Protect Our Preserve is an organization of citizens who believe that the Preserve should remain a Preserve and therefore should not have ANY development in it other than trails and minimal trail head facilities as required to access those trails. It should remain free of all other development.
We are therefore highly opposed to the city building anything else in it, including the proposed Desert Discovery Center (DDC) to be located at the Gateway trail head.
This organization is not taking a position on whether the DDC is good or bad for the city, but that regardless of its perceived benefits, it doesn’t belong in the Preserve. Further we believe that no funds, raised to create the Preserve, should be used to pay for it.
Protect Our Preserve provides information and awareness in opposition to the 30 acre $74 million dollar Desert Discovery Center, that special interests and a select few politicians want to put at the Gateway Trailhead in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. This project is being driven without citizen input, or a viable business plan. It violates the Preserve Ordinance, goes against the wishes of the voters, and is being promoted under false pretenses. It will cost each citizen $100s, and be a taxpayer-owned money loser year after year.
We formed this organization to do two things:
- Inform all citizens about this proposed development in the Preserve, and to provide facts about it, so they could decide on their own if they support or oppose putting it in the Preserve.
- Form a corporation that can raise money to inform citizens and if necessary hire legal help to prevent the city from building this in the citizen’s Preserve