Supervisor Ruiz's Ad Promoting Willow Springs (click for larger view)

       An advertisement promoting the South Village of Willow Springs motivated Kazda and her friends to check the public record.

       The ad, published in the June 13 edition of The San Manuel Miner, was paid for by Pinal County Supervisor Lionel D. Ruiz.

       In his ad promoting the project, Ruiz  claimed a "tremendous amount of support" for the Willow Springs project and said that board members had received over 61 letters favoring it.   

       Because Kazda and her friends wanted to see the letters mentioned in Ruiz's ad, they stopped by the Planning  & Zoning office and asked to see the "application package" for Willow Springs. 

       An application package is a file of all publicly available information for any rezoning application and is maintained by Pinal County government.

       Prompted by Kazda and her friends, Pinal P&Z staff examined the application package for Willow Springs and confirmed  the 61 letters purportedly supporting the Pinal Board of Supervisors approval of the Willow Springs rezoning were missing.

       After confirming that the letters had gone missing from the public file, Pinal P&Z staff suggested that Kazda and her friends check with the supervisors to see if they had the letters.

       Kazda said she would be happy to do so, but informed the P&Z staff that she and her friends had already had a full day collecting signatures to put the Board of Supervisors recent Willow Springs rezoning decision to a public vote.

      Kazda said she would check for the letters when she delivered the Willow Springs petitions on July 2.