U.S. Forest Service officials stalled repairs last month to Tombstone’s water line in the Huachuca Mountains and now challenge the town’s historical claim to the land where up to 80 percent of the town’s water flows.

This week, Tombstone officials took an aggressive stance with federal demands. They drove equipment up to the site and continued repair work to the lines damaged by this summer’s wildfires and monsoon rains.

The federal maneuver is bleeding Tombstone’s water stores—and wallet—dry, officials said.

This prompted the U.S. Forest Service to make concessions, including the promise of a speedy approval process. They also addressed the ownership question, supplying a map that city officials say contains inaccurate data, essentially supporting their claim to the land.

After months of negotiations, federal officials demanded in October that the city apply for authorization before they worked on Wilderness Act land, citing federal procedure and preservation of wildlife.

“A lot of the work they want to do is work in congressionally designated wilderness, and for work of this type there is a process you have to go through,” said Heidi Schewel, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service.

“Wilderness has definite characteristics that people expect. When going into wilderness they are thinking of lands that are made for preservation—they don’t want to see evidence of development,” Schewel said.

City officials argue there’s not much left to preserve and time is running out to complete repairs with the first snowfall as little as a month away.

Snow could spell trouble for hitting their deadline because the hard, frozen ground will make digging difficult if impossible.

“With the approach of the snows, there’s just no time to doodle around with this anymore,” said George Barnes, city clerk/manager. “We’re not talking about moving through a pristine forest here. It’s like a battlefield out there. What we want to do is go in there, minimally disturb the place, fix our stuff, and get out.”

Mayor Jack Henderson agreed.

“Trees are down and it burned. There’s not much we can do to it,” Henderson said, voicing doubt that many animals would be disturbed by their work.

“They left if they didn’t die,” he said, during the fires and floods.

While telling city officials to stop the repair work, the Forest Service is also questioning city ownership of the line, Barnes said, though they’ve agreed to table the matter until emergency repairs have been done.

The demand for authorization forced Tombstone to park its heavy machinery that was rented to repair the line, which Barnes said costs $2,000 to $4,000 a week, and wait for the application to be accepted by the regional office headquarters in New Mexico. Officials said they have waited weeks for approval, not to mention the three months of negotiations that led up to the realization they’d need authorization.

“The authorization for mechanized use of wilderness has to come through our Regional Forester,” said Jim Upchurch, a forest supervisor for the Coronado National Forest, in an Oct. 20 email to Barnes. “I understand your need to get the work done as expeditiously as possible however please understand that we need to work within the Wilderness Act law to approve this use,” Upchurch said.

But on Nov. 1, when there was still no answer, officials took the matter into their own hands. Henderson and others lugged equipment up the mountain to begin repair work.

“We had a little bit of a confrontation with them yesterday up in the springs,” Barnes said. “It caused a meeting to be held at forest service offices in Hereford. We put the moose on the table and said, ‘Look. We got to get up there and you guys are dragging your feet.’ ”

Following a $50,000 emergency grant from the Arizona Division of Emergency Management that demands repairs be finished by February, Barnes said that whether the Forest Service even had jurisdiction to enforce the parking of their equipment was unclear.

“Our understanding is that the government’s emergency takes precedence over the Wilderness Act,” Barnes said.

Officials at the governor’s office, though, said Tombstone has to follow federal guidelines first.
“Federal law will supersede that emergency declaration,” said Matthew Benson, a spokesman for Gov. Jan Brewer’s office.  “They need to work in collaboration with the feds on that to get whatever approval is needed.”

Benson added that if the process ends up taking longer than February to complete, officials should remain in close contact with state officials to request an extension of the emergency declaration.

“There’s no danger of losing funding for the project,” Benson said. “The deadline is in place to ensure there’s urgency involved.”

Now, following the Forest Service’s promise to expedite the process, the city is working on parts of the line that are not Wilderness Act land while it awaits approval.

Henderson voiced frustration with the “bureaucratic game” going on. “It’s imperative that the forest service gets the permit done,” he said, noting that they’d been in negotiations with the agency since July.

“Now we’re waiting, again,” Barnes said. “We’re trying to be as patient as we can be. It’s going to snow soon and we’re going to be out of business for the winter.”

Henderson agreed.

“We’re in an emergency state here and it should only take a couple of days,” Henderson said, especially with upcoming demands during tourism season. “We have to get that water flowing.”

Without the springs, Tombstone spends $10,000 a month to pump water from their San Pedro River aquifer, Barnes said.

He added that if aquifer stores became too low, it’s possible that San Pedro’s flow could disrupt water supplies for communities upstream.

In a worst-case scenario, draining the aquifer too much could lead a fork in the river to “be eliminated,” Barnes said.

“How do you think that makes me feel when we’re sucking down our water when we don’t have to?” he said.

To Barnes, “it’s all bureaucracy,” he said, even the ownership issue of Tombstone’s historic water line.

“This was granted to us by the federal government before Arizona was even a state,” he said. “This stuff predates all of it.”

In fact, that documentation has been crucial to repairing the spring itself, which Barnes and other officials have used to guide repairs that state agencies are demanding.

“It became the only thing we could refer to when all the ground markers had shifted,” Barnes said.

When the dust settles, Barnes just hopes they’ll fix the lines before the first snowfall.