Regarding Mohave County Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter’s op-ed, Rural Arizona deserves balanced groundwater management tools:
Mohave County wants regulations about the withdrawal of our groundwater. Sounds logical but it’s not that simple. It appears like it’s a one-way street. Don’t use our groundwater even if you’re growing food!
The county was finally successful in getting an INA — irrigation non-expansion area — in the Hualapai Basin. That did not limit the amount of water that could be pumped. It only limited how many acres can be irrigated.
There are no rules, regulations, no education and no incentives for people to use the water that falls in the county. The county has and will spend millions putting in detention ponds and dry wells.
There is a failure to slow the water and infiltrate it into the ground that might increase the areas that could infiltrate the water into the ground. Literally tens of thousands of leaky weirs could be installed in small drainages at little expense compared to these detention dams which is one area
These could be installed by property owners if they were educated, to slow, spread and soak the water into the ground near where it falls!
The current system is to direct the water out of the area as quickly as possible. The INA was established because 34,000 to 40,000 acre-feet was not being recharged into the aquifer.
If the aquifer area receives just 1 inch of rain, that amounts to about 97,000 acre-feet.
According to Mohave County, if 5 inches of rain fell annually over the entire county, that would amount to 3.59 million acre-feet of rainwater. Yet, the state wants to spend billions of dollars to bring water into the state from outside sources instead of using the water that falls on us here.
If the state receives the annual rainfall for the state that is about 75 million acre-feet of rainfall! New water! The problem is we lack organic matter in our soils so it can infiltrate and hold the rain so it can be used by plants. Then, what is being done to increase the chance of rainfall? Not much if anything! How much of the agriculture in Arizona is producing regeneratively grown products and animals? The answer again would be, not much!
Let’s create more problems instead of fixing the ones we have. Every resident in Mohave County and the state of Arizona has a responsibility they share with the government to use our water wisely and save it and to create more projects to do those things.
Put permaculture and regenerative agriculture to work! We will have more water!
This just touches on the problems and solutions. You cannot legislate water into the aquifer! This requires actual work!
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.
Share with others
