On October 14, 2025, the Pima County Board of Supervisors approved Pima Prospers 2025, the County’s updated comprehensive plan that will guide local growth and land use decisions for the next decade.

We have been working with the county and other stakeholders on this draft for the last two years and are excited to share how our work on this plan will help protect local wildlife and open spaces into the future!

What is a comprehensive plan?

Every county in Arizona is required by state law to have a comprehensive plan and update it at least every ten years. The plan serves as a community roadmap for how land is used, shaping decisions about housing, transportation, water, jobs, and conservation.

The update process takes several years and includes input from county departments, community groups, and the public. While public input is part of the process, it doesn’t go on the ballot — unlike the general plans that we see at city level.

How did we contribute?

We recommended that a new policy be added to Chapter 3 to help ensure that, when development occurs in areas of high-quality habitat, a project’s required open space set-aside is conserved nearby, rather than offset in distant parts of the county. 

This follows a recent project where the county permitted the Tortolita Fan to be developed in exchange for open space set-aside or “mitigation” land out in the Avra Valley. If this trend continues, especially given the rate of growth in the Tortolita Fan area (one of the main growth areas in Pima Prospers 2025), it would threaten the Tucson-Tortolita Mountains wildlife linkage that we are working to protect.

This new policy is one of several updates to the plan that we’ve worked on since 2023 that will help protect local habitats, wildlife corridors, and reduce the localized impacts of growth in the desert.

“The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan remains one of the most forward-thinking local conservation frameworks in the country. We are proud to have played a foundational role in its development and ongoing implementation.” — Kate Hotten, Co-Executive Director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection

Thank you!

It takes a village! To see these changes over the finish line, we worked with county staff, stakeholders, including the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association, and several of our coalition members — including DarkSky Southern Arizona, Gates Pass Neighborhood Association, Great Old Broads -Tucson Broadband, Living Desert Alliance, Tortolita Alliance, and Tucson Bird Alliance.

We also met with several members of the Board of Supervisors prior to the vote this week to discuss the importance of the new policy we recommended.

You can read the county’s press release and quotes from our Co-Executive Director Kate Hotten and other coalition members, here.