Local Opinion: Arizona's Ponzi scheme of water laws will fail us

By Matt Somers

Special to the Arizona Daily Star (Jan. 29, 2023)

Matt Somers is a nearly 65-year resident of Arizona, a community activist, and a 1983 graduate of the University of Arizona.

Just as a Ponzi scheme fails when the economy becomes sour and people want their money back, the land trade in Arizona is just the same. Except, in this case, it’s not the dollars that go missing, but the water.

There are always technology “fixes” that are suggested, even planned, for future water supplies. Once it was using nuclear bombs to build a canal from the Columbia River to Nevada. Another was towing icebergs to the Pacific Coast (if there will be any icebergs left in a few hundred years). Desalinating water from the Gulf of California has been a con for over 50 years. There’s always been outlandish ideas.

Unfortunately, the Republican-led Arizona business interests have always been suckers for the con. Remember when Elizabeth Holmes and her people at Theranos dazzled the Arizona leadership with a comprehensive blood test from a drop of blood? She’s going to jail. Remember when Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order allowing Uber to test self-driving car vehicles in Arizona? A pedestrian died in Tempe in 2018. Remember the natural gas-powered cars fiasco of 2000, when Republican Jeff Groscost got a law passed to give huge incentives to those who change their gasoline-powered car to alternative fuels? That cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The slow-motion trainwreck of water availability has been known for decades. The earliest comprehensive book about this coming wreck was Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” published in the early 1990s. In 2011, “Dead Pool” by James Lawrence Powell warned of future of water overallocation. Just a few years ago, Kathleen Ferris and Sarah Porter’s report, “The Myth of Safe-Yield: Pursuing the Goal of Safe-Yield Isn’t Saving Our Groundwater,” showed that the goal of the Groundwater Management Act (GMA) for Safe Yield was a mirage.

The information is out there to show groundwater and surface water is not available for Arizona’s future population growth. Yet here we are — stuck in the same big money-making cycle that, eventually, can not continue.

In the 1960s and 1970s Ned Warren was, by his own words, the self-proclaimed “godfather” of Arizona land swindles. He knew that Arizona has always been a land of con artists who promised the moon and didn’t deliver, allowing the quick-buck artist to reap the rewards, especially selling land without water.

What Ned Warren didn’t do is make his swindles legal. While the 1980 GMA was only a start to address water availability, it was still too stringent for developers. So the Republican leadership created the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CARGD). The CAGRD acts as a credit card allowing developers to build now and kick the debt down the road, or, in essence, privatizing today’s profit and socializing future expenses.

The Feds can’t help us. With about 46% of Arizona CAP water controlled by the tribes, do you think the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe of New Mexico, will force a reduction of water without compensation to the tribes, who have higher priority, in order to save Lakes Powell and Mead?

In less than a hundred years when Saddlebrooke becomes a ghost town, when Goodman Water developments like Eagle Crest dry up, when Metro Water can’t provide water for the huge developments planned in the southern Avra Valley, when Green Valley turns brown, and when Phoenix power elite force Tucson Water to stop “wheeling” CAP water to Oro Valley and Vail because there’s not enough, we will know the greatest con game in Arizona’s history is over.

And unlike the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of banks in 2008, in which we recovered, the taxpayers and ratepayers in Arizona will be left pretty much high and dry with little hope for future water supplies.