---

Title:	Grant Allows Group To Open Prescott Office
Author:	Joanna Dodder
Source:	The Prescott Daily Courier
Date:	April 3, 2007

---

Grant Allows Group to Open Prescott Office
Center for Biological Diversity Threatened Lawsuit


PRESCOTT – A new grant will allow the Center for Biological Diversity to establish a fulltime Verde Program office in Prescott for its “Save the Verde” campaign.  The new office probably is not good news to some Prescott-area government officials, several of whom have said that one reason they did not want to join the Verde River Basin Partnership was because the center was involved in it.

The Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust gave the center in The Grove building at 119 Grove Ave. the $80,000 grant last week.  Yavapai College biology professor Joanne Oellers will be the program coordinator. She has been working part-time at the job the past several months in anticipation that money would become available to make it permanent.

The center filed a notice of intent to sue the City of Prescott, Town of Prescott Valley, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service in late 2004, one day after the Prescott City Council voted to buy a ranch in the Big Chino Sub-basin. The two municipalities plan to dig wells on the ranch and pump groundwater south from the Big Chino to their depleted Little Chino Sub-basin.  U.S. Geological Survey studies have concluded that the Big Chino Sub-basin supplies 80 percent to 86 percent of the base flow of the Upper Verde River.

It's About The River
Center officials say the pipeline will violate the Endangered Species Act by hurting endangered fish and birds that depend on the Upper Verde.  Oellers already is becoming a fixture at local water meetings, joining the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others in urging the City of Prescott to complete a federal Habitat Conservation Plan before starting to pump any Big Chino groundwater.  “This is about the river,” Oellers said. “I guess this is my time to step up,” as her mother did to help protect mountain preserves in the Phoenix area.

“Our absolute preference is for the cities to decide to do the right thing,” instead of filing a lawsuit, program manager Michelle Harrington said. Monitoring wells and Upper Verde River Watershed Coalition plans are not enough, she said.  The center joins The Nature Conservancy in establishing a full-time Verde Program office in Prescott. The center also has offices in Tucson and Phoenix.

“The Verde is just so important to the state as a whole,” Harrington said.

The center has goals similar to TNC and other groups, Harrington said. TNC has more focus on land purchases and conservation easements, as well as biological studies, she noted.  While the Big Chino pipeline plans are a major focus of its Prescott office, the center also is concerned about all the houses and wells developing in the Big Chino Sub-basin.

“This campaign is really more specific to educating the citizens of the area so we can work on long-term planning for water use,” Harrington said.  The center’s Verde letter-writing campaign produced a response from the Town of Prescott Valley this past year and, more recently, from U.S. Rep. Rick Renzi, whose district includes the Verde River Basin.

“The City’s (of Prescott) public works department has to complete a(n) environmental assessment and remediation, well field development and Ranch Management plan, and installation of monitoring wells to gauge the potential impacts of the withdrawal and transportation of groundwater from the Big Chino Ranch, before they move forward to the completion date of July 2009,” Renzi wrote Feb. 26.


Contact the author at: jdodder@prescottaz.com

Click here to view the original article