Sabino Springs seeks to grade more land
Tuesday, 12 February 2002
By Tony Davis

More than a decade after winning the right to build the luxury resort Sabino Springs, a Massachusetts developer wants Pima County to let it grade more land and save less open space on 80 undeveloped acres bordering the national forest.

Today, the Board of Supervisors will hear the request after having postponed a vote three times. Eleventh-hour negotiations between Perini Land and Development Co. and the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection failed to reach a compromise on grading limits.

Since winning a grueling rezoning battle in 1990, Perini has had approval to build 44 homes in the Sabino Estates section of the 430-acre, 496-home project. The estates homes would lie in what a county staff report says may be the project's most ecologically sensitive area: palo-verde- and saguaro-covered, undulating foothills adjoining the Coronado National Forest on Tucson's far Northeast Side. Homes would cost $750,000 and up.

Part of the debate, now settled, highlighted two springs blanketed with cottonwood and willow trees, cattails and reeds. They're among seven such desert springs in Pima County, said Julia Fonseca, a county hydrologist. The two sides agreed to shrink the project by three houses near one spring, to buy and remove a city reservoir to restore an area near another and to name a committee representing all interests to negotiate over the other 41 home locations.

One spring's water flows several tenths of a mile. Both are biologically important, Fonseca said. The county could reintroduce some of the native fish and frog species that the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan seeks to protect, she said.

"We're trying to accommodate them as best we can," said Mike Grassinger, a consultant for the developers. "We agreed to do everything we can to protect the springs."

But developers want to grade an average of 14,200 square feet per lot, compared with 9,200 square feet in the 1990 plan. Environmentalists want a 12,000- square-foot limit.

The coalition proposal doesn't give the developer enough total grading, Grassinger said.

Perini says increased grading provides flexibility to move homes from sensitive areas, while allowing bigger, more expensive homes.

Coalition officials said the grading limit is important for the surrounding watershed and the desert, although not the springs. The county rates this area with high or medium potential for 13 of the Sonoran plan's 55 vulnerable species, including six bats.

"We thought it was reasonable to ask for an average of 12,000 per lot including driveways, particularly in such an environmentally sensitive area," said Carolyn Campbell, the coalition's executive director. "That's 2,800 square feet more per lot than they have now."

The developer also wants to:

* Grade up to 58 percent of the entire Sabino Springs development site, up from 56 percent currently and 50 percent in 1990.

* Reduce the 1990 plan's open- space-saving requirement for the Sabino Estates area from 80 percent to 70 percent, not counting roads.

Grassinger said the 1990 plan isn't clear on whether the 80 percent covers all the estates or just home lots.

But more grading will scar mountainsides, say neighbors who have sent the county hundreds of protest letters. They say the developers still should be bound by the same 1990 plan that covered the other homes.

"What the developers are doing now is deplorable,'' said John Fernstrom, a semiretired general contractor living just outside the development. "They wait until everything is done and now they want to change."

But the 9,200-square-foot grading limit on homes and driveways would place houses smack against a road splitting Sabino Estates, Grassinger said, making it hard to scatter them to preserve other areas as wildlife corridors.

* Contact Tony Davis at 807-7790 or [email protected].