Gilbert considers water plans while awaiting Colorado River report
Residents being asked to make conservation efforts, especially outdoors
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Arizona's cuts under DCP
Central Arizona Project had junior rights on the Colorado River and were subject to larger cuts proportionately than some other users in the basin's states under the Drought Contingency Plan. Larger cuts still have been ordered by the U.S. Department of Interior.
Gilbert residents could in the coming months be asked to step up their game when it comes to water conservation.
What will be asked of residents depends largely on what is in a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation report on the river due Aug. 15. That report will assess the river’s elevations and determine how severe the shortage at the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs is—and just how much water users will be allowed to take.
Among those users is the Central Arizona Project, of which Gilbert is one of its customers. The town gets about 29% of its water portfolio from CAP, according to officials.
The supply cuts stand to be substantial, officials said, as the river’s elevation levels have been falling far more rapidly than anticipated than projected in the most recent Bureau of Reclamation reports. As a result the U.S. Department of Interior in June warned the three states on the river’s lower basin they could expect to have 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water withheld in 2023, on top of what was agreed upon in 2019’s Drought Contingency Plan.
What it will mean for Gilbert is uncertain, but officials expect they can start to unpack that when the reclamation bureau makes its report Aug. 15. That’s also when Department of Interior expects the seven Colorado River basin states to come to an agreement on how they will keep those millions of acre-feet of water in the reservoirs.
“Everyone has their eyes on that,” Gilbert Water Resources Manager Lauren Hixson said. “I don’t know that Aug. 16 we will be ready to say exactly what it means. Obviously they need to take it and figure out how does it impact our different water supplies — is there different priorities on the river and so on.”
Moving to further stages would require Town Council action, but staff said it is possible cuts could be severe enough to move the town past stage two and to stage three, which would require demand reduction measures for all town water customers.
However, staff said they hope to keep the town in stage one for as long as they can. In addition to education effort, the town is offering tools and programs to help customers conserve water and stretch resources.
Situation on river
In 2019, the seven states on the Colorado River, Mexico and other river water users came together to update their strategies for dealing with the historic drought, which was making previous plans obsolete. The Drought Contingency Plan was an agreement on voluntary reductions and conservation efforts as elevations at the reservoirs fell.
A “Tier 1” shortage was declared in 2021 for 2022, and most officials felt it was probable that a Tier 2 shortage would be declared this year for 2023.
The tiers trigger cuts in water supply to customers to preserve elevations. Tier 1, for example, meant Arizona would get a 512,000-acre-foot reduction in supplies to its users, mostly CAP.
Officials said they believed the plan would likely keep lakes Mead and Powell above operational levels for reservoir dams through 2025, but poor hydrology the past two years has accelerated the decline of water elevations in the reservoirs.
“The reservoirs have reached critical elevations where the next couple years, water supply and power supply from Powell and Mead are of greater concern, and the Bureau of Reclamation cannot allow those reservoirs to get lower than what's projected, given supply and demand,” Hixson said. “And really that's been exacerbated by the low inflow into the river system over the last three years.”
Hixson said that while snowpack has been running at 80-90% of projections, runoffs into the river have been at 30%-50%, a result of dry soil and hotter spring temperatures causing earlier spring runoffs.
Eric Braun, Hixson’s predecessor and now the town’s assistant director of public works, likened it to a math equation where supply from inflows must balance with demand from customers.
“DCP was supposed to affect the other side of the equation by diminishing the demand on the system, and what we have seen is that it wasn't the perfect solution that we had hoped for,” he said.
For example, Braun points out that California, which has senior water rights on the river, actually is taking out more water than it was alloted under DCP because it can under certain parts of the agreement.
“I think that's why it (elevation drop) has accelerated — both of those parts of the equation have changed in the wrong direction,” he said.
Officials said all users on the river are going to have to come together to make an agreement on keeping an addition 2 million to 4 million acre feet in the reservoirs. Hixson called it a “huge, astronomical number.”
Assistant Town Manager Mary Goodman noted that it took years for DCP to be hammered out, and it involved less cuts than this newest number, for which the users have only been given a couple months to come to an agreement.
The plans has four stages: water education, demand reduction facilitation, demand reduction requirements and demand reduction curtailment. Each stage has its own triggers and actions. Gilbert entered Stage 1 at the time of the latest calls for reduction by river water users.
Hixson said this stage is calling on people’s desire to be good stewards of the resource that is not to be wasted in the hot, dry desert. She also noted that between 60%-70% of usage is outdoors so much of the focus is on efficient watering of landscapes.
“If you're overusing it outdoors, we're not getting that water back into our wastewater system,” she said. “And therefore we can't reclaim it and recharge it and help our resiliency. It's just waste.”
Stage 2, when projected demand is greater 110% of the upcoming year’s renewable supply, is meant to build on Stage 1’s education efforts and deploy water-saving, cost-effective incentives for water customers meant to make water efficiency gains more practical for them, according to plan documents.
Stage 3, triggered when the summer peak daily projected potable demand is greater than or equal to 92% of the daily physical supply availability of the upcoming year, is more proscriptive. A water shortage surcharge could be placed on water use and requirements for limits on the total area of overseeded turf and on day and time of landscape watering could be implemented, according to the plan.
“We'd be having dialogue with council to figure out what would be the appropriate stage,” Hixson said about advancing into further stages. “There will be months of advance planning to bring us to that point.”
Goodman said the town is exploring launching some rebate programs in the fall to incentivize customers to look at landscaping differently.
“The thing about that 100-year plan is that it builds in these times of shortage into that planning horizon,” he said. “So we've got resiliency and some level of redundancy built in for when some of our supplies decrease over time.”
Tools for customers
The town has different tools for customers who wish to contribute to the conservation effort or at least save a little money on their water bill.
One tool staff members recommend is purchasing smart irrigation controllers, for which the town offers training. The controllers monitor weather and adjust a resident’s watering schedule for conditions on site, including turning off a scheduled watering when it rains.
The town offers landscape workshops in the fall for those interested in transforming theirs into something more sustainable.
“There's ways to do it, to produce shade and produce that cooling effect and to maintain the beautiful environment that we have here,” Braun said. “We just have to change our mind-set that the environment that is natural here can be beautiful, and it is beautiful. We don't have to have a California coastal environment be transplanted here or the Midwest Ohio environment transported. Gilbert's a beautiful place. The strip of grass next to the street is not what makes it beautiful.”
The town also has a Water Wise program for businesses, schools, homeowners associations and other local organizations that help them get their water use toward a targeted number appropriate to their site.
“Even though this is happening faster than we anticipated they would happen, we’ve still been planning for this for a very long time,” said Public Works Director Jessica Marlow, also a former town water manager. “People are still going to have water at their taps. It’s not like they’re going to wake up and there’s no water.”
The town, too, is making efforts on its end, increasing facility audits, using smart controllers in parks and requiring them by code on new builds and changing out landscaping where it makes sense.
Marlow points to the recent street renovations on Val Vista Drive near Baseline Road, where landscaped medians had turf put in requiring no water, saving not only water but damage to the road from irrigation runoff.
Braun said what residents can do boils down to a couple things.
“They need to get a handle and understanding of what their watering use should be and what it is,” he said. “That's goal number one, be efficient with what you have. Goal two then is think about what you have and is that the appropriate landscape for where you live? I'm not saying all grass has to go, but if the only person that walks on it is the landscaper when he is mowing, it's probably a good opportunity for you to be more efficient with what you have, maybe change what you have.”
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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