Marana, City of Tucson, Sahuarita, and now the projection, their unofficial projection but we used it in the cost model, was on the order of 40,000 and I'm rounding up.  We actually went up to 100,000 for purposes of the cost model because that's such a drastic change in the projection.  But what it means is the annexations will accommodate PAG beliefs, much of the development.  Well, what also happened in those annexations is, they annexed a lot of the ESA issues.  I don't really think that's been widely understood.  So at the beginning, Pima County had a lot of anticipated population, a lot of ESA issues, and over the past 4 years, both the population projections and the ESA issues have been picked up by Marana and Sahuarita city.  What that means, then, is that Pima County holds much of the solution and little of the problem.  And so it's time for the jurisdictions to really see the advantage of solving their problem perhaps outside the jurisdictional boundaries.  That makes sense for urban development and developers and everything.  That's the biggest benefit in concrete terms right here.
 
* Will Hoffman: With respect to the best available science and your assumptions, the best available science is certainly by definition a National Research Council decision on that.  I don't think any of us want to end up looking like the people from Klamath Falls or the swamp in Florida.  The other matter is, how do you distinguish between milestones and adaptive management?  I don't think anything has been said along that subject, and certainly you can't make any operational definition without defining that.

Maeveen:  This is not a process that has feared critical oversight.  Most HCP's have a consultant that goes in the back room, they come out with a draft MSCP, the draft DIS is the first document you see.  We've sent over 200 documents out into the world to be reviewed, chewed on, commented, and so we don't fear review.  What we would really like is a unified recommendation from the public about what types of review, at what frequency would they like to see us go forward.  So we honor that point.  Okay.  There's no fear of review and we have our own science team, different teams have invited review, and if other people would like to see some rational way of going forward and reviewing that's productive and moves us forward, that's what we're looking for.  Your second point, I guess I just want to re-emphasize that, to sort of shake a stick and say that this review is insufficient, we want another review, that's fine, that's completely consistent with the way we've gone forward. Sure, the milestones could be keyed to adaptive management, that would make sense.  That's really a Steering Committee recommendation
 
Stakeholder Presentations by Steering Committee Members:
Business Community Landowner Private Property Rights Recommendations:  Presented by Steering Committee members, Mike Zimet and Chris Sheafe.
Michael Zimet: Good morning.  I was going to start off with a little introduction about myself, but I think I will not.  The bottom line is, I have been interested in this process since the very beginning, basically because it hit me in my back yard.  The whole understanding of property rights, the whole understanding of the Endangered Species Act, and trying to come about with a way to deal with this on a community basis.  What we have to present today is a work in process that was prepared by several members of the Steering Committee.  The members not only represent their own self interests, but for the most part potentially represent the interests of the entire business and pro-growth community in Tucson.  It is meant to be a statement of what items we believe we have consensus on, core issues that must be incorporated into any alternative, and important considerations that we believe need more precise definition.  The bottom line is, though, when all is said and done, it is intended to open a real dialogue on the very important issues raised by the Endangered Species Act and our community response to it.  I want to just cover the first 5 slides, then I'm going to turn it over to Chris Sheafe who's been kind enough to take it through the rest of the process and stand your questions and answers, which stands for your questions.  I think he's much more qualified than I am to answer most of them.  So we'll just go down this presentation and I'll read, as you may, along with me. SDCP acknowledges, onto these key concepts, SDCP acknowledges existing rights of landowners of currently zoned or platted lands, or lands covered by a development or specific plan during this transition period until the land is developed.  We want the plan to allow development to proceed under current entitlements, grandfathers existing zoning, plats and recorded development plans and specific plans.  It also should provide necessary mitigation acreage and provide a plan to compensate landowners for lost or reduced value.  Next.
            A complete economic analysis of the regional impact of the SDCP and of the HCP as required by the ESA.  So whether we do the full SDCP or just the HCP, in any event, we're suggesting a complete economic analysis be in hand.  Participation in regional HCP is voluntary.  Landowners may opt to negotiate directly with U.S. Fish and Wildlife.  For instant, I'm not clear, as a landowner right now, what I would not do if we have a Section 10 permit in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act in developing my land.  Small and low impact projects are expedited.  Primary funding will be determined by a community vote of approval for a conservation sales tax or a bond issue.  Next.
            Some other key concepts.  Minimizes inflation on land prices by keeping balance between amount and type of land in market circulation for development.  Guarantees sufficient acreage and mitigation banks to allow both development and conservation.  The plan proceeds based upon habitat conservation, specifically for species that are listed as threatened or endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife.  Includes incentives for voluntary conservation initiatives, that's real important.  Peer review by a specific organization with qualifications comparable to the National Academy of Science.  How many have I covered?  One, two. I'm on the fifth.  Areas of consensus that we believe that we have among us here.  Rights of individuals with current zoned platted land or land covered by a development plan or specific plan.  Protection of species and habitat.  Future land use and development patterns will be different than past.  We are in a transition period until existing zone land that is currently in the pipeline is developed.  To date, the focus has been on biology and science.  Current focus needs to be on the balance between biology, science, and the economic impact, mitigation costs, and affordability, and social considerations.  And again, we're saying an economic impact analysis for it must be completed.  And all development will comply with Endangered Species Act where applicable.  Chris, if you would be so kind to take over?
 
Chris Sheafe: I will run through the rest of the presentation.  Let me just cover a couple of points.  If you cut through all of this, it comes down to a fairly simple basic fact, and that is that those people who worked on this plan were simply trying to come up with a viable way to preserve the concept of having a continuing supply of land to meet the natural growth of the community.  And not overly burden the new residents of the community with an unfair proportion of the overall cost structure.  That's essentially what all of these elements try and lead to.  Mike, in his introduction, mentioned the pro-growth group.  That has almost a bit of a negative connotation, and I hope it's not received that way.  The pro-growth group is just simply those people who are tasked in their own professions with the burden of assuming or taking care of the natural growth that occurs.  That's something that has not changed for a lot of years, and it won't change in the future.  The idea is to try and meet all of the new demands that are being placed on the environment in the best possible way with the growth that's going to occur, whether we like it or not, it's just a function of the fact that there's more people coming. We've made some qualitative considerations, and that's the next slide here.  These are the things that we feel need to be agreed upon and understood before you can formulate a solid plan.  And one of them is the amount of habitat acreage that really needs to be preserved, and that goes to the question of the number of species.  The mitigation ratios, the site disturbance ratios, land valuation methods, which is probably the most controversial issue that we'll end up dealing with.  Because if you recognize that people who already own an asset are going to be impacted by this process, then there comes a time when you discuss how you compensate them for the loss that they are going to take in what would be the ability to use that land, absent any further regulation.  I'll speak to that in just a second.
Then we get to the whole public concept that Maeveen, I thought, covered so well, which was the land acquisition funding methods and the concept of doing it piecemeal or maybe taking a more comprehensive approach.  And of course, the number of species to cover will guide a good portion of this discussion.  The compensation side is, again, going to be most important, I think, to those people who actually have an asset, and mostly the landowners, and I think the ranching community in large measure, and also will become important to the general population depending on the burden that's placed on them.  We already have a rather difficult tax structure in this county, particularly in terms of property taxes.  And it's just reasonable to assume that if a greater burden is put on the property tax element, there probably is going to be a backlash at some point.  So it's incumbent upon this process to handle this area very responsibly.  The only thing I would say is that I think it probably ought to be a guiding principle for the recommendation of this committee that whatever burden we recommend be spread equally and fairly among all of the citizen base and not try to plant the burden on one group or one unsuspecting element of the citizenry, hoping that they'll absorb that without noticing, because probably that won't happen.  So you can kind of read through the rest of that.
The next one is, and that's at the bottom of this slide, excuse me, you should be on the next one.  Develop a non-litigious method for equitable appraisal which finally resolves all issues of value.  I think it's going to be very important as we go through to try and make this plan really work, that we not allow landowners assume valuations that are just in the ridiculous and then put us into a long ending string of litigation, but on the other hand not assume that they also don't have value that is really there, which could also resolve in the same, and it's not very productive for the process.
So part of that is recognizing, next slide, the existing zoning, and I don't have to go through the details of that, I think it stands pretty much on its own.  It's just, if you have the right that's been established for a property, that right is something that it would not be productive to not respect those rights.  And if the plan in effect sets aside somebody's rights, then you can expect probably real problems with the plan, because those people will, depending on the number of them, will react rather sharply.  The area of specific plans is very important because a specific plan quite often is dependent on the whole or some smaller part of it.  So if you're half way through a specific plan and you suddenly have the end of the specific plan being put in question, that puts the economic viability of the entire project and all the investment that's been made to date at question, and it really is a very severe penalty and probably the most unfair, and would not be defensible if it were put to a test.
The other one which comes up periodically and really has to be a basis of a successful plan, and that's the economic analysis.  I know that we've used examples from around the country of various circumstances that have happened, good and bad plans that have occurred.  But I think there's one thing that is almost irrefutable and that is that any time public action creates a very sharp economic burden, there is a very significant reaction, and I guess the most careful way to put it is, the only way to preserve the environmental goals is to preserve the economic goals that underlie them.  Anytime a community has its economy go into the tank, it will react in a defensive manner, and quite often, if there's an easy solution at setting aside environmental objectives, they'll get set aside.  Now, I say this with some experience, because I was in Seattle, that's where I grew up, in the late 1960's and saw what happened in the Seattle area at the time that Boeing Company had a major setback, loss of 100,000 jobs in less than a year, and there were all kind of environmental goals that were set aside in the name of trying to create job growth.  So I personally believe that, and I think it's very incumbent, and I think this committee felt, that it's very incumbent that the economics be held responsibly, then the studies be done and be done in a realistic manner, so that at the end of the day, the plan works for the economy, which will then help it work for its ultimate goals.  So then, economic impact analysis should include acquisition costs, impact on property tax base, impact on developable land and affordability of housing.  That leads to a very significant element, which is the attractiveness to quality employers.  One of the things that is happening in San Diego, and it's not real evident, but the beginnings of it are, is that many employers over there are beginning to question if they want to remain in the area.  And who knows where that will lead 10 years from now, but it could have some rather significant unintended consequences.  It's incumbent upon us, because we're dealing with a smaller piece of the pie, and I think a far greater opportunity to do this right, to get it right economically, so that we don't pay that penalty long term and in effect damage the fundamental underpinnings of how this plan could work.  Also it should meet the ESA and EEPA requirements for a regional habitat conservation plan to obtain a Section 10 permit.  I think, put bluntly, it also has to support the environmental goals.
Mitigation banks, recognizing the likelihood of values appreciating over time, it would be most cost effective for the county to expedite acquisition of sufficient mitigation bank lands in each geographic service area to allow development to continue while meeting conservation goals.  And you know, what that really is saying is that, at least this committee felt, that it would make a lot better sense to take the comprehensive plan, what Maeveen was just talking about, think about it comprehensively, and lay out a plan to go out and acquire what we need early, and get those lands set aside, and understand what that means in terms of other lands being developable and really needing to be developed to support it all.  The land supply and demand, affordability, we can go through each of those, a reduction in land available for housing will increase housing costs and negatively impact economic development and industrial growth.  It also, you know, a lot of times when I'm involved in these discussions of housing costs and the environmental issues, the issue very quickly goes to this, well, it will raise housing costs.  Well, that's not so much a concern when it also talks about the destruction of habitat that's of great value to the community.  It is, though, important to remember that it affects individual families in a very punitive way.  There is a significant cost to a community that allows its housing stock to become rental in nature because people simply can't afford to purchase as new consumers coming into the area.  And I'll use San Diego as an example.  San Diego's housing stock right now, for a starter home in that area, is approaching $300,000, and for the most basic move-up home is approaching over half a million.  There are more and more people in that environment that simply can't afford to own.  What's happening in areas like Portland and certain areas in Connecticut and what not, the ownership ratio is dropping.  I think long term, there's a huge price in society to pay for the fact that people are no longer owners.  So this is a big issue, and it's something to pay a lot of attention to.  Look at the third one down on your page, there should be a zero net effect on land available for development that will support densities and allow for growth.  And I don't know if that's the best way to put it, but the message is that we should understand that we need to keep land available for the growth that will occur in a way that will allow it to remain in an affordable range.  That just simply means you have to have enough supply, and that's where I began, supply is the key.  Future planning decisions should support development and provide incentives in recognized growth areas.  In other words, if you're going to take a big piece out and say, this is no longer available, you ought to simultaneously take another piece in and say, this will be protected and we won't allow short term issues to prevent proper densities and proper use of that land, because we know that that leads to the preservation of something that we see as a community is far more valuable to us.
Well, who pays?  Next slide.  There are numerous stakeholders and partners in regional conservation.  The primary funding source for buying and conserving habitat should be based upon a community vote approving conservation sales tax or bond issue.  The idea being, we should just spread this equally and have all beneficiaries participate.  Balanced regional conservation should be supplemented by participation from public jurisdictions, and that's the whole concept of bringing in the public.
The next one is government, public share.  Well, there's a whole list of elements there and I don't think you need me to read them to you.  I thought Gayle Hartman's presentation was very helpful in talking about open space bonding and that planning, and then there's a recent report that was put together by Carolyn Campbell's group and the Sonoran Desert Institute and what-not, on the economics of ideas.  I think if we can look at this as a committee and try and find a way to accomplish the funding of this without overly unfairly burdening one sector or another, we will have much greater success.  Citizens and individuals must share, and there is at the bottom, voter approved issues, property tax, permit and user fees, and those are in there because I want you to recognize that those people who are developed in the growth industry understand that they do bring burdens and they also need to participate in helping to offset those costs.  And the landowners need to share, ensure that development meets regional conservation goals, existing zonings are grand fathered and comply with ESA when applicable.  And then we go down through the idea of purchasing the mitigation acreage, creating onsite individual mitigation wherever possible, the idea of trade or exchange, and it's not listed in here specifically, but the idea of acquisition of development rights, for example on the ranching lands, properly protecting the economics of the ranching holdings but at the same time, protecting the overall desire to not have every piece of property developed and maintain lifestyles that are traditional to the southwest.  Conservation credits as currency.  And this gets really into the idea of taking your land and trading off certain elements for it, or having a conservation credit as a currency that you can trade off using a common denominator and a common value base, and as I understand it, it's really the only way it could work effectively, is you have to understand what the values are, and you can take those credits and acquire them, and then that would bring property into development that may not otherwise have that privilege.
Going on, buy, sell, trade, earn.  I think those are fairly self-explanatory.  Conservation credits for mitigation acreage may be purchased from public or private conservators at a time of development, a fee in lieu of purchase, a mitigation acreage via a conservation credit would be paid which would in fact allow a public body to go buy the same.  They can be earned or awarded for voluntary set-asides as an incentive for conservation.  I think, tying into that, is the need to meet other public needs as well.  And then, conserved lands, identify and prioritize sensitive lands, ESA listed endangered or threatened species for conservation acquisition.  It's always easy when you deal with the largest landowners, we've always wondered why we're not looking more to the federal and the Indian lands and the state and public lands.  We have a great deal of that in terms of conservation.  There's only 13% of our state that is held in private, and that leaves 87% that's on the other side.  So an awful lot of these goals might be made or handled on lands that are already in some form of public reserve.  Identify private lands currently zoned, platted or covered by the development plans or specific plans in sensitive areas, compensate for lost or reduced value.  That keeps coming up and it seems to be a point of great concern, particularly for those people who already have those lands.  Consider the impact of ESA compliance on regional lands designated for conservation.  Again, this goes to supply and I think brings into the question of state lands.
Now that's really the report, but I'll finish exactly where we began.  The real question on the table is continuation of supply.  That's from the growth side.  The real question on the table is maintenance of lifestyle, traditional lifestyle, and protection of our lands and the landscape, and that's on the environmental side.  The growth side can't pursue its goal without protecting and dealing with the side of conservation.  The conservation side will have it very difficult pursuing its goal without protecting the supply side, and in particular making sure that it doesn't overly damage the economy.
 
Discussion:
* Where is the growth lobby or the development community or the regulated community when it comes to lobbying the state legislature for the tools and incentives which we all agree we need for private landowners in particular; i.e., where are the transfer of development rights which jurisdictions have, municipalities have, but the county does not? 
* Where is your industry in lobbying the state so we can achieve transfer of development rights for areas that have comprehensive specific plans, etc., that already fall in some sensitive areas that have ESA issues today? 
* You talk about grand fathering, but we have problems with issues that we have already created.  We need tax credits, we need safe harbor agreements, we need incentives on a tax basis for people to cooperate in a way that's economically efficient.
* When you talk about conservation credits those need to be like for like.  Pima pineapple cactus is a whole different issue than a pygmy owl.  So when you do that, it needs to be like for like, not apples and oranges.  You also need to look at some of the other problems that you can create with this sort of thing. Those are a couple of areas where  there would be broad support for moving together to get a better toolbox.

Chris: It hasn't happened yet, but I really don't think, it doesn't become a point of controversy, frankly, if the fundamental issues are there, that there is a way to maintain supply.  I know of nobody, frankly on either side, that's anxious to wipe out all the ranch land.  I haven't had one person, even the most ardent pro-growth person, come up and tell me that the area south of Vail that's filled with mobile homes on total wildcatting, for example, is a great thing.  So I think it's generally recognized that we could be doing a better job.  And probably have far more consensus than we have separation, a lot of it is in the semantics.  But the issue of how to adjust state land or how to adjust some of the state law that would allow cooperation, and particularly preservation of development rights and safe harbors and what-not.  I don't know that there's any objection to that, and I'd invite anybody else to comment on it.
Bill Arnold: Last year representative Huffman from new District 26 sponsored and was successful in getting purchaser development rights legislation through, which is now state law.  And we're already in conversations with him with transfer development rights legislation.  I haven't gotten a commitment from him that he'll do that this year, but we're talking about it.  So we are doing things irrespective of what's happening here.   These are already in motion and I'm going to continue that dialogue and I know others are as well.
 
* When you take private land, and it might be in high biological core, and you are saying they need to give you equal value somewhere else, flip-flop the lands.  But usually where development is occurring is in the high core area or what is termed as high core and good biological area.  So how do you propose that you want people to move out where it's not the riparian area or where it's not close.  I mean, how do you propose to do this one for one ratio?

Chris: What you're really asking is, how to set that formula, and the answer is, I was hoping you wouldn't ask that question, because that's kind of the fly in the ointment, is how do you do that?  I think what you have to do is just start off with the concept that you're going to do it in a fair way, you're going to try and do it in a way that is defensible so it eliminates as many lawsuits as possible, and then you set the formula.  Clearly, if you own a piece of property that is on a major intersection and has all the rights of a commercial development, and it turns out it has a pineapple cactus on it, it's going to have a different value than if you own a piece of property that's the bottom of a wash that is flood prone and simply not developable anyway.  But how to reach the consensus where most rational people would say, that's reasonable value, I don't know.  There is a marketplace element, and we had a whole report on that not long ago.
 
* With our allocation on the CAP and the easily high quality pumped groundwater, we're not going to have any more water here than we have today. If you take the population trends in the last 10 years and assume they continue, we'll run out of water about 2030 or 2040, which presumably would stop any so-called natural growth in its tracks.  Is the business and development community moving towards agreeing that water will be the limiting factor and trying to work within the limits of that.  The other thing is that about 30% of the land within the City of Tucson, within city limits, is vacant.  If that's true, then more or less 60, 65 square miles worth of land, isn't that all available for housing now?

Chris: Well, let's go to the water issue first, Jerry, and you have a long history with water, as I do and we've had a lot of fun debating that.  The reality is, water is the natural limiter of our population base.  I don't know how many people understand that or maybe you haven't, but Jerry and I have been involved in the water debate for many years.  There is a study out that shows that basically southern Arizona will hold about 2.2 million people, and if you get much above that, and that's pretty much retiring all the agriculture, and it retires the mines.  That's just how much water is here, because it's a finite supply.  Once the CAP was brought south into this region, it took the number up substantially, but it caps in that range.  As to the city and the amount of viable land, I think the question on the table is, what really is the supply?  I can't tell you.  I've heard county representations that there's enough for another 50,000 people, but then when you ask the question, they're not sure where that land is.  I do know that very often when some piece of land is pointed out to me, well, you could go put homes over there, when I actually overlay all the controlling maps that control these things, you find out that, gee, most of that land is not available for 10 other reasons that are unrelated to the reasons we're here.  So I think when you deal with the supply side, one of the first things that needs to happen is, let's identify the land.  Because, I'll tell you, and this is just from a practical standpoint of spending 30 years, you know, in the housing and development side, one of the things that I've always felt badly about is that we get into this density issue argument on every zoning.  There's always somebody that's fighting to say, well, let's take 50 units out.  I'm always thinking to myself, here's a perfectly developable piece of property.  If we take 50 units out of that property, we're basically saying, let's take those 50 units and put them out in Tortolita or some other area.  Because those people are not going to fail to be here.  It's just that if they can't go here, they're going to go somewhere else.  So part of the scenario, to me, is to find the properties that are developable and defend the fact that they ought to go to certain densities so that we get the people where the services are and we put them in there and not allow a few neighbors around there to overshadow the interests of the entire community.  Because that's generally what happens.  The worst kind of sprawl is the kind of sprawl we've had where we have one per 3 acres or one per 4 acres.  A lot of times those homes are not well maintained, a lot of times there's a lot of debris and stuff around them, and it just goes willy-nilly across the landscape, and it's crazy.  We're a very low density metropolitan area.  It would be much better to have whole areas that are wide open and left that way forever, and I don't think the development community ever argues against that.
Michael:  I'd just like to add something to Chris's point.  It's interesting that this happened just two days ago and I bring it to the attention of the Steering Committee in this context.  PAG(?) came out with a map, and maybe you've seen it, that shows the growth areas in Pima County.  One of the areas that we have property in is south of Sahuarita Road and Houghton area.  There's literally thousands of homes planned for that area as we speak, and it doesn't show as a place where growth is expected on the PAG map.  My only point is, I think we've got to get our act together, regionally and county-wise and among us all, so that we understand what areas we're trying to develop and what areas we aren't.
Maeveen: Just a suggestion to this, it's a great dialogue.  We have a study that might help advance, an analysis ongoing that might help advance this.  What we did is took, you know, vacant land classified by the assessor really means vacant, it has no improvements on it.  So we mapped out that across jurisdictional boundaries inside and outside the conservation land system, for state land and private holdings.  Then what we did was, took big parcels of land that have full cash value of less than a certain amount, which might also be developable, less than 10,000, less than 15, less than 25, to see where the break points were, to see what the total acreage was, what the ownership was, where it was.  It would really be nice well, the other analysis we did was what's the current zoning, then you can do a calculation about what kind of population that could accommodate.  It would really be nice if when we issue that study in draft, which could be in the next 2 weeks, if there was participation from the expert community, the development community, to say, that looks available, but it really isn't for these other reasons, and to bring that practical side to it.  That is an exact parallel to what we did on the biological side.  You know, we had that purple map and then went in with greater expertise and created some delineations within it.  It would be wonderful to have a parallel process, we certainly are ready to go forward with that, if there was any team or subgroup that could help us with it.
 
* Could you be more specific as to who is your group from the Steering Committee that has signed on to this proposal?

Michael: Just before I do that, though, I do want to say that it is my intention, if the authors of this piece would agree, that we do get others in the community to sign onto this kind of thing so that we can identify those in the community that want to take this approach and blend it with the final product.  So we haven't done that yet, but I would like to get, personally, the chamber, for the sake of discussion, to say, yeah, we can support these things.  SAHBA should say it.  The fact that Alan Lurie sat in on some meetings and was one of the people that helped produce this document doesn't mean that SAHBA for the moment endorses this.  That would have to go back to their committees, and we would hope to do that as this process proceeds.  So, those that did help bring this about were Ken Abrahams, Bill Arnold, Peter Aronoff, Larry Berlin, but Larry Berlin in his role as negotiator, if you will, between these sides.  Mary Darling, Jonathan DuHamel, David Goldstein, Alan Lurie, Chris Monson, Patty Richardson, Chris Sheafe and myself.
 
* Does that mean there aren't any actual groups, like, I think, Diamond Ventures, Tucson Association of Realtors, those kind of organizations that are represented here are not on yet as actual organizations?

Chris: Let me give you the humorous answer, Carolyn.  The business community has the same problem as the environmental community getting people to come to meetings and do the work.
So while we got the people to come to meetings, and I was probably the worst participant of the group, there was not time to take it back to the board at the chamber or the board at SAHBA and say, these are all the principles and can we get everybody's concurrent, or the board of the Tucson Realtors.  But I think it's fair to say that when the environmental community has various people work on something, the general consensus that comes out of that effort is probably fairly representative of what's going to be agreed to if you had everybody there.  And the same is true with the business community and any other community.  As long as, I think, you know, there might be minor disagreements, but the general consensus is probably fairly correct
 
* You were talking about a community vote on a sales tax or a bond, so is your group saying, is that a recommendation that you are in favor of either a sales tax or a bond to fund some of this?

Chris: Oh, I think that the whole concept of open space planning is going to involve public bonding.  All that we're saying is, it needs to be shared appropriately by a broad base element of the community that benefits by it.  What we're trying to avoid in our recommendation is any thought that we can get somebody else to pay for it, but we'll get all the benefits, because the minute we go down that road, I think we doom it.
 
* Is your specific recommendation that we adopt the 8 species map that we got a presentation on?

Chris: We did not include that on purpose, because we were not sure just exactly where this was going to go, and we didn't want to make that a controversial point.  But the underlying issue is that the purpose of all this is to get a Section 10 and that has to be a fundamental issue that's satisfied.
 
* Did you say major employers are considering leaving San Diego due to the MSHCP?  Did I understand that correctly?

Chris: No, I didn't mean to put it that way.  But the burdens on the employment base over there are significant, that's one of them, because housing values are getting so high, that a major consideration for any employer is whether or not they can attract employees and properly house them.  That's fundamental.  If you look at the list every major employer looks at, the issue in Tucson is whether we have quality jobs or we have service jobs.  If we want to develop a strong economic base of this community which will give us the very best opportunity to preserve our environment, we need to build quality technology-based employment growth side by side with our service employment growth.  Recent times, we've tended to get more service growth and not so much quality growth.  We used to have in our hard growth base, mining and manufacturing type jobs, and those are gradually being reduced, and they will continue to do so.  The only way that this economy holds itself strong is either through growth, through the University or through technological growth.  It's dependent on having viable housing stock.  San Diego is a very desirable place.  It has enjoyed a growth base, it's a long history.  One of the costs of that is, they've started to reach their saturation limit and their housing stock is just going through the roof.  I don't know, frankly, that they can do a lot about it because they've about covered every piece of land over there that's possible to be covered.  But the reality is that employers are beginning to look and they are now seeing the leading edges of high tech employers steering away from San Diego and steering away from some parts of the L.A. basin and ending up in Las Vegas and frankly, Tucson. Now I'm talking personally and not for the committee.  Jerry brought up a very interesting point, and that's the issue of water.  To me, I think if you took anybody in the room, anybody, because we're all people that are kind of activists, you know, there isn't anybody here that's a couch potato that doesn't think about social welfare.  Any of us sat down and said, you know what?  We're going to end up with 2 million or 2.2 million people in this greater area.  How do we best accommodate them?  I bet you there would almost be unanimity on how best to do it.  We have an opportunity in this plan to think through and get that done.  And all that the business community is saying is in the process of figuring out the restrictions, also figure out the protections for supply.  That simple.
 
* Part of the equation on affordable housing is wages, and one of the factors here in Tucson is we have a pretty low wage kind of town, that kind of feeds into that.  So maybe we could get a little more information on that for future discussion.  Because isn't it true that over in Silicon Valley, for example, all those dot com folks drove the prices, they could pay, so prices just went up and up and up.  The other point I wanted to make is that, when we mention the 87% of public land out there, it might give the impression that that land is protected, and it isn't, most of it.  It's subject also to being developed through various mechanisms.  Finally, on whether or not people want to come here, I think that until, and this is my own personal moment of plug here, until this state can do something about its public school system, we're going to have a very hard time attracting quality employers to this state.  They're not going to want to come because their employees don't want to put their children in this kind of school system.  The last thing is, I've noticed a lot about the stock of things for housing.  Up in Sun City, only half the residents live there full time. 

Chris:  Those are all good points.  You know, on the school finance issue, you're going to the issue of paying per student per se, and that probably needs to be reviewed.
 
* A couple of tangible things that the business development community might do to help us move forward.  Chris McVie raised the excellent point of transfer development rights.  We haven't been able to get that through the State Legislature, we need to do that.  If we're all really trying to come to a solution here, this ought to be something where we could go hand in hand, go to Phoenix and try to get that to happen.  Another issue, though, is the role of the City in this process.  As Jerry Juliani correctly pointed out, there's 30% of the land in the City is empty, the City has annexed a large piece to the south which according to their calculations could hold two or three hundred thousand people.  There's a lot of supply there in the current city and perhaps the new city, and we are not dealing with that largely because the city has never been willing to come to the table.  Is that a role that your groups could play to help facilitate their involvement in this process?

Chris: Well, I thought Maeveen put it very clearly when she talked about the economics and the way that the dollars flow.  My understanding of it, and maybe most people in the room don't know it, but I'm sharing Rio Nuevo for the city and the citizen side of it, so I get in a lot of discussions with city administration and they're just worried about taking their money and putting it in county hands.  I don't know that that's a burden on the county, frankly, it's just one government's a little suspicious about giving their money to another government or control to another government at any time.  So that issue is always going to be there and it doesn't reflect poorly on either of the two governments.  The end result, though, and there was a great conference held here just, I think it was on Wednesday evening, with the mayor or the provincial head in Quebec who came down to talk about this whole idea of regional government and I guess did quite a job of selling that concept.  And the real answer is to have some of these things handled regionally.  But let me caution you on one point.  When we were going through the comprehensive plan and the various groups, there was an awful lot of communication which went to the effect of, well, let's have all the growth happen in the other sector.  Finally one of the guys from the county stood up and he said, you know, I'm going to every one of these meetings and it's interesting to me that everybody supports the idea of growth, they all just want it in the other sector.  It won't work to say that we're going to put all the growth here or all the growth here.  What we need to do is make sure that comprehensively in the city we've identified those properties that are suitable for growth, we've identified those areas that need to be preserved, and we protect them both.  Protect the growth and make sure people don't diminish that value, and also protect the things that we're trying to preserve.  And I know it's easier said than done, but we have a way to do it.  Let me give you a classic example, and I don't want to go overboard here, David, but just from my own personal experience, I'm involved in an area north of Seattle, because I have an interest, I'm president of a group that owns two farms.  One of my fun things in life, because I don't really make any money doing this, is going up and working on this, it's called the Skagit Valley.  We've formed a group called the Skagitonians.  Skagitonians is working very diligently in the State of Washington to develop transfer rights so that development rights can be sold and we can preserve some of the most fertile farm land in the world.  This is where the tulips are grown, you've probably heard of the tulip festivals that occur up there, get over a million people a year in the second week of April who come through to see the tulips when they're fully in bloom.  Well, that's just a small component because tulip fields have to be rotated, most of it is truck farming.  Now the resistance and the acrimony that started off maybe 8, 9 years ago, compared to where the farming community is today and where the other interested parties are is just remarkable.  And this idea of transferring development rights and preserving people's economic rights works and it can work very effectively.  But one of the real problems that they had was, how do they maintain their housing stock for all those people that are needed to do all this work, and that's also been built into the plan and it seems to be working fairly well, albeit with a fair amount of controversy, but gradually it's getting there.  We can do that here.  Christine, I fully expect that the end result of our efforts will be some form of transfer right provision that will protect the ranchlands.
Maeveen: I think your discussion has been really valuable here and it's consistent with some information that we're developing and I just wanted to let you know that we have it so if you want it brought forward to the Steering Committee, we can do that.  One is, when you do an environmental impact statement, you make a projection of build-out.  And traditionally, build-out is not in a region of our size and not with the land that we're dealing with, and the rate limiting factor is land availability.  And so we'll have that, we'll have that projection of build-out, as though you go under current zoning, you can change the zoning and change the calculation.  But another view of build-out is that which is constrained by water availability, and we can bring that forward.  And another view of build-out is that which is constrained by exhaustion of the tax base, and that is of great interest to Pima County.  So you can say, if we continue on the course that we're on, when do you exhaust the tax base, when do you exhaust the water supply, when do you exhaust the land supply?  We can bring all those forward, and you come up with very, it's a great ordering principle for future discussion, because if you find, as I think you will, that there's much more land than there is water, and the question is, where are we going to put a population of the size that the water can accommodate.  I think that a lot of the debate that has created so much tension in the conservation plan will go away and the conversation will go forward more productively.  So sooner than later, I'd like to bring that kind of thing forward.  Then you can see an expression of the interest by the county.  We don't want to see an exhaustion of the tax base, we don't want to see the same type of development that we've seen in the past, because we can't take it, just as you've so beautifully articulated the interest of the development community, which is, you don't want to see an end to the land supply to the extent the water supply can accommodate it.  So we've actually been working on all that and I'd love to see an audience for it.
 
Stakeholder Presentations by Non-Steering Committee Members:
Pete Tescione: Just to apprise you of what the presentation that we're working on is, and that is that, on March 6th, the Steering Committee voted to adopt two alternative proposals, or to adopt for consideration two alternative proposals, A and B, I guess they're called.  And the proposition is, between the two alternatives that are up for consideration, they are mutually exclusive, in that about 100,000 acres, at least 100,000 acres or more, is not covered, does not overlap, is not covered in both of the plans.  That is to say, if plan A was adopted, there would be 100,000 acres outside of plan A that is in plan B that wouldn't be covered, and vice versa.  So the examination that we're making is, and this is just a few of the reports that are relevant to researching a presentation to the Steering Committee, and I just acquired them recently, I haven't even seen them before, except for one of them.  So it's a lot more complex trying to track all of the data that's necessary to compare where the two plans don't overlap, examine those lands and see how, for example, if B was adopted, what lands in A would be left out of a conservation land system, and vice versa.  So hopefully by next month, I'll be able to make a presentation to you delineating the lands that are left out, which right now it appears are there's a substantial amount of riparian lands that are left out if either one of the plans is adopted.  So hopefully next month I'll be able to make a report to you analyzing what would be left out if each of the two plans was adopted and whether they're, I hate to use, I had this word before I came here, but hybrid.  It may entail a hybrid alternative in the end, where you have to take some of the lands out of the other plan and add them to the plan you're adopting in order to be sure that you get the critical or sensitive lands, particularly in the riparian areas, that might be left out if you adopted one of the other plans. The lands that fall through the cracks is basically what I'll be addressing.
 
Issues for future meeting agenda and new business:
* The Steering Committee needs to  develop a mechanism to work out disagreements, the issue of whether we do subcommittees or general meetings. Steering Committee did make an affirmative decision to operate under a general committee mode.  It did, however, agree that it may on occasion create subcommittees on an as needed basis.  As a legislative body, and the Steering Committee created own rules, and can change the rules, suspend them or reaffirm them.
* Need ideas on how to take this from where all the various positions have been identified, to the next step, whether through subcommittees or general meeting sessions. It would be good to formulate a recommendation so that we can bring that to the Steering Committee meeting in November.
* SAHBA has wanted to make a presentation at this meeting on the issue of housing supply, as did the Coalition.
* Elliott Pollack, who is used to be the Valley National Bank's economist, who's done a lot of work on housing supply would be willing to come speak to the Steering Committee, if it would coincide with one of his regular trips.
* The Steering Committee wanted to have an executive session to talk about SIMG as the  facilitator.
* I would like to suggest that we have attorneys present to us their views on this takings issue.  If there is an attorney from, if you will, the environmental side that has a specific bent on takings versus an attorney on, let's just say the pro-growth side, that has a particular bent on takings.
* I'd like to reiterate a need that we agendize the decision on mission with regard to the mitigation approach versus the regional approach versus a hybrid approach.  I'd also like to reiterate that we agendize the question of time frame.
* I just wanted to remind everyone that the conservation community, which consists of the same groups that presented before, I think in March, are coming back with a detailed presentation for the Steering Committee for a preferred alternative.
* The Steering Committee has talked about doing a workshop, a policy maker workshop, on what we've been doing, what the county's been doing, for state legislators, for councilmen and other folks around the community. The Steering Committee discussed doing this after the election, but before the legislators go up to Phoenix for the legislative session, so we thought maybe we would do that on the 7th.

 
Call to the Public:
Will Hoffman: In connection with the, pardon me, presentation from last time on the general public, I've prepared a few disks that cover this and the economic conference.  I'll leave them on the table.
Stephen Wood: Hi, I'm Stephen Wood.  I'm mostly part of the trails community locally, and Mr. Sheafe's point on the Skagit Valley is an excellent one, but I really just don't think you have the demographic down here for people that appreciate habitat preservation.  I don't see it in the volunteer work that I do, and I don't think you guys are going to see it as part of this plan.  Ms. Hecht also brought up a point about networking to educate a group on the Steering Committee on land exchanges, conservation easements, credits, etc.  I'd like to make the suggestion that the committee look into the conference on October 19th hosted by the Sky Island Alliance.  They're going to be presenting a segment on those issues between 1:15 and 2:30 on Saturday, October 19th. At the Radisson.
 
Adjourn: