The Groundwater Act

History is written by the victors.

This marks the 40th anniversary of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act. The state Department of Water Resources said in a press release:

The 1980 Act was – and remains -- the most sweeping state law in the Nation governing groundwater use. In addition to creating a coherent, manageable system for helping wean Arizona’s most populous regions from groundwater use, it enacted the framework for long-term groundwater-use reduction that continues to the present.

“In Arizona, we stand on the shoulders of giants — pragmatic, visionary leaders whose achievements have shown us the way and enabled our high quality of life,” said Governor Doug Ducey.

If today's Arizonans know of the landmark law at all, it's via the shorthand that new developments were required to show a 100-year supply of water. But it was primarily intended to stop groundwater depletion, which was frighteningly reducing aquifers that had taken centuries or millennia to fill. The most noticeable sign of this phenomenon is subsidence, the collapse of the earth and opening of fissures as groundwater is pumped away.

Groundwater pumping was particularly problematic in Pinal County, which depended on it heavily for agriculture. The irrigation district from Coolidge Dam wasn't nearly enough for the demands of farming there, rapidly giving way to tract houses. The resulting dead landscape along I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson makes it The Ugliest Drive In America.

More about the 100-year supply (now 60 years for the earliest developments) and Pinal County later.

The Groundwater Management Act was far more extensive and complex. It established the Department of Water Resources to administer the act. They created Active Management Areas (AMAs) to police the most at-risk populous regions. Today those are around Phoenix, Pinal, Tucson, Prescott, and Santa Cruz in far southern Arizona. New irrigated farmland was outlawed. Finally, the department took the lead in allocating water from the Central Arizona Project, which was under construction and completed in 1994.

The legislation was the greatest achievement of Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt's administration. This was also when the Legislature was much more sane, with the partnership of Republican House leader Burton Barr and Democratic Senate leader Alfredo Gutierrez.

The press release states:

A central goal of the Act is to conserve the State’s most vital resource, water. It has succeeded at the goal remarkably well.

 

Since 1957, Arizona’s population has grown nearly 500 percent, to 6.7 million residents as of 2018. Its economy has exploded from a gross domestic income of $13.4 billion in 1957 to about $270 billion in 2017. Yet, despite such dramatic growth, Arizona’s total water use actually declined to 1957 levels following the passage of the Act.

 

Today, Arizona uses roughly 7 million acre-feet of water per year – nearly the same amount that Arizona water users consumed more than 60 years ago.

But that's not the end of the story.

Over-dependence on groundwater continues, especially in Pinal County. Its population has skyrocketed from 91,000 in 1980 to an estimated 463,000 last year. Almost all of this has come through exurban sprawl single-family subdivisions. Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke told legislators this past year that Pinal County lacks the water for projected needs. This despite earlier reports that everything's fine.

A critical component of the act, recharging aquifers, remains elusive. Thus, the statutory deadline of 2025 to meet "safe yield" — where groundwater pumping doesn't exceed replenishment — looks impossible to meet.

Also, regulation is only as reliable as the regulators. When I was a columnist at the Arizona Republic in the 2000s, high-ranking sources inside the Department of Water Resources told me they were under constant pressure from development interests to conceal or downplay the actual, dangerous water situation — and this was in the AMAs. Outside them, water extraction is essentially unregulated. This includes developments in Mohave County and probably the giant project proposed outside Benson. I doubt the situation has improved.

The "assured water supply" for Douglas Ranch west of Phoenix? Sure. Buckeye lacks the water for its ambitions to become a "city" of nearly 400 square miles, or even its present growth.

About that 100-year supply. The aspiration was to use the time to get qualified developments off groundwater or dodgy water swaps and onto renewable supplies from the CAP (for newcomers, it's pronounced cee-A-pee, not like baseball headgear). But this has fallen far behind. Meanwhile, it provided a cynical way to kick the can down the road. In a century, the federal government would build desalination plants on the Pacific and canals linking them to Arizona, or a second CAP canal.

Neither of these dreams is likely. The federal government is tapped out in reclamation money and the Colorado is oversubscribed, too many straws in the river, with the original compact based on historic high flow levels and the region now in a long drought made worse by climate change. Nobody envisioned a metropolitan area the size of Las Vegas when the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922 or Arizona v. California was settled in 1963. The Upper Basin remains resentful that it was robbed by California and Arizona — it will never allow Arizona more water.

The original sin of the Groundwater Management Act is that it was predicated on encouraging ever-greater population growth. And increasingly in areas lacking adequate water. In 1980, the state held 2.7 million — as of 2019, it's 7.3 million.

And the CAP — the winning of which my mother dedicated 10 years of her life — turned out to be the flim-flam that California argued it would be during the historic Supreme Court case. Instead of providing water security, it was used for a binge of unsustainable urban and exurban development. The Ponzi scheme only has a few decades to go, no matter how much gravel and palo verdes you put down.

Little of this will be mentioned in the 40-year anniversary celebrations. History is written by the victors.

My losses are incalculable: The Phoenix oasis, citrus groves, Japanese flower gardens, shorter and cooler summers, the wild High Country, a Prescott without the asteroid belt of sprawl and abomination of Prescott Valley, genuine small towns, Sedona without so much as a traffic light. Few know or care.

Forget it, Jonny. It's Chinatown.

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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.

Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Cal Lash]

Yep!
Thanks Jon.

[Cal Lash]

Good Seattle Times column Jon.
I see you still have an admiring group of commentors!

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-depression-shattered-and-changed-america-now-history-may-rhyme/

[Ramjet]

Take away Air Conditioning and the CAP and you have Cal's beloved desert back.

[DoggieCombover]

Unfortunately Cal's (and my) beloved desert is melting away like a snowbank in June. The ongoing fires in the Catalina and Superstition Mountains are taking out Sonoran desert vegetation that will not recover in our lifetimes, if ever. Invasive species such as red brome, bufflegrass, and globe chamomile are fueling unnatural fires.

The Sonoran desert ecosystem is not fire-adapted, but these invasives now can carry a fire and the native vegetation is catastrophically affected. Every time there is a wet winter in the desert, these destructive fires follow. They are beating climate change to the punch in altering the ecosystem.

[Kevin in Preskitt]

I know and I care, Jon. However, I feel powerless to change anything when the vast majority only appear to care about consuming and being entertained. It seems that all we can do is mourn what has been lost and try to adhere to our personal ideals as we adapt to the present reality.

[Veterano]

Wish you would've mentioned in more deatail,
The CAP Sham.."CAGRD" (Central Arizona Ground Water Replenishment District)
And its Groundwater Recharge Tax.
Which is imposed on Property Taxes at the end of the year. Charging new homeonwers who have had homes built on former irrigated lots.

Along with its backdoor elected complacent Crony CAGRD Commision.

Regards,
Veterano

[Joe Schallan]

DoggieC and Kevin in Presskit, you've echoed my sentiments exactly. I first went up the Beeline in 1959 and the passage from exquisite upland Sonoran Desert to piñon and juniper to Ponderosa pine, while skirting riparian biomes along the way, was a drive I looked forward to, always. The journey through that splendid country was every bit as much the reward as any destination. Mostly all gone now. Effectively forever.

With climate change and too many abusers of the land among our seven million, none of it is coming back. My drive through almost any part of Arizona, either destroyed by irresponsible development or wrecked by the "personal freedom" mob, is now elegaic rather than joyful -- a one-car funeral parade for a dead landscape.

[eclecticdog]

Thanks Rogue. Water is nothing but trouble in the desert now. It used to be a blessing, but was cruelly whored out by the real estate hustlers.

[Cal Lash]

When your waters gone
Your Dead!

Google this.
Media Lens.
Six months to Avert Climate Crisis

[100 Octane]

I have often wondered what fuels these fires, so DoggieCombovers comment is much appreciated. At least one of these, bufflegrass, was planted by the government for "erosion control and cattle forage".
"One car funeral parade"...very good Sir I will borrow that in the future.

[Ramjet]

Old west saying: "Whiskey is for Drinkin and Water is for Fighting", is still true today.

[Joe Schallan]

Pertinent charts re: surface and groundwater here.

[AZRebel (no affiliation with the confederacy, so don't tear down my statue)]

In a previous working life I worked for a company that provided insurance coverage for water producers, storage, users and water rights issues. We ended up getting out of that area of coverage. The battles were getting to numerous and too severe. I remember one battle in Colorado over a small trickle of a stream with about a dozen users fighting over its use.

[Mike Doughty]

I find it interesting that most media companies want to know if a fire was” human caused “ They rarely talk about why the fire started or why we have so many fires that we didn’t used to have.I guess they are still afraid of offending the real estate-Industrial complex. Folks,we have these fires because we are building in the desert/mountains or because of the extreme drought.It doesn’t matter if it was “human caused “or not.We have a fire problem because there are too many of us.That’s right,but nobody wants to leave.

[Cal Lash]

T.R. Failure. Not declaring everything West of the Rockies a National Park.

[100 Octane]

Perhaps the next best thing to Cals wish of a Western United States National Park is the John Wesley Powell map of state lines drawn along watersheds.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/

In any event, it's all over now but the shouting.

[Joe Schallan]

Some science on buffelgrass here (abstract and highlights).

[Dave Parish]

Robert Glennon, U of A, is a water policy and law attorney. Recent book will educate. Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It.

[Cal Lash]

And India's water crisis.
And the 8 billion human working on more,
crisis.
But there's hope.
The plague is reducing the number of new births.
And I recieved legal notification that Greenlee County is still beautiful.
The Blue!

[Cal Lash]

Note
See Cronkite news article re Water under Jon's Phoenix and Arizona section

[DoggieCombover]

Bufflegrass is spreading like COVID around here, that is, exponentially. In just a few years, it has migrated up every ephemeral waterway in the Superstion Wilderness and continues, 5 years ago I never saw it there. Same thing with globemallow, I had never seen it before 3 years ago, and after a couple of wet winters, it was ubiquitous, even spreading to urbanized areas.

[Roger]

We are entering an era of desertification. I've warned for years that corporate and state interests (in Cali, AZ and others) would suck this river dry. I've been rebuffed for it many times.

There is a group of investors trying to buy out the Harquahala Valley farmers so they can pool it all into one so they can sell it to the cities as a replacement for the CAP. The groundwater in that valley in total is about what Phoenix uses in 1 year.

The Arizona Hydrological Society had a guest speaker this past Tuesday that discussed the Arizona Arabia links and how we let them take as much as they want in rural areas of the state- never mind that the communities nearby are losing their water (Kingman is a good example). All of this is legal. The state doesn't care.

No one factors in the environment. The animals. The plants. The very thing that makes this desert so beautiful is being destroyed daily (mines, expansive communities, flora fauna, public lands).

The farmers in Pinal County, once the CAP is gone, have stated in industry meetings that mining groundwater to depletion is expected to be the new normal. In other words, the CAP was a short term bandaid to the cancer that is perpetual growth at all costs. Capitalism.

I love this desert. I hate the politics and business of this state. We are considered an extraction state and yet we pull in more federal dollars than we are taxed at. I wouldn't be surprised to see a study that shows more wealth has left the state than has been brought in.

Much like what these wildfires are doing, I say burn it all down. The system is incapable of reform.

[Joe Schallan]

DoggieC -- you mean "globe chamomile," a.k.a. stinknet, the invasive species from South Africa. Globe mallow is an Arizona native and adds much to our spring desert wildflower display.

[Cal Lash]

Bordering on Revolution?

[Cal Lash]

"your country is desolate,your cities are burned with fire;your land,strangers devour it in your presence,and it is desolate,as overthrown by strangers"
-ISAIAH 1-7
A entry to the beginning of Red Line by Charles Bowden

[DoggieCombover]

Joe, you are correct, I had identified it as globe chamomile in my first post above, had flowers on the brain in the second. Globemallow also had a very good year this spring.

[Cal Lash]

The 1922 Colorado Compact.

"The history of the Colorado River is progressive murder."
Charles Bowden

In "Wrenched From The Land"
A compilation of readings in a new publication.

"Hoover dam killed the Colorado Delta that was considered Earths greatest Wilderness by Aldo Leopold. And murdered the Vaquitos."

[Cal Lash]

Front pages: Russian Bounty hunters.
Trump didnt know?
Trump doesn't know chit and could only care if it would make him look good.
The whole scenario looks like more bullshit to keep the world wars going.