ORO VALLEY : Land Stewards or Land Sharks ?

For more than 35 years I have lived on the West side of the Catalina Mountain Range so admittedly I love it as much as I do the air I breathe. Too often in those years I felt the land being developed there was treated secondary to the construction and the natural beauty that brought you, me and the developers was being lost.  All that having been said, “beauty is all in the eye of the beholder”, would be the political stalemate we see in all such cases.

So when I complain I can’t see the Mountains, from what is arguably the best vantage afforded anyone driving north on Oracle, because someone built a wall. That seems like a obvious complaint and such a outrageous affront it amazes me no one has blown it up or knocked it down or asked that it be moved. I did my own informal survey and my banker said she was usually so busy driving, she hadn’t noticed the wall that outrages me every time I drive by. My eye doctor had heard lots of complaints and some of them thought it was an affront, many others, thought it, silly.

You wouldn’t find it silly, if you paid big money for a lot and a new home and went out on the patio to enjoy your exclusive view and couldn’t hear the birds singing because of road noise made worse by the echo of the CDO wash. You might not also see the silliness of bulldozers carving out those expensive home plots tearing up the beauty that GOD himself carved and nestled on our west slope. So the wall keeps you from seeing stuff you might not like seeing and therefore heads off complaints and bitching because out of sight–out of mind.

Catalina State Park was born by a land swap that made Sun City Rancho Vistoso possible and gave Oro Valley, the chance to become the next Scottsdale, rather than the tennis court it was for two decades. In those days Big Horn Sheep lived on Pusch Ridge and watched us carefully as our noise and light pollution grew and the growth pushed out. The sheep gave up grazing on the golf course behind the Sheraton and have now gone all together. The only rams to be found there today are the Oro Valley mascots with which they have decorated their environs so they might revel in the days when these wild animals once walked this land. I heard two women talking at a Oro Valley event, one women from Saddlebrook was going on and on about the wildlife that her community enjoys and the Oro Valley women said how she so wished she lived where she could enjoy the desert….

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