FLORENCE -- Pinal County officials have been claiming in advertisements, official press releases and public meetings that they received 61 letters of support for the Willow Springs rezoning but when pressed to produce the letters, officials were only able to locate 51 of them. 

       Of the 51 letters, 2 are signed by the same individual and one is not even addressed to the board of supervisors but was a letter to the editor. 

All letters, except the letter to the editor followed this form.  Note the date of receipt by Pinal County (click for larger view)

       Except the letter to the editor, all the the letters are copies of a form letter, the author of which is unknown.

       The letters are not dated.

       Because only three of the letters have time stamps showing when they were received, it is not clear when Pinal County actually came into possesion of the letters.

       An official press release of 5/16/01 written by Pinal County Public Information officer Joe Pyritz claims the letters were received "prior to the public hearing."  However, one of the time stamped letters shows it was recieved almost an hour after the hearing began.   The letter was received at 10:22 a.m. on May 16.  The Willow Springs rezoning hearing began at 9:30 a.m. that day.

       When asked why most of the letters were not time stamped, Sherri Cluff, Deputy Clerk of the Board of Pinal County, said that all the letters were delivered to Pinal as a single package.  However, the letters that have time stamps show Pinal County received them on different days. 

       With 51 of the claimed  61 letters found, Pinal officials were asked if they knew where the other 10 letters were. 

       Pyritz speculated that the still missing 10 "letters of support" could be emails sent to the the supervisors, and if the supervisors haven't deleted them they may still be on their computers at the supervisors local offices.

Supervisor Ruiz's Ad Claiming the Board of Supervisors received 61 letters of support for the rezoning (click for larger view)

       The search for the letters was prompted by an advertisement promoting the Willow Springs project and paid for by supervisor Lionel Ruiz.  In his ad Ruiz claimed the board had received "tremendous support" for the project and mentioned the letters as a rationale for his approving the rezoning. 

       Their interest piqued by the ad, Oracle resident Mary Ellen Kazda and two of her friends stopped by to check the application package and view the letters on June 27. An application package is a file of all publicly available information for any rezoning application and is maintained by Pinal County government. 

       When Kazda and her friends discovered the letters were missing from the public record, Kazda informed P&Z staff that she would check again when the petitions for Willow Springs were delivered on July 2.

       During the morning of July 2, after delivering over 5,900 signatures mandating the Willow Springs rezoning be put on the Nov. 2002 ballot, Kazda and a group of 12 other county residents proceeded to the offices of Planning and Zoning to see if the letters had been found.

       Inspection of the application package revealed the letters were still missing. 

       The group then proceeded back to Administration Building 1, located Pyritz and asked if he could help find the missing letters.

       As Pyritz was talking to the group, Cluff arrived and said that the letters had been stored in a vault in the rear of  Administration Building 1. 

       When Pyritz was asked why the letters were not in the application package maintained in the Planning & Zoning offices, he said that another application package existed and was maintained at the Administration building. 

       The citizen group was surprised to learn that Pinal County apparently maintains multiple files of public information, each with differing content.

       Pyritz did not show the second application package to the group but went to the vault and retrieved only the letters he claimed he found in that package.

       The citzen group paid for copies of the letters and left.