Rural Arizona, land of the free (water)
New goals are nice and all ... But it depends on what you're trying to do ... Abortion rights loom large in CD6 race.
When Gov. Bruce Babbitt stepped in to end years of legislative stalemating and finally get the 1980 Groundwater Management Act passed, this massive new body of law created the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
The ADWR replaced the State Land Department as our top water authority. And the new law created the Active Management Area regulatory system that covers much of central Arizona today.
Since then, the ADWR has been trying to figure out how to actually manage those AMAs.
Most recently, ADWR implemented a “management goal” for the new Douglas AMA which eschews the notion that the basin should even be trying to stabilize their water tables. This issue is currently being litigated in an appeal.
Fun fact: I’m the plaintiff in the appeal.In brief, ADWR’s lawyers have argued that they should defer to the opinions of Riverview, the Farm Bureau, and Californian agriculture investor Nav Athwal, who states that stabilizing water tables is only appropriate for areas that have access to Colorado River water or other surface water supplies, whereas the Douglas Basin only gets its water from monsoon recharge.
“Rather, the management goal for the Douglas AMA should allow for long-term depletion of the aquifer consistent with protection of the agricultural economy and communities within the basin,” Athwal’s letter to ADWR read, in an impressive display of double-speak.
When Katie Hobbs became governor, ADWR Director Thomas Buschatzke, a Doug Ducey appointee, was one of the few state agency heads who she kept on board.
Presumably, you don’t want to change directors mid-stream, and Buschatzke had been leading Arizona’s intense water negotiations with the other Lower Basin states and the federal government over how to implement cutbacks to the states’ Colorado River water allotments.
And while Buschatzke may have been doing a good job with those negotiations, he also has a history of giving short shrift to rural Arizona where basin communities are increasingly requesting regulations on groundwater use.
Since his appointment, he has refused these requests in three rural basins, San Simon, Hualapai Valley, and Sacramento.
"We were the ‘Land of the Free’ for the longest time. We wanted to be able to put wells where we wanted to. We didn’t want monitoring. We didn’t want metering. We didn’t want government coming in and telling us what to do. Until we saw the number of wells that were being put into the ground," said former state Rep. Regina Cobb (R-Kingman).
Buschatzke also convinced Willcox Basin residents to abandon their request for an AMA designation in 2015.
Local resident Randy Redhawk, who led his neighbors in that effort, explained how ADWR’s lawyer assured them that an AMA wouldn’t be able to regulate the water use of the Minnesota-based Riverview “mega dairy” that had just moved into the basin.
When I explained to Redhawk that he had been misled,1 he was disappointed but not surprised.
“You know what our nickname for Buschatzke is? Bullshitzke,” Redhawk said.
But when I spoke with Hobbs’ water policy advisors, they said it wasn't that Buschatzke didn’t want to implement regulations, it was just that his hands were tied by Ducey and the Republican-led legislature.
Or could it be the other way around — Buschatzke is finally addressing rural groundwater problems because his hands are tied by Hobbs?
The proposed management goal for the Douglas AMA raises questions.
And if the courts uphold ADWR’s determination on the goal, it would only confirm opinions that AMAs can’t work.
Hobbs, like many others, including legislators, journalists and academics, has already foreclosed on AMAs being the right tool for the job.
“An AMA’s not gonna change the amount of water that they (corporate agriculture) can pump if they’re already pumping it now,” Hobbs said during her recent visit to the Willcox Basin.
But the law says otherwise.
“The (AMA) plans shall include a continuing mandatory conservation program for all persons withdrawing, distributing or receiving groundwater designed to achieve reductions in withdrawals of groundwater.” (A.R.S. 45-563)
Indeed, in olden times, by which I mean the 90’s, the ADWR stated in their AMA management plans that “in most instances, (the AMA plans) will reduce a farm’s water allotment,” and that agriculture’s “total annual groundwater allotment will be reduced by 21 percent” over 12 years.
That’s because the Groundwater Management Act “requires that the maximum annual groundwater allotment be reduced over time with increasingly stringent conservation requirements,” the ADWR said.
While some say that ADWR is finally stepping up, you could also say they’re kicking the can down the road harder than before.
And Hobbs may succeed in getting shiny new legislation passed, but it’s unclear what that could accomplish if ADWR gets their way and dooms basins like Douglas and Willcox to a future of long-term aquifer depletion with feckless management goals.
What’s in store for Arizona’s rural groundwater?
How will the courts rule on ADWR’s management goal for the Douglas Basin?
Will Hobbs and the anti-AMA legislators find a compromise?
Is ADWR helping or hurting the cause of struggling rural communities?
How many more acres of land will California ag investors start irrigating in the Willcox Basin before a solution is found?
And what about the groundwater basins in La Paz County and other parts of Arizona facing similar problems?
The new saga of groundwater in Arizona is just getting started.
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3.6 billion: The miles between Earth and Pluto, give or take a couple hundred million miles, depending on where they are in their orbits. That’s how far NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, which University of Arizona researchers helped develop, had to travel to find new clues about Pluto’s largest moon.
According to Redhawk, ADWR’s lawyer said that AMAs can only regulate agricultural water use, while the dairy is considered an industrial water user. What they failed to disclose is that the vast majority of their water use is to grow feed for their dairy cows, which is classified as irrigation, not industrial. Not to mention that AMAs do, in fact, require conservation programs for industrial water users as well.
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Great article! One correction: JWST has been at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million km from Earth, since launch. As a space telescope JWST is designed to see things far away, so it doesn't have to travel any further from Earth than that. The much smaller New Horizons spacecraft made the 5 billion km journey to Pluto a decade ago and remains the only spacecraft to have visited Pluto.