Replies

From today's Sierra Vista Herald:

County to rule on border fence
By Jonathan Clark
Herald/Review
BISBEE — The county planning department is expected to rule this week on the border fence that the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps hopes to build on private land east of Naco. However, District 2 Supervisor Paul Newman has asked the department to first present its findings to the county board of supervisors during its public and executive sessions on Tuesday.
Over the past several weeks, county Planning Director Judy Anderson and Deputy County Administrator Jim Vlahovich have been in contact with Mesquite Ridge rancher Richard Hodges to gather information on the Israeli-style security barrier he has asked the Minutemen to build on his property later this month. At the same time, the County Attorney’s Office has been preparing a legal opinion on whether the barrier — two parallel 12-to-15-foot fences flanked by anti-vehicle ditches and eight feet of concertina wire — could be considered as having an agricultural use, therefore making it exempt from county regulations.
Using the legal information gathered from Hodges and the County Attorney, Anderson, who has the responsibility of ruling on the fence, said she hopes to make her decision by the end of the week.
In the meantime, Newman asked that she discuss her findings with the Board of Supervisors.
“This should not be kept within the confines of legal discussions with the County Attorney,” Newman said. “Whatever the County Attorney’s opinion, I think that this should go to the Board and the public can have a right to comment on it.”
It is uncertain whether the public will be allowed to hear the opinion, however. Thus far, County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer has evoked attorney-client privilege when asked to speak on the matter, and the legal conversation Tuesday may be kept within the confines of the executive session.
But Newman, who represents the Bisbee-Naco-Douglas border area, said his constituents should still be allowed to participate in a general discussion of the barrier.
“One of the things that concerns me is that there’s a possibility that there may be three or four of these fences built,” he said. “If these fences are connected, that is an issue of public importance and I think people have the right to discuss whether they want that kind of community.”
In an op-ed article published in last Friday’s Herald/Review, Hodges spoke of heavily-armed drug traffickers running rampant over his property and of gun battles between cartel members and law enforcement agents. He said that he had turned to the Minutemen to build a security barrier after elected officials seemed disinterested in confronting the problem.
He did not mention an agricultural use for the fence.
Contacted on Monday, however, Hodges said he expected the barrier to have significant benefit for the 18 cows and 18 calves at his 372-acre ranch.
“Everything has to do with agriculture,” he said. “If we can keep the drug dealers away from the cows, the cows are better off. If we can keep the UDAs (undocumented aliens) from dropping all the plastic that they do, the cows are better off. And if we can keep the cows out of the road that the Border Patrol uses, the cows are better off.”
And while Hodges said he would accommodate a ruling by the county, he also expressed frustration that local officials had only shown interest in his property in response to the Minuteman fence.
“When we ask for help from the county to deal with any of these (border-related) problems, they don’t even know who we are,” he said. “But something like this comes up and, oh man.”
Though Anderson said Monday that a ruling was likely — though not guaranteed — by the end of this week, it was still not clear what the exact nature of her decision will be.
One possibility is that Anderson will simply rule whether or not the fence qualifies as an agricultural structure. If that is the case, any aggrieved party would then have 30 days to file an appeal with the county Board of Adjustments.
But it is also possible that a ruling would decide whether or not the Israeli fence could be built at all in the county, or that any such proposal should be put through a special-use permit process with the county Planning and Zoning Commission.

The Planning and Zoning Commission is hostile to the Minuteman Project. They were all over their operation in April of last year and, in fact, fined the heck out of the Pastor of the church who rented empty dorms at the Bible College to the MMP for their HQ and housing some of their volunteers.

County Supervisor Newman is a liberal Democrat who is always attacking the MMP. He was also busted smoking dope in a county vehicle he was driving but was never prosecuted.

The other two County Supervisors (Call and Searle) are liberal Republicans who aren't really thrilled with the Minuteman Project at all and would rather everyone just shut up about the border problem.

County Attorney Ed Reinheimer is a conservative Republican and has been fair in his dealings with the MMP.

I know this because I live in Cochise County and I know these people.

This article details some of the reasons that the fence project has been delayed and the final fence configuration may have to be further altered to comply with a hostile county bureaucracy.