Right now, it’s nothing more than 275 square miles of desert on the eastern periphery of metropolitan Phoenix. But one day, Superstition Vistas — named after the mountain range that looms over the scrubby land — could be home to a new city of 1 million people, almost as big as Phoenix itself.

That’s the plan of the Arizona State Land Department, which owns the land. The department, an agency of 122 people, is responsible for 9.3 million acres scattered throughout the state. Not long ago, it was an easily overlooked corner of the bureaucracy that mostly leased land to ranchers and miners. Over the past decade, however, the agency became a real estate juggernaut by selling thousands of acres to developers. For a while, sales poured hundreds of millions of dollars a year into a trust fund dedicated to schools.

Now, with the boom gone bust, the land department is hoping to catch its breath long enough to learn a few lessons. Superstition Vistas is a test case of sorts, to see if an agency that minted money by auctioning land to the highest bidder can take a more deliberate approach when the market rebounds. In Superstition’s early planning stages, the land department is delving into the nitty-gritty of land use planning — something it has never attempted on such a scale. It’s also seeking to reform the rules governing state trust lands, which have not been substantially updated since Arizona became a state in 1912.

In the wake of the housing meltdown, similar conversations are taking place in other states across the West. Some 48 million acres in the West are in state hands. And while the bulk of it lies in remote places where ranching, forestry and mining will dominate for the foreseeable future, thousands of acres lie near growing metro areas where strip mines are giving way to strip malls. In the sun-baked Interior West, the next round of growth — whenever it comes — likely will take place on state lands. Jon Souder, an expert on state trusts lands who works as executive director of the Coos Watershed Association in Oregon, calls this phenomenon “the last land rush.”

In the early 2000’s, state land agencies saw revenue from land sales and development spike. The housing crash caused those numbers to fall off.

Managing this growth will be a challenge for state governments. Most of them had almost no experience in real estate development until about a decade ago. In Arizona, for example, environmentalists want to see more land sealed off from developers, while developers want to cut through the red tape that tends to tie up state land sales. The state and local governments want more flexibility in deciding how to dispose of the land, while school advocates are hesitant to sign off on any change that will reduce their trust fund revenues. All the while, ranchers, some from families that have been working state lands for generations, want to protect their leases.

“There’s a nice pause,” says Dave Richins, Arizona policy director for the nonprofit Sonoran Institute, which studies land use patterns in the West. The market slowdown, Richins says, “allows us to look at 9.3 million acres of state trust lands and plan where we want development and growth to be, plan where we want conservation to be, plan where we want transmission lines and roads to be and lock that in.”

The question is: Will Arizona and other Western states be ready when the market turns back up?

A rite of statehood

When territories achieved statehood, the federal government gave them millions of acres of lands, often in small parcels scattered across the state in a checkerboard pattern. Although the enabling legislation differed from state to state, they were required to create a trust to manage the land, put it to its “highest and best use,” and use the revenues to finance public education.

Some states, such as Nevada and California, sold off most of their land almost immediately. Others leased it out to ranchers and farmers, or struck agreements with timber and mining companies. Today, 23 states, including most states west of the Mississippi River, plus Wisconsin and Mississippi, maintain some land in trust. Texas has the most state land, with 20.3 million acres, much of it leased for oil drilling.

During the housing boom of the past decade, new suitors began to approach state governments. Raw land — once only valued for what could be mined, grazed or harvested from it — became valuable in its own right, as a place to put houses on the fringes of ever-expanding metro areas.

Arizona led the way. Although only a tiny fraction of its state trust land was attractive to developers, the Arizona State Land Department was able to wring eye-popping revenues from sales to developers thanks to the breakneck pace of Phoenix-area growth.

In 2003, then-Governor Janet Napolitano appointed Mark Winkleman to lead the department. Winkleman, who left in 2009, was the first director to come from a real estate background. “We worked pretty hard in my time there to put ourselves in a position to take advantage,” Winkleman says. Revenue from land sales rose from almost $127 million in 2003 to $544 million three years later.

In Utah, the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration struck deals with developers to build on thousands of acres, mostly in Washington County in the Southwestern corner of the state. Development revenue jumped from $15 million in 2003 to $45 million in 2007. In Idaho, revenue from the sale of land increased by more than 600 percent between 2002 and 2007, from $1.1 million to $7 million. “These lands have really been in many ways undervalued,” Souder says. “The trust beneficiaries didn’t pay much attention to them, although that has changed in the last 10 years or so.”

As the pace of development grew faster — and states made more money for their schools — conflicts arose. Environmentalists worried that fragile land was being gobbled up with no regard for conservation. Their opponents weren’t just developers but also school advocates, who were hungry for more revenues. And local governments sometimes sparred with the state over the impact all the new development was having on local services.

Brian Boyle, a former land commissioner in Washington State, where commissioners are elected, says politics goes with the job. “There’s always a political furor that you run into with local legislators about a little parcel of land that some constituency wants to hang on to or when a subdivision doesn’t want the next parcel to be developed or they want the forest not to be cut.”

By law, the agencies have to earn as much money as they possibly can for schools, which makes it very difficult to legally set land aside for conservation.

In Arizona, a ballot measure in 2006 to carve out conservation areas from the state’s land holdings went down after ranchers and home builders opposed it. Another attempt, in 2008, failed for lack of signatures.

Then the housing bust did what the ballot efforts couldn’t: It sucked the momentum out of development. By last year, land-department sales in Arizona dropped to $72 million. What’s more, developers who purchased state lands during the peak of the rush have defaulted on about half a billion dollars’ worth of those sales, according to an analysis by the East Valley Tribune. When that happens, the land reverts to state ownership, although some of the cases are entangled in lawsuits.

One of the more dramatic tales from the bust happened in Utah. In Washington County, the developer of Coral Canyon, an upscale but unfinished 2,600-acre subdivision, put the half-built development on the market last year. Hedge funds circled around the sale but stayed away. Finally, the state decided to buy back the development itself for $3.4 million and sit on it until the market bounces back.

Hopes for reform

While bailouts like the one Utah is making are rare, the housing crash has given land trust officials across the West reason to reevaluate what they’re trying to accomplish. Says Doug Buchi, assistant director for real estate development at the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration: “We need to be a lot more prudent and cautious and not get caught up in the feeding frenzy of when there’s the big land rush going on and everybody wants to jump in and take advantage of rapidly escalating prices only to have what happened happen.”

In Arizona, land department officials made another attempt at land reform last year, but the package got bogged down by colliding interests and sidetracked by the state’s collapsing budget. A central feature of reform would do away with the requirement that the state sell its land by auction. Doing so would give state officials more flexibility to guide what ultimately happens on the land. They could work with local governments, conservationists, builders, ranchers and school officials to find compromises among their various interests, rather than being beholden to selling the land to the highest bidder. In the case of Superstition Vistas, advocates of reform say the land would be worth more with careful planning than if the state auctioned off the 275 square miles piece by piece.

Nevertheless, prospects are dim for trust land reform in the near future. Conservationists, developers, ranchers, school administrators and state officials and others are gathering once again this year to draft an agreement, but making everybody happy will be difficult. Meanwhile, the land department, like all state agencies, has lost staff and seen its budget cut by 25 percent.

“I’m sure the department is doing the best it absolutely can,” says Winkleman. “But there’s no way it has the resources to do an effective job. I think this downturn is largely being wasted.

This story was reported for Stateline by David Harrison.

Scientists call it the biggest environmental disaster no one’s heard of, and they are gathering this week in Colorado to try to change that.

Nitrogen pollution from fertilizers and other sources can be detrimental to both water and air quality, experts say, leading to major health and environmental problems ranging from the onset of Alzheimers to the notorious “dead zones” at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

University of Colorado professor Alan Townsend with CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research says this meeting aims to create the first national nitrogen assessment.

“On one hand, we depend on fertilizer to grow our crops, and one of the key ingredients in that fertilizer is nitrogen. On the other hand, in general the world tends to use too much of it and use it too inefficiently.”

With all the focus on the oil spill in the Gulf, Townsend points out that the scope of the nitrogen problem is even greater — and that’s important to realize.

“There’s really essentially a nitrogen spill everyday. That’s the core of the problem.”

Nitrogen pollution has had documented impacts on Colorado’s alpine lakes, and Townsend adds that nitrogen is a key component in those “ozone alert” days that Coloradans are familiar with.

“Nitrogen that we end up emitting to the atmosphere through driving cars or running factories or putting fertilizers on fields is one of the key ingredients in making that ozone happen.”

The state’s new Clean Air, Clean Jobs Act will go a long way toward cutting the pollution from coal-power plants, Townsend says, but the problem is so far-reaching that a larger, coordinated effort is needed.

The nitrogen assessment meeting will be held 8 a.m.-5 p.m. May 18-20 at Millennium Harvest House, 1345 28th St., Boulder.

Listen to the Colorado News Connection podcast by Deborah Smith.

BOOTSTRAP: WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
Tom Philpott at Grist outlines a variety of options to help reduce nitrogen in the environment through changes in eating habits and farming:

• Rethink what you eat: Americans consume an average of more than a half pound of meat per day each day. The livestock feed needed to generate all that meat — and our dairy and egg habits — consumes more than 40 percent [PDF] of our entire corn crop, by far the world’s largest.
• Push farmers to use best practices: “align their N applications more closely with their crops’ needs, perform more soil testing, try applying a little less and see if yields hold steady.”
• Promote a progressive 2012 Farm Bill: N-conscious citizens should prepare to involve themselves in what promises to be a bitterly contested farm-policy debate. The goal must be to shift federal funds from supporting large-scale corn production through commodity subsidies, to well-structured conservation programs that reward organic-style production.

Genetically modified (GM) wheat is still “poison” for Montana growers’ pocketbooks. A new review of consumer attitudes in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan shows if GM wheat is introduced in the U.S., buyers will reject Montana wheat because of the possibility of contamination. And that would send prices for hard red spring wheat down 40 percent.

Dr. Neal Blue, a grain market consultant and former research economist at Ohio State University, did the survey because a coalition of some U.S. wheat-farming groups has started pushing GM wheat. He calls that a dangerous move, because action is swift against GM — as seen in 2006, when GM rice was found in American shipments to Europe.

“When they saw it, they immediately ceased imports of United States rice. That’s a very clear message, and it took a couple years for the United States rice growers to clean up all of that.”

The new push for GM wheat is backed by the argument that growers and processors need all the advantages they can get to boost production as wheat acreage has declined. However, Blue says the solution to more production is not in GM — it is in Washington D.C.

“One of the driving factors causing the wheat acres to go down in the United States over time is agricultural policy that favors corn and soybeans.”

The review is a follow-up to a study seven years ago that came to the same conclusion. Blue says genetically modified foods may eventually be accepted in foreign markets, but that is at least 10 years away.

Listen to the Big Sky Connection podcast by Deborah Smith.

The documentary FRESH is part consumer call to arms and expose on the food security movement to promote small sustainable agriculture over factory farming.

Filmmaker Ana Sofia Joanes also provides one of the better explanations on how-to build an activism campaign around an important local issue.

The film’s Web site is packed with educational resources, community-organized screenings, social media outreach and a letter of support to the U.S. Dept. of Justice for public hearings to investigate agriculture monopolies.

Dig in!

Source: Wall Street Journal

Continued economic challenges in rural America have turned ugly with efforts to poach farm operations from states with stricter rules on animal confinement.

Pork Magazine posted a podcast with Republican Idaho state Sen. Tim Corder who plans to introduce new animal care legislation to help lure chicken farmers to relocate from California. Corder says he is focused on finding a work-around to thwart tougher animal cruelty and factory farm regulations advocated by the Human Society of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal explores the farm poaching effort further:

In Idaho, where there’s currently little poultry production, Doug Manning, economic-development director of the town of Burley, said he wanted to offer incentives to poultry farmers as a way to increase jobs and tax revenue in the area. He has heard from a few California farmers who “are looking at some options,” Mr. Manning said. “We said, ‘When you’re ready, give us a chance.’ ”

Idaho is no stranger to California farmers. In the past decade, the state has attracted scores of dairy farmers from California seeking cheaper land and less regulation.

Mr. Corder, Republican chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Agriculture Affairs Committee, has been pushing an animal-cruelty bill that distinguish between companion animals — such as cats and dogs — and production animals like chickens, hogs and cattle. The proposed law would also give Idaho’s agriculture department full authority over farm-animal welfare. Now, law-enforcement agencies have some jurisdiction over such matters.

Mr. Corder also is drafting a proposal to update state rules governing how large farms win business permits. He said the current rules needed to be tailored to specifically accommodate poultry farms.

“We know that … some of the chicken operations are looking toward Idaho,” said Mr. Corder. “We wanted to be very proactive and make sure our statutes could resist efforts” by animal-rights activists and provide “a place where [farmers] can continue to be profitable, while protecting the environment for Idaho.”

From American News Project and the Huffington Post Investigative Fund:

One of the nation’s most widely-used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results.

UPDATE: In reversal of Bush policy, EPA launches new study of atrazine’s effects.

The Environmental Protection Agency today reversed its stance on the potential hazards of atrazine, one of the most commonly-used herbicides in the country, saying it will re-examine how the chemical affects human health.

Read the rest of Danielle’s story at the HuffPost Investigative Fund.