Photo courtesy of Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society, Dave Pence

“I haven’t seen a lot of George Johnson types,” says attorney Mike Smith of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “He is one of the more prolific bad actors.”
Smith, speaking from his office in Washington, D.C., says his national group got involved in the controversy because Johnson’s land was so close to a national monument.
“There’s something more universal about George Johnson and what he represents, especially in an area like Arizona where there are a tremendous number of unidentified cultural resources,” Smith says. “It seems his approach as a developer is, he just does it and deals with the repercussions later. That usually means fines. That approach is unacceptable.” 
It’s not uncommon for development and protected sites to clash, he notes, but there’s a way to deal with that, and that’s by acquiring permits needed to make major changes on land.
“Usually a developer is going through the permit process, and that’s how we discover problems,” Smith says. The permits spell out the intended changes on the land, and that’s when officials can debate with developers about what’s acceptable.
This case was so different because, although Smith says the law is clear that Johnson needed permits, he not only didn’t have them, he didn’t even apply for them.
Johnson first contends in his reply to the state lawsuits that he didn’t need permits to do his “ranching and farming” activities – noting this property has been ranchland for hundreds of years – but he also maintains the grading was a “mistake” by a subcontractor and not his fault.
Carolyn Campbell is one of the environmental leaders of southern Arizona that sounded an alarm about George Johnson. She heads the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection and has worked for years to hammer out a compromise with developers in southern Arizona to respect the land. The landmark Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, adopted in 1998, has been recognized nationally as a smart and effective way to preserve both habitat and threatened species while accommodating new development.
Campbell also was instrumental in getting the federal government to create the Ironwood National Monument. “It was a big deal to us getting 129,000 acres as a national monument,” she notes.
So she took particular interest in what Johnson was doing.
“It wasn’t much fun working with him,” she says in a telephone interview. “After seeing some of the things George Johnson did on the land, it is hard for me to see any of them as accidental. Who bulldozes a river by accident? Without a permit? Who puts in a concrete culvert by accident? How can you not know? I watched him in public meetings and how he treated everyone – my mouth was wide open that anybody could be that insensitive. He wouldn’t meet with us. We tried, but he dismissed any environmental concern.”
Campbell adds, “I’ve worked with a lot of developers in Pima County. From small to big, the whole gambit. And I haven’t worked with someone like him. Maybe that’s how they grow them in Phoenix. Hopefully, I’ll not have to deal with someone like him again.”