Creation of a new county may be answer to concerns

In recent months, folks in Green Valley have proposed that the Green Valley area secede from Pima County and become part of Santa Cruz County.

Now there’s a really bad idea.

Just imagine how much more screwed up Santa Cruz County would be if 20,000 residents of Green Valley were added to Santa Cruz County.

Obviously the folks in Green Valley don’t read the Nogales International and thus have no idea about what goes on politically in Santa Cruz County.

But there might be a better solution.

Create a whole new county composed of southern Pima County and northern Santa Cruz County called Kokopelli County. The boundaries of the new county would be Santa Gertrudis on the south and Duval Mine Road on the north.

This new county would encompass Tubac, Amado, Green Valley and Arivaca.

The advantage for Santa Cruz County would be that it would get rid of all the Tubacians who constantly come down to Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and Planning & Zoning Commission meetings complaining about this or that. Just think of the amount of gasoline that would be saved if all those trips were eliminated — and the air pollution that would be eliminated.

The advantage for Pima County would be that they would get rid of all their costly financial obligations paying for the roads and police protection in Green Valley and Arivaca.

The proposed new county would be heavily Republican, with all the consequences that means for the kind of county government they could create for themselves.

Randy Graf, the chief proponent for taking Green Valley out of Pima County, might even end up as a Kokopelli County Supervisor.

A major problem for this new county would be there is no incorporated city or town in the area. Green Valley or Tubac could incorporate in order to become the new county seat. Or the boundaries could be pushed north to Pima Mine Road, adding the Town of Sahuarita to the mix. However, neither the residents of Green Valley nor Tubac would likely want the new county’s population dominated by the younger people who live in Sahuarita.

Should a new county formation effort actually be launched, it is possible Rio Rico might want out of Santa Cruz and into Kokopelli, for many of the same reasons Tubacians may want to be rid of Santa Cruz County control.

New counties emerge when residents of one part of an existing county don’t feel their voices are heard in the other part of the county. Witness the creation of La Paz County in 1982 by carving it out from Yuma County. The original precedent for new county creation was when Santa Cruz County was split off from Pima County in 1899 because the people of Nogales didn’t want the people of Tucson dictating their future.

(Holub is a resident of Tubac and editor/publisher of The Frumious Bandersnatch.)