Wind farm jeopardizes state's largest land exchange

For all his life, it was Fred Ruskin's dream to complete the largest land exchange in Arizona history and consolidate his family's huge northern Arizona ranch into a contiguous private parcel. Now that dream is in jeopardy because of a different dream of building a wind farm on the vast grasslands of the Yavapai Ranch. The wind farm gets a public hearing in front of the Yavapai County Planning and Zoning Commission on Wednesday. The 100,000-acre ranch, located about 30 miles north of Prescott, is a massive checkerboard of the Ruskin land and the Prescott National Forest. Despite extensive controversy, especially over Forest Service land in the Verde Valley that would become private, Ruskin finally won congressional and presidential approval of the Yavapai Ranch Land Exchange in November 2005. "We've been talking about this exchange literally longer than I've been alive," Ruskin told The Daily Courier when then-President George W. Bush signed the exchange into law. His father started the process, and "I've been working on it really hard for 10 years." The federal government saw it as a major opportunity to open up public access to as many as 70,000 consolidated acres north of Prescott...more