Water-farm funds to go to lure businesses

Mesa's leaders thought they were planting the seeds of a secure future in 1985 when they paid about $30 million for 11,000-plus acres of Pinal County farmland. Indeed, they were. But it didn't turn out exactly as they had planned. The idea, based on the requirements of a 1980 state law, was to nail down water rights on that land to help supply a city that would nearly triple in population between then and now. As time passed, however, Mesa found other sources of water, which it believes will slake the city's thirst for decades to come. And with that the Pinal County water farms became more of an albatross than an asset. Mesa kept leasing the land to farmers, including some who had originally sold their holdings to Mesa a generation ago. But the returns were so paltry that Councilman Alex Finter called a meeting a year ago to explore whether Mesa should go into the farming business itself, eliminating the fees it was paying to a farm-management company.

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