Opponents sue to try to overturn Arizona land sale to Hudbay Minerals

The sale, at public auction on April 29, is seen by Copper World developer Hudbay Minerals Inc. as a way to add a "buffer" area between the mining company's lands in the Santa Ritas and a major subdivision lying to its north, known as Corona de Tucson. Opponents, however, said the sale will enlarge the scale of Hudbay's mining operation at Copper World and help it dispose of more tailings on more land.

The sale took place over the objections of a wide range of protestors who signed petitions and wrote letters to Gov. Katie Hobbs, seeking unsuccessfully to block it.

The Copper World project has already obtained the three major state permits it needs to build the mine. One approved the company's mine reclamation plan, while the other two approved an air quality permit and an aquifer protection permit.

Now, John Dougherty, executive director of the opposition group Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, said he hopes that if the lawsuits prevail and at least temporarily block the land sale, it would reduce the mine's value and possibly discourage investors from putting money into the project.

"Our goal is to show our supporters that this project is still not a done deal," Dougherty said.

The 160 acres is a linchpin for the mining company because it connects the main mine parcel to the south with other land to the north that's been planned for tailings storage, he said.

"We want to hurt the mine's value" however possible, Dougherty said of the group's efforts.

One new lawsuit, filed in Pima County Superior Court, alleges the Land Department violated public notice requirements by repeatedly posting, for weeks, an address of where the sale would take place, only to change it less than two weeks before the sale date. It also said the department used an inaccurate parcel number for the land that was sold and that it repeatedly changed the time of the sale in its legal notices until two weeks before the sale date.

The second lawsuit asks the Arizona Court of Appeals to uphold a protest against the land sale that the environmental group filed on March 6, but that the land department denied shortly before the sale occurred. That suit alleges that the department's appraisal of the 160 acres significantly undervalued the worth, leading to a land sale price of $993,000 for a parcel that will be worth far more to Hudbay.

That lawsuit also faulted the department for selling the parcel while failing to comply with a legal obligation to develop a land disposition plan, as outlined last summer in a critique of the department's land sale practices by the Arizona Auditor General's office. 

The lawsuits were filed separately because the conservation group didn't learn about the issues with the public notice of the sale's location and timing until after the legal deadline had passed to add those issues to its protest, Dougherty said.

Lynn Cordova, the land department's land policy administrator, declined comment on the two lawsuits.

Hudbay Minerals said it was reviewing the two suits and has already fund the first one to be meritless, "as they continue to expend scarce donor funds on a chimera."

Hudbay's predecessor at Copper World, Rosemont Copper, had filed an application back in July 2021 seeking to buy this parcel. Save the Scenic Santa Ritas and Pima County government officials repeatedly sought to delay or block it. But after one major delay, the Land Department's Board of Appeals voted to recommend the sale last September, shortly after the department had obtained an appraisal of the property, valuing it at $993,000.

After the land agency auctioned the parcel to Hudbay, the company issued a statement saying the auction will allow the land department to "successfully fulfill its fiduciary duty by turning a landlocked, 160-acre parcel into a vital revenue stream for Arizona’s public schools. For the Copper World project, acquiring this parcel allows us to immediately implement a critical community mitigation plan that increases the buffer between our operations and the southern edge of Corona de Tucson by approximately one mile.

"We remain committed to mitigation and building an environmentally sustainable mine as we continue delivering significant economic benefits to Southern Arizona, such as high-quality jobs and long-term tax revenue," Hudbay said.

The parcel is "landlocked," not connected to other state land parcels, because Hudbay owns the land to its north and west, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management owns the parcel to the south, and the U.S. Forest Service owns the parcel immediately to the east, the Land Department says.

Under the state constitution and the federal law that turned this land over to the state more than a century ago, the land department is legally obligated to maximize revenues from its land sales for the benefit of public schools, universities and other public entities. It holds its land in trust for all those entities.

But the lawsuit said the appraisal commissioned by the Land Department only considered the value of the land as it is currently zoned, for “low density residential, limited commercial use, agriculture use, and governmental uses.”  

The appraisal acknowledges that the sale parcel will not be used for any of these permitted uses and that the proposed use is industrial, but only looked at the land's residential values, the lawsuit said.

Appraising the sale parcel as residential is not the “true value” of the 160 acres, the suit said. "The sale parcel is worth many multiples more to Copper World than $993,000 and the trust is entitled to that considerably higher 'true value.'”

But in turning down Save the Scenic Santa Ritas' protest of the auction, the Land Department said the appraiser, Thomas Baker, did appraise the land's value as if it would be put to industrial use.

"Mr. Baker certified that the valuation and the (appraisal) report were prepared 'in conformity with the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice,'" the land department said.

Dougherty said the Land Department's characterization of the appraisal is inaccurate. Not only did the appraisal describe the parcel as one suited for rural residential use, Dougherty noted that all five parcels the appraiser used to determine comparative value to the 160 acres were zoned residential.