The Desert Advocate gets readers' kudos

Before the start of the March 8 county Board of Adjustment meeting, The Desert Advocate was credited by numerous attendees with alerting them to the important zoning clarification to be made and explaining exactly what was taking place.

Dawn Morris of Rio Verde said she read the Advocate articles and faxed them to members of the Rio Verde Horsemen's Association. "We lived in Glendale when Phoenix annexed that land and we tried to keep it rural, but little by little it changed," she said. "Then we moved way out here (Rio Verde) and it's happening again.

"Like my mom said the other day, 'Where would we keep farm animals, if not on Rural zoned land?'" Morris lamented. "We displaced equestrian people have to preserve this."

Harriet Waters, a resident of Van Buren Acres, a strip of Rural zoned land near 64th Avenue and Van Buren Street, said her Desert Hills friend, Jan Hatterman, sent her a copy of the Advocate story. "We moved out there in the '60s before the area was incorporated into Phoenix," she said, and pointed out that many owners of one half and one acre properties in that area raise animals for food and need to keep their animals.

Julie Burns, who lives near 19th Avenue and Happy Valley Road, gets the Advocate in her mailbox. She expressed her opinion that it would be "negligent" for the county to try to interpret a law today that was made 30 years ago, when animals were a way of life on rural land. She felt it was obvious and understood that animals should always be a part of rural life.

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