Marana: Incorporated to Save Its Water

Marana's incorporation story is really a water story. Farming had been happening here for thousands of years. The first peoples grew corn in the Santa Cruz River bottomlands as early as two thousand one hundred years before the present. After World War One, the fields shifted to cotton, wheat, and pecans.

In nineteen seventy-six, Tucson began quietly buying up farmland in Marana and the Avra Valley, targeting the groundwater beneath it. Local farmers saw what was happening and called a meeting. The decision was to incorporate, giving the community legal standing to protect its water rights. On March twenty-first, nineteen seventy-seven, Marana became an official town with about fifteen hundred residents and ten square miles of land.

It worked. Marana held its water. Today the town covers one hundred twenty square miles and approaches sixty thousand people, one of the fastest-growing communities in Arizona.