State Trust Land and Open Space – <br>Is There Tension Between Value and Our Values?

I love open space. After years of hard work and saving, it was a happy day when I spent it all to buy an acre-plus of beautiful, private open space, followed years later by a passive-solar adobe home in which our three daughters could make their memories.

We left 80% open, compared to the 25% our city mandates. Arizona has a lot of open space.

To put it in perspective, 87% of our state is government-owned and almost entirely undeveloped. In fact, by most estimates, less than 4% of Arizona’s land area is developed. Recently, political pressure has been brought to bear on State Land Commissioner Mike Anable to favor, in distilled terms, open space over schools.

The focal point of an intense lobbying campaign by The Arizona Republic and environmentalists has been a beautiful 16,600-acre tract in Scottsdale.

There are over 9.2 million acres of state trust lands, and the overwhelming majority is and will remain as open space. In fact, much of it is undevelopable.

Rural open space is abundant—as airline travelers, raptors and economic development advocates in places like Navajo County can attest. In metropolitan Phoenix there are 168,000 trust acres.

State Land Department (SLD) mapping data indicate that much of it will remain open space due to topographical and other development constraints. Thus, in the Phoenix metro area, the competition between environmentalists and school children, in admittedly simple terms, centers on 80,000 developable acres.

The tension arises to the extent developable acres are included in the set-aside as open space, leading to a potentially large loss of revenue to the schools, the primary beneficiaries of the trust.

Should some designated developable lands be permanently set aside as open space “for free” with public approval as is currently being discussed?

While I don’t think it’s wise, if done, the public should at least be informed as to what portion of the developable trust land they are giving away and the market value of the loss to schools.

Rather than give it away at the expense of schools, cities and other conservation-minded groups should compete at auction with other market participants to maximize the value to the schools as originally intended.

If people want prime developable land preserved, they should buy it at market value. Better still, why not give the voters the chance to change the Constitution (and demand federal amendment of the Enabling Act) to privatize all state trust lands over time as some have recently suggested at the federal level through marketable public land share certificates distributed equally to all?

Private property owners are generally better stewards of the land than government, and market-based benefits could accrue to schools, while giving conservation-oriented folks an equal shot at purchase for conservation purposes.

Remember, much of the state’s trust lands will remain open space because they have no value for development.

Even in the case of the 16,600-acre Scottsdale tract, nearly two-thirds are designated as being suitable for open space on the SLD’s conceptual land plans and therefore not developable.

However, the remainder may be worth as much as a billion dollars to the schools, approximately a third of the present value of all the developable trust land value in the metro Phoenix area.