Arizona's governor blasts Republicans on rural groundwater bills

Speaking Wednesday at a University of Arizona-sponsored water conference in Tucson, Hobbs said Republican legislative leaders would “rather bury their heads in the sand than move forward.” If anything, the bill they’ve pushed this year has “taken us backwards” compared to the legislation that was under discussion last year, Hobbs said.

But Sen. Tim Dunn of Yuma, a co-sponsor of Republican-backed rural groundwater legislation both years, said many farmers and others in rural communities lost any desire to work with Hobbs this year because of what he termed her “aggressive” action to establish an Active Management Area in the Willcox Basin last December.

The Governor’s Office, legislative Democrats and legislative Republicans have been unable to find common ground on a bill that would for the first time usher in a system to regulate groundwater pumping in some rural areas.

In both years, the two parties have failed to agree on how many areas of the state should be governed as rural groundwater management areas, how much those areas should be able to reduce pumping, and how the management of these areas should be structured.

The current Republican-backed bill would establish such areas in the Willcox Basin, the Gila Bend Basin southwest of Phoenix and the Hualapai Basin in northwest Arizona. The Democratic-backed bill, which now appears dead for the year, would have added rural groundwater management areas in the San Simon Basin in far southeast Arizona and the Ranegras Plain Basin in La Paz County in western Arizona.

Last year, the two parties appeared to come close to compromise but ultimately failed. This year, the two sides appear to be at least as far apart if not farther than last year.

Currently, no groundwater pumping regulations exist in most rural areas outside Arizona’s major metro areas including Tucson and Phoenix, Pinal County and the Prescott and Nogales areas. Douglas-area residents voted in 2022 to create a state-run Active Management Area for their region, and in late 2024 the state designated the highly over-pumped Willcox Basin as a similar management area.

This year, Democratic legislators have pushed a bill backed by some county supervisors in rural counties that would require rural groundwater management areas to order farmers and other users in the area to reduce pumping by 10% during the first 10 years and allow for additional reductions of 5-10% during each of three additional decades. That bill died after it failed to get a committee hearing in either chamber.

The Republican bill would allow for pumping reductions of 10% in the management areas’ first 10 years but nothing beyond that. It has cleared the state Senate but not the House.

Republicans have said the Democratic bill would be regulatory overreach and cause economic harm to farmers. Democrats have said the conservation allowed by the Republican bill would be inadequate when more than half of the state’s 51 groundwater basins are now experiencing groundwater overdrafts in which more water is pumped than recharged.

“But the legislative majority has actually taken us backwards from a bill they worked on and amended last year,” Hobbs said, speaking Wednesday at an annual conference sponsored by UA’s Water Resources Research Center.

Last year’s bill, which died in the Legislature’s closing days, would have allowed for curbs on pumping of up to 15%.

“We know that with a 300-400% overdraft in some areas, 10% won’t move things,” Hobbs said. “They continued their tradition of stonewalling.”

She implied that more state-created Active Management Areas such as the one declared in the Willcox Basin could follow if legislative solutions aren’t agreed upon.

“I’ll take whatever action I can, as in the Willcox AMA. We’re willing to work together with people to find solutions. We’re still willing to negotiate solutions. There is still a small group of legislators standing in the way,” she said.

Dunn, however, said, “The governor’s aggressive, emotional, and hasty maneuver in Willcox killed the willingness of stakeholders to negotiate with her. They believe she is dead set on decimating local economies.

“Hobbs is not a dictator, and she should not act as such. We will continue our work to negotiate with all parties involved, despite the governor’s antics,” he said.