Click on any image for a larger view.  Some images are scans of faxes, hence the poor quality

Cover letter from OHS to Pinal County indicating OHS had signed the lease, and were making the lease payment..

Affidavit of Publication of Legal Notice declaring Pinal Board of Supervisors promise to sign OHS lease.

Board of Supervisors Jan. 16 Meeting Agenda ( see Consent Items on page 2).  Adobe Acrobat reader required.

Ruiz's letter to OHS announcing he was reneging on the deal.

Letter from Pinal County returning OHS check for publication of Legal Notice declaring Pinal Board of Supervisors would honor the OHS lease.

Letter from Pinal County returning OHS check for lease payment

But Dobler heard nothing further and in September of 2000, he wrote to Griffis inquiring about the status of the lease.  A few weeks later, he received a letter from Deputy County Attorney Glenn Johnson stating that the county had assigned Johnson to draft the lease.

OHS representatives met with Johnson in Florence on Oct. 13, 2000.  Johnson requested that three conditions be fulfilled: 1) determination of use; 2) appraisal of the property and 3) liability insurance.

These requests were carried out between October of 2000 and April of 2001.  In April, OHS reviewed Johnson's draft lease.  Between April and September, Dobler continued negotiations with Johnson on specific lease conditions requiring remedy.

"We needed to fine-tune the language of the lease, because the county was asking that the property be returned in better condition that it was received, but nobody actually knew the condition of the property," explained Schiek.

Woodruff had long had environmental concerns about the property since its bus yard days.  "When the school took the gasoline tanks out, it tested the soil around the tanks, but nobody tested the grease pit where they poured the used oil from the buses.  Sometimes they poured it around the fence line too, to keep down the seeds," she said.  "My well is contaminated.  The oil breaks down but not the hydrocarbons or the heavy metals."

There were also matters of property maintenance and safety to be worked out.  "We had asked the county to secure a small building on the property, the grease pit and the fence, which was in a bad state of disrepair," said Dobler.

According to Dobler, Johnson agreed that the language of the lease needed further work and that his office would make the needed adjustments.  Betty Harmon, who took over negotiations when Dobler stepped down from the OHS board at the end of his term, received the revised lease from Johnson in November.

The OHS board approved the lease at its regular meeting in December.  It sent the signed lease and $25 lease fee to Johnson on December 18, 2001.  Concurrently, Pinal County published its Legal Notice of Intent to Enter into Lease with OHS for four consecutive weeks in the Casa Grande Dispatch.

The lease agreement was to be approved at the supervisors' Jan. 16, 2002 meeting, but the item was suddenly removed from the agenda.

Two days later OHS received a letter from Ruiz stating: "We assumed your organization was no longer interested in acquiring the property," which left him "no choice but to continue the process with (another) organization."

At the end of January, the county sent OHS a bill for $84.29 for the four weeks of advertising in the Dispatch.  Two days later, a phone message from the county requested OHS to disregard that bill.