TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- A Canadian family is objecting to the Department of Homeland Security's $300 offer to access its three Arizona properties for border security surveys, calling the compensation "ridiculous."

Toronto developer Alex Mills is the only one among the owners of 12 Arizona properties contesting government condemnation proceedings in any way.

Federal prosecutors, who also are suing landowners in Texas and California, filed condemnation lawsuits in January. The government wants access to the land to survey for border fences, roads, vehicle barriers and other border security measures.

Mills' lawyer has filed court documents replying to the government's condemnation notices and complaints, disagreeing with the compensation offered. Mills is general manager for three of his family's enterprises, which own parcels of land totaling nearly 170 acres about 10 miles east of Nogales, Ariz.

Mills is not objecting to federal authorities going onto the properties, his lawyer, Ronald Lehman, and Department of Justice spokesman Andrew Ames said.

But Mills wrote the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix in February objecting to the government's action "without further consultation with the defendants as required" under language in a recent appropriations bill signed into law.

While most border landowners contacted in the three states have allowed the government to come onto their properties, some landowners have not, leading DHS to file condemnation lawsuits.

All but one of the dozen Arizona lawsuits involves land in a Santa Cruz County subdivision called Buena Vista Ranch Estates.

The Arizona condemnations are not as extensive as in Texas, where the government has sued more than 50 south Texas landowners this year for temporary access to survey for border fencing.

Owners of nine of the Arizona properties have not contested the government's efforts, which seek six months of access to the lands through temporary condemnation.

No hearings have been set and none are required in any of the Arizona cases, a Justice Department spokesman said.

Mills said he had spent well over $1,000 on legal costs through Feb. 22, and added, "The compensation proposed by your client thus-far is unjust to the point of being ridiculous."

In contrast, landowners in many of the challenges to similar condemnation proceedings pending in Texas are focusing on objecting to entry, or access, itself.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who is handling the Texas cases, held hearings recently and has signed orders in all cases where a lawyer or property owner did not show up to protest. There are several other cases still awaiting an order, and yet others where a hearing was postponed.

In one case, the government dismissed its lawsuit against the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College and agreed to explore alternatives with school officials to building a fence.

Hanen has ordered the government to negotiate with owners over the price of access to the land. That extra step has slowed the government in its goal to complete nearly 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border by the end of 2008.

"Our intention is to try to work as cooperatively as we can with the United States to try to resolve our objectives and create this fence in a manner which will have the most minimum impact possible for a very beautiful and unique part of the country," Lehman, Mills' lawyer, told The Associated Press.

If the government decides it needs the land for which it has asked for a temporary easement - the right to use the land - "the next step would be to file a more substantive condemnation action where they would seek to acquire our land," Lehman added.

The land in the Nogales area was subdivided during the 1950s from the Buena Vista Ranch into the Buena Vista Ranch Estates, with most of the parcels ranging from less than an acre to about 3 acres. Mills and his recently deceased brother, Donald Mills, owned 10 acres through the Alex Mills Development Corp., 29.1 acres through AMDC LLC and 130 acres through WAMIR LLC.

In three virtually identical filings in U.S. District Court, Lehman said the Alex Mills Development Corp., AMDC or WAMIR did not object to the government entering the property on a temporary basis to do surveying and testing.

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