PHOENIX — Backed by elected officials from rural areas, Democratic lawmakers unveiled what they hope will be a plan to finally provide some protections against their groundwater drying up.
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PHOENIX — Backed by elected officials from rural areas, Democratic lawmakers unveiled what they hope will be a plan to finally provide some protections against their groundwater drying up.
Legislation introduced at the Capitol would create five new “rural groundwater management areas” where members of local councils could set limits on new pumping. Residents of other areas of the state also could establish their own RGMAs.
Senate Bill 1457 and House Bill 2714 also contain provisions for voluntary water conservation.
Senate Minority Leader Priya Sundareshan acknowledged a similar plan last year went nowhere in the Republican-controlled Legislature. But Republicans, who had advanced their own plan last year to protect agricultural interests, had no better luck in coming up with a deal that was acceptable to a majority of lawmakers.
What’s different this year is there appears to be a sense of urgency, particularly by elected officials of the largely Republican affected communities, who say that unless something is done — and soon — there will be no coming back
Travis Lingenfelder, chairman of the Mohave County Board of Supervisors, says that’s true of the Hualapai Basin on which Kingman sits — one area of the state currently with no regulations on who can pump groundwater and how much.
“We’ve had Saudi, United Arab Emirates and central California corporations who are no longer permitted to over-extract groundwater from where they are from,” he said. “They’ve collectively purchased over 78,000 acres in the Hualapai Valley basin and are currently cultivating 16,500 of those acres for export agriculture.”
Lingenfelder said those companies have collectively drilled more than 100 wells exempt from regulation, with 16 of those capable of pumping between 3,000 and 3,500 gallons per minute. And a single well with a 3,500 gallons per minute capacity can extract more than 4 millions of groundwater a day.
Those are larger than anything owned by Kingman.
“These entities are pumping water at an unsustainable scale,” Lingenfelter said, with users extracting 30,000 more acre feet of water a year than is recharge.
To put that into perspective, an acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons and considered capable of supporting two to three families for a year.
Willcox Mayor Greg Hancock said the problem is already here, what with wells of individual homeowners going dry and the ground collapsing as there is “a race to the bottom to deepen wells.”
Prescott Mayor Phil Goode, in lending his support for the Democratic plan, urged lawmakers to avoid making this political.
“I am a conservative, active Republican,” he said.
“But this issue is not a partisan issue,” he said. “Last time I checked, there wasn’t Democratic water and Republican water.”
What this measure will do, he said, is allow rural supervisors to “control their growth, control their future, and be able to have a broad policy that protects a balance of interests between business development, agriculture and rural communities’ ability to provide future water for current needs and future needs.”
The current problem traces its roots to the enactment of the state’s historic 1980 Groundwater Act designed to address the overdraft in five urban areas. It set up “active management areas” in each of those — Tucson, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Phoenix and Prescott — with requirements to curb pumping.
Only thing is, that bipartisan plan left the rest of the state unregulated.
That gap came into sharp focus when Fondomonte, a Saudi-owned company, bought and leased up large tracts of land in the Ranegras Plain in La Paz County to grow alfalfa to be shipped back to the home country to feed to dairy cattle there.
They did that because Saudi Arabia prohibits such farming in its desert. But Arizona has no regulations.
La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin said there’s nothing in the legislation to stop that.
“It’s private property,” she said.
“They’re there,” Irwin said. “They bought the property.”
What this will do, she said, is keep the problem of groundwater depletion from getting any worse.
“This will prevent any future massive or big water user to be able to come in and do this type of operation,” Irwin said, what with that basin being one of five that would be formed automatically into a rural groundwater management area.
“We need the local control which has been lacking for years,” she said. “We need to be able to decide what’s going to happen within their own counties and put something together from a local perspective.”
Others are in the Hualapai Valley — Lingerfelter’s concern — along with Gila Bend, San Simon and Willcox.
The state Department of Water Resources, using a provision in the 1980 law, actually has imposed an AMA on the Willcox basin.
But Hancock said there are serious issues with the plan. As established, he said, it could restrict the ability of agricultural interests to grow.
“Wine is a big industry in Willcox,” Hancock said.
“Under the AMA, they’re kind of stuck at where they’re at,” he said. “There’s no room for growth.”
By contrast, Hancock said, allowing residents to create a rural groundwater management district — something not now allowed but would be permitted — would be more flexible “and we might be able to grow our wine industry.”
That question of local flexibility is allowed that could be a sticking point. Last year’s Republican plan would have created a complex and legal and governmental process to allow for designation of rural management districts. It allowed some mandatory conservation measures while still protecting the rights of farms to pump groundwater.
That proved unacceptable to Democrats, who wanted a simpler process with fewer hurdles to create a district and giving council members more regulatory authority.
There also was a dispute over who should serve on each area’s water council, who would appoint them and whether they actually had to live within the area.
Sundareshan said what’s different this year is that this bill starts with the benefit of input from both sides. And she said there have been compromises, calling her bill and the mirror legislation sponsored by Rep. Chris Mathis, D-Tucson, “the starting point for rural groundwater legislation.”
Much of the heavy lifting for Republicans and their allies will be by Rep. Gail Griffin. The Hereford Republican, who has championed various bills designed to deal with water supply, chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, Energy and Water, though which any plan must pass.
Gov. Katie Hobbs said she met with Griffin on Wednesday.
“I would characterize that meeting as positive,” the governor said.
“I don’t want to put words in the representative’s mouth,” she continued. “But I feel we both left the meeting with at least a basic agreement that something needs to happen this year.”
Griffin, for her part, would not comment on the meeting. But she said she now reads the 88-page bill before expressing any opinions on what it does — and does not — contain.
Hobbs is exerting her own pressure on lawmakers to come to a deal.
“There is no denying that we are at a critical juncture at managing our water resources,” she said. “And it’s imperative that we take action right now we have the water we need to thrive now and into the future.”
But all that came with a warning. Hobbs said she will use the powers she has to act if lawmakers reject a plan. That power includes what she did through the Department of Water Resources to order creation of an active management area — the kind of rigid control that Hancock said is too onerous.
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