The Arizona Supreme Court has issued a ruling that dooms a pair of ballot initiatives, one seeking to raise $42.6 billion for transportation upgrades and another that would permanently prevent the development of almost 600,000 acres of state trust lands.

The court this morning upheld a Maricopa County Superior Court judge’s decision that backers of the TIME ballot initiative waited too long to challenge the Secretary of State’s decision to remove petitions for the measure that contain thousands of signatures.

The lower court’s ruling, issued by Judge Mark Aceto, left the TIME initiative campaign approximately 100 signatures short of the state’s minimum amount of required signatures needed to qualify a proposed change to state law for the ballot.

And Aceto’s ruling impacted the Our Land, Our Schools initiative, a campaign to allow voters to decide whether to permanently conserve 570,000 acres of state trust land and eliminate requirements that some state land be put up for bidding at auction.

Without the option of challenging the Secretary of State’s Office, both campaigns could not have forced the validation of enough signatures deemed unacceptable by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office to qualify for the ballot.

The Our Land, Our Schools campaign fell approximately 160 signatures short of reaching its required amount of signatures, said attorney Paul Eckstein, who worked with both campaigns.

The Arizona Supreme Court’s order, signed by Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, offered no immediate explanation for the ruling, but promised one in the future.

TIME co-chairman David Martin, president of the Arizona Chapter of the Associated General Contractors, said the failure of the initiative to make the ballot does not alleviate the needs for comprehensive transportation solutions.

Citing concerns of rapid population growth in the state and existing air pollution problems, Martin called on the Legislature to address transportation with added urgency in 2009.

“The issue does not go away,” he said. “What I’m hoping is that we raised the issue of transportation to the top of policymakers’ minds at the end of the day. Something has to be done.”

Both initiatives were strongly backed by Governor Janet Napolitano.

“It is a tremendous disappointment that the voters of Arizona will not have a chance to be heard on this issue,” she said. “In my State of the State address in January, I urged the Legislature to act on Arizona's critical need for transportation infrastructure, and they did not. I call on them to move quickly in the next legislative session to address this issue for Arizona.”

The TIME initiative, shorthand for Transportation and Infrastructure Moving Arizona’s Economy, sought to raise $42 billion over 30 years by increasing the state’s sales tax by one penny on every dollar spent.

The money would have been used to improve public transportation systems and state roadways, as well as create a $1.3 billion fund to allow the director of the Department of Transportation to issue grants to government and nonprofit entities to help address environmental concerns.

While backers of TIME insisted the measure was necessary for the state to adjust to a rapidly increasing population coupled with decreased federal funding and lower buying power, opponents wasted no opportunity to disparage the initiative, its components and its proposed sales tax increase.

Steve Voeller, president of the Free Enterprise Club, hailed the Supreme Court’s ruling as a “victory for the taxpayer” and called for transportation debates to be held at the Legislature- not at the polls.

Limited government groups like the FEC also chastised the initiative’s inclusion of the Open Space Conservation and Wildlife Habitat Fund as a buy-off to gain the support of influential environmental interests.

And others, like members of the agricultural community, believed the fund to be entirely unnecessary because federal law already requires that transportation-related environmental damages be mitigated.

In May, news reports revealed a behind-the-scenes deal between the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona and supporters of the TIME initiative, including Gov. Janet Napolitano. The reports prompted cries that the builders were secretly strong-armed into supporting the transportation initiative.

The Home Builders Association of Central Arizona pledged to contribute $100,000 to the TIME committee, and to stay out of the fight over the Our Land, Our Schools state trust land ballot initiative.

The move helped the builders, who in 2006 derailed a similar initiative to reform state trust land law, escape being hit with development-district fees found in earlier drafts of the TIME initiative.

Tom Jenney, director of Americans for Prosperity, told Arizona Capitol Times in May he believed the deal secured between Napolitano and the HBACA to be a “pretty ugly case of political extortion,” while Napolitano chief-of-staff Dennis Burke said at the time he regarded the agreement to be an ordinary product of negotiations.

The arrangement would later dissolve into a open dispute between the trade group and the members of the TIME coalition, which included several prominent members of the business community and the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors.

Shortly before the July 3 signature filing deadline, TIME consultants refused to accept more than 18,000 signatures and a $27,000 check offered by the HBACA. Explaining the refusal, TIME treasurer Martin Shultz said the deal required $100,000 in cash – not a trade amounting to an “unauthorized” in-kind contribution.

Martin said the refusal by consultant company ZiembaWaid to accept Wilhelm’s 18,000 signatures was “not a factor” in the measure’s final disqualification. He called for lawmakers to also reform the initiative process, which he described as too complex and widely recognized as “broken.”

Shultz, a vice-president for the Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, dismissed critics of the initiative and said he did not understand the “constant resistance” put up by opponents while the need for transportation infrastructure improvements is glaringly obvious.

Additional environmental spending is a vastly superior plan to just “paving” the state, said Shultz, who also rebutted criticisms voiced against routing such a large-scale project through the ballot initiative process and not the Legislature.

“Going to the initiative is a cumbersome process and was not our first choice,” he said, adding legislative efforts were directed at chairmen of the House and Senate Transportation committees and Republican leadership in both houses.

Like Martin, Shultz said he looks forward to what solutions will be considered by lawmakers in the coming session in January.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” he said.

Reporter Tasya Grabenstein contributed to this article.