Opponents sue to try to overturn Ariz. land sale to Hudbay

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.