ABSTRACT
Golf courses, retirement complexes, and rapid development are most commonly associated with Maricopa County, Arizona, and its burgeoning cities, including Scottsdale, Glendale, and Phoenix, now the fifth-largest city in the United States. Open space preservation in Maricopa County took off in 1924, when Senator Carl Hayden and President Coolidge helped Phoenix save two mountain ranges south of the city. Maricopa County itself began preserving its mountainous terrain in 1954 and then accelerated its parkland acquisitions after a 1970 federal act allowed the county to buy land from the federal Bureau of Land Management for the extremely reasonable price of $2.50 per acre. In 1996, the Maricopa Association of Governments adopted Desert Spaces, a regional open space plan that serves as a framework for all levels of government to cooperate in the creation of a coordinated open space network providing recreational trails as well as wildlife corridors.
