As Mohave County District 1 Supervisor representing rural Arizona, I have a responsibility to ensure that Mohave County’s rural communities have a sustainable future — one that includes fair and balanced groundwater management, if necessary, in order to secure groundwater for many future generations of rural Arizonans.
After reading his op-ed, Hobbs should accede on rural groundwater management, I am left wondering if Robert Robb read the bill. Senate Bill 1221 failed to meet that standard. Instead, it locked rural Arizonans into a broken system that prioritized international and out-of-state agribusinesses over the vast majority of regular rural Arizona homeowners, small businesses, and long-standing family farms and vineyards that have built these Arizona communities for generations.
For years, corporate agribusinesses from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and California have descended upon rural Arizona, exploiting our lack of even basic groundwater protections to pump massive amounts of groundwater — often for export — while leaving our local rural communities to suffer the future consequences.
Most of these corporations have no long-term investment in our rural cities and towns, our small businesses or our families. Their business models include extracting massive amounts of rural groundwater at a very rapid rate, and leaving all other rural Arizonans holding the bag, the price tag, and few options when the wells run dry.
SB 1221 really did nothing to stop this. Instead, it created a framework that allowed for these corporate interests to lock in their unsustainable groundwater usage — in violation of Town of Chino Valley v. City of Prescott — and ensuring that local cities and towns would have even less say over their rural groundwater future.
Unlike urban areas with access to multiple and renewable water sources to round out their water portfolios, most rural Arizona cities and towns depend entirely upon a single groundwater basin for 100% of their forever water. When the water resource is gone, the rural city or town dependent upon that rural basin will also be gone.
When the groundwater is depleted, there are no alternative sources for most of our rural Arizona cities and towns, no backup supplies and no second chances. SB 1221 pushed an approach to rural groundwater management that heavily favored corporate ag interests, but the reality is that each rural groundwater basin has unique hydrological challenges that require data-driven, locally controlled and customized solutions — not a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy that favors corporate agriculture.
A few of the southern counties in Arizona have economies that are heavily dependent upon agriculture — but to the surprise of many state legislators, we are not all farmers in rural Arizona. Many of our Arizona counties have extremely diverse economies (Mohave, Yavapai, Coconino) that are focused on aviation, health care services, manufacturing, distribution, transportation and tourism. SB 1221 failed to do our county economies any justice.
A rural groundwater management framework should be based on the best available hydrology and modeling, ensuring that we do not deplete basins beyond their ability to recover. SB 1221 failed in this regard. It did not establish clear, enforceable conservation measures, nor did it prevent corporate agribusinesses from continuing to lock in severe deficit pumping of massive rural groundwater at unsustainable rates.
Instead, it allowed those foreign-backed operations who arrived here last to claim rural groundwater rights for a majority percentage of the groundwater used annually that should be protected for the regular Arizona citizens who have lived and worked here for generations. Once these corporations extract what they need and move on, it won’t be them paying for new wells, deepening existing ones or dealing with a groundwater crisis — it will be our rural Arizona homeowners, small businesses and local economies left with few options.
The real question is: Why does Arizona continue to allow these agricultural corporations to consume over 72% of Arizona’s water resources, to produce less than 2% of Arizona’s GDP and in some areas where that activity is creating future real public health crises? In areas where regular rural Arizona folks will eventually start to be priced out of the rural groundwater that they need to live and thrive? On behalf of my constituents, when are we going to start having those conversations as drought continues to ravage our state?
If we are serious about protecting the future for our rural Arizona cities and towns, we need a rural groundwater management framework that is:
Our rural Arizona cities and towns deserve better than what we saw last year with SB 1221. We need a balanced and commonsense solution that protects all rural private property values, sustains our local economies and small businesses, and that ensures rural Arizona’s homeowners and small businesses — not just agribusinesses — control the future of our rural groundwater.
I urge state leaders to arrive at a truly balanced and commonsense rural groundwater framework tool that puts all voting rural Arizonans’ interests first.
Editor’s note: Travis Lingenfelter has served on the Mohave County Board of Supervisors since 2021, representing as District 1. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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