A tale of two counties

● SaddleBrooke, a retirement community that popped up more than 20 years ago, lies just north of the county line. But its mailing address says Tucson, which is in Pima County.

● Eagle Crest Ranch, a housing development that hugs the Pinal-Pima line, has filled up over the last six years. But people who live there get letters and packages addressed to Catalina, the unincorporated community just south of them in Pima County.

These neighborhoods, as well as Oracle farther to the east, are officially part of Pinal County.

But based on geography and philosophy, to most residents the communities feel like they should be in Pima County.

"My property is in Pinal, but that's just on paper," said Jeffrey Wells, who has lived in Eagle Crest Ranch for about two years. "This really feels more like it's Pima County because everything I do requires me to go into Pima County."

The distance between these communities and the county seat in Florence is much more than physical, however.

Many area residents feel they don't get adequate representation from Pinal County government.

"We're in the southwest corner of the county, and they could care less about us," said Ted Kennedy, a resident of SaddleBrooke.

Feeling ignored on outskirts

It's a natural reaction for residents on the outskirts of an area to feel ignored, Pinal County Board of Supervisors Chairman Lionel Ruiz says.

He also said it's not surprising for people to identify with the area where they go to work and shop, remembering when Pima County residents acted the same way toward Pinal.

"It used to be, people from Pima County would come into Pinal to work at the mines," said Ruiz, whose district includes southern Pinal County. "Now, it's just the opposite. We have a big tax leakage going into Pima County."

People such as Kennedy and longtime Oracle resident Robert Skiba make regular trips up Arizona 79 to Florence for Board of Supervisors meetings, speaking for or against topics they feel affect their communities.

They've criticized the county over the lack of services for the southern part of the county, for the high increase in property taxes due to elevated countywide valuations and for not catching on to the criminal acts of former County Manager Stanley Griffis, who in January pleaded guilty to fraud and theft charges and was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

It's mostly a waste of time, they've surmised, leading many of them to wonder whether being free of Pinal's control would make things better.

"If we could get Pima's rules brought up here, it'd be to a great advantage for us," SaddleBrooke resident Bob Schwartz said. "If this was Pima County, half of Eagle Crest wouldn't have been built."

Eagle Crest Ranch woes

Schwartz says Eagle Crest Ranch is an example of how Pinal does things differently — and worse, in his opinion — than Pima.

The 966-home Eagle Crest Ranch lies directly north of Edwin Road, a rutted dirt passage that rolls up and down a series of short, bumpy hills and serves as the border between Pima and Pinal County.

To the south of Edwin is the sparse layout of Catalina, an unincorporated community that has remained mostly rural as a result of Pima County's more stringent zoning.

Eagle Crest includes many homes built atop ridges, homes that according to Pinal County Deputy Planning Director Jerry Stabley probably wouldn't have been part of the neighborhood had it been built in Pima County.

"I think our rules are a little less stringent than in Pima County," Stabley said.

The way Eagle Crest is laid out is not what Anne Brown expected when she and her family moved there from California a year and a half ago.

"If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have moved up here," Brown said. "They're making it into tract city. They're making it into California."

Even SaddleBrooke is growing much larger than some of its oldest residents thought, with the total build-out bringing an expected 5,000 homes. The latest section, The Preserve, extends so far to the northeast that the Biosphere 2 complex is visible not too far off in the distance.

That property is expected to contain more than 1,500 homes starting as soon as 2009, while four miles north of SaddleBrooke is SaddleBrooke Ranch, another age-restricted community that already has its golf course open and expects to start selling homes in January.

Supercharged Pinal growth

Growth is inevitable, especially in Pinal County, the fastest-growing county in the state and one of the fastest-growing in the country.

But the feeling of many people in the county is that Pinal officials don't have much interest in trying to control that growth, which is happening mostly to the north as the Phoenix area expands beyond Maricopa County's borders.

"The supervisors here are very pliable," said Schwartz, noting that all three supervisors are Democrats in a county that since 1996 has gone from being overwhelmingly Demo-crat to nearly an even split between Republicans and Democrats.

Suggestions for how Pinal's southernmost communities could be better represented are plentiful, and some efforts have been made toward that end.

Both Oracle and SaddleBrooke looked into incorporating as recently as 2005, though Oracle's proposed 62-square- mile town was voted down by the Board of Supervisors for being too spread out and not urban enough. Oro Valley, for example, was just 2.4 square miles when it formed in 1974 and now encompasses about 34 square miles.

Skiba, who has lived in Oracle since the 1950s, was against incorporation. He said that without a strong source of revenue — such as a sales tax — the rural town would end up like Mammoth, which is 10 miles to the east and is the only incorporated town in the area.

Mammoth, which according to the 2005 U.S. Census update has 2,167 residents, saw its total assessed property value rise just 5.6 percent from 2006-07 to 2007-08 compared with the 15.7 percent increase for property that lies within the Oracle School District. The Oracle School District includes Oracle, SaddleBrooke and Eagle Crest Ranch.

"What did incorporation do for Mammoth?" Skiba said. "The more incorporated communities you have in the county, the less responsibility the county has to have. What you'd end up with is all kinds of small communities in Pinal County, all doing their own thing."

Ruiz said Pinal County is in favor of areas' incorporating and for existing towns to annex new developments. In his territory alone, he says, he has three unincorporated communities (Arizona City, Oracle and San Manuel) with more than 5,000 residents.

"We believe in annexation, because cities can offer better services," Ruiz said. "We're a regional government. But the problem with incorporation is, if you tell them to incorporate they think you're trying to get rid of them. If you tell them not to, it's that you're trying to assert control over rural communities."

Increase in supervisors?

Skiba said he's long been an advocate of splitting Pinal County in two, with the eastern half becoming a new county that would operate with a much more rural mindset.

A more likely solution is expanding the Board of Supervisors, which according to state law should consist of five members once a county's population exceeds 200,000. Pinal's is over 300,000 now, but county spokesman Joe Pyritz says that since it was still less than 200,000 at the last official census in 2000, the county must wait until the 2010 census to expand.

"That's in the plans," Pyritz said, noting that Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoed a bill in June 2006 that would have lowered the board-expansion threshold to 175,000 residents.

SaddleBrooke residents have started a petition to try to speed up the process, but even if the Board of Supervisors increases its numbers in a few years, that might not be enough to change things, some say.

"I don't think we have the people in place to handle the growth," Schwartz said. "The entity has outgrown them."