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Our View: Scottsdale should take time to evaluate preserve options
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After setting up eight auctions of state trust land in the past year with no bidders, the state Land Department is throttling back on them, Tuesday's Tribune reported, which could give Scottsdale a chance to re-examine its priorities for adding to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
The city's prime targets among land it seeks to secure to complete the 36,400-acre preserve include 1,700 acres of relatively flat and quite buildable parcels colloquially known as the "postage stamps." Initially scheduled for auction next year, state land commissioner Mark Winkleman told the Tribune's Ari Cohn that it and several other planned auctions will probably be put on ice.
We've always looked at the "postage stamps" with raised eyebrows. Jutting out of the planned preserve like a box-shaped finger and surrounded on three sides by developed and developable parcels, it won't look like much of a desert preserve.
Cohn told us that city officials said the idea was to create a sort of corridor for wildlife to travel between the planned preserve and land of similar topography in Phoenix. But the trend in far northeast Phoenix, despite some preservation efforts, has been to develop faster (and in some notable cases, higher) than Scottsdale.
Even the proposed state land reform - bypassing the auction process for cities for some state land - that was disqualified for the Nov. 4 ballot would not have applied to most of acreage in the "postage stamps," according to city documents. This means that if such land was scheduled for auction, increasingly cash-strapped Scottsdale would find itself bidding against private developers.
In holding off on auctions, Winkleman would be following the Arizona Constitution's mandate that state land only be sold with the highest possible return to benefit of education. The current recession, fueled in the main by a real estate crisis that has resulted in a precipitous decline in land values, do not provide many prospects for the highest possible return.
This gives Scottsdale a chance to regroup, replenish its coffers with admittedly lessened sales-tax revenue, re-evaluate the need to bid for the "postage stamps" - and wait and hope for better times, like the rest of us.
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