The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Tony Davis’s alarming series on the ongoing CAP crisis shows what has been forecasted by scientists for years — because the Colorado River water levels are diminishing, the Arizona water laws are now nearly obsolete. The question now is what to do about this situation.
The makers of the statutes that are the Arizona Groundwater Management Act (GMA) in 1980 had the best information available at the time. The 100-year guarantee of water was seen as innovative. The GMA should have been strengthened after it passed. It was not.
At the state level, “loophole” statutes like instituting the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGRD) in the 1990s started the undercutting of Arizona’s water future. The CAGRD allowed a developer to use water credits from one part of the Active Management Area (AMA) to develop in another part of the AMA, even if the proposed development is in another aquifer in the AMA. This was supposed to help the AMA attain a safe yield. Safe yield by statute “is a groundwater management goal which attempts to achieve and thereafter maintain a long-term balance between the annual amount of groundwater withdrawn in an active management area and the annual amount of natural and artificial recharge in the active management area.”
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Kathleen Harris, writing in May, 2021, with Sarah Porter of the Kyl Institute for Water Policy, explains all the problems with the concept of safe yield in their report, “The Myth of Safe Yield: Pursuing the Goal of Safe Yield Isn’t Saving Our Groundwater.” One of their assessments was that none of the 8 Arizona AMAs would be able to achieve safe yield by Jan. 1, 2025, as legislated by the GMA. And this was before the latest Colorado River flow evaluations.
Locally, Tucson Water’s “One Water 2100 Plan” that came out in September 2023, has a graphic on Page 54 that shows, in the worst possible case called “Thirsty Desert,” Tucson Water would receive 72,000 AF of CAP a year until 2100. Yet there may not be any CAP water available in federal fiscal year 2027 or in later years.
So what to do?
Governor Hobbs needs to call a Special Session of the Legislature now to do the following:
-End the CAGRD system. The CAGRD developer loophole failed Arizonans. It is ludicrous to empty an aquifer in one part of an AMA with paper credits in another aquifer in the AMA. With no large supply of water available, it should be recognized that the CAGRD system failed to help achieve safe yield parameters.
-Put a moratorium on all water meter permits in Arizona. This was recently done in the western Maricopa and in Pinal County. Yet resulting legislation allowed a continuation of unsustainable growth.
-End grandfathered rights to unlimited pumping. This is one of Jagadish Parajuli’s suggestions from his paper “45 Years of the Groundwater Management Act”. (Parajuli is an ASU post-doctorate research scholar at the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.)
-End the concept of the 100-year Assured Water Supply. While understandable in order to have water stability it, ironically, allows developers to push into the long-term future any lack of water availability after the developers cash the checks in the short term.
-End all agricultural CAP deliveries in a 5-year period. Arizona is just too junior in the CAP water food chain to compete with California.
There are other possible actions, but the assumption in the GMA was that the Colorado River would always provide the water we wanted. That assumption has evaporated.
It’s time to face the reality of too much growth and too few options to promote growth.
It’s scary that by 2050, we have a higher probability of assured gasoline supply for our cars than an assured water supply for our families.
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Matt Somers has a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Arizona and has lived in Arizona over 65 years. He is a lifetime student of local water issues.
