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SIERRA VISTA - City officials joined The
University of Arizona yesterday in dedicating the 2-acre site of a future
plant sciences center.
Their efforts could save thousands of
native trees, plants, grasses, cacti and succulents.
Plans for a center building are years
off, but the site, on the UA Sierra Vista campus off Charleston Road,
still will see action relatively soon. Plants salvaged from the Arizona
Department of Transportation's widening of Highway 92, set to begin early
next year, will be stored at the site. The state and the city eventually
will use most of the plants for public landscaping.
The plant center is the result of eight
months of work by the city's plant center task force, which includes
representatives of the UA, Sierra Vista City Council, federal agencies,
environmental groups and the Arizona Cattlemen's Association. The group
was formed to study the feasibility of a research facility to protect
endangered plants by growing them in captivity.
The focus changed when the task force
members learned from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials that
"no one will issue a permit to go out and remove endangered plants
from the wild," said Patrick Bell, the city's environmental analyst.
Even so, the city was encouraged to
continue its efforts because of the many threatened native plants in need
of protection.
Bell said the road widening project
provides an opportunity to accomplish something positive in a short time
frame at very little cost.
He said the council was expected to
approve a measure last night authorizing a $12,000-a-year
intergovernmental agreement with the UA's Cooperative Extension Program to
operate the facility through the first three-year phase of operations.
For its part, the UA has donated the
land for the center, which it plans to use as a teaching facility.
Mark Taylor, of ADOT's resource
management office in Phoenix, said that cacti, agave, and ocotillo in the
planned roadway normally are removed and transplanted back from the
highway. But other native plants that are not protected, or not
commercially marketable are lost.
The storage space provided by the
university will make it possible to save many more of those plants for use
in other projects, he said. Return
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