Wells are going dry in rural Arizona, leaving residents struggling. A recent investigation by The Arizona Republic and a documentary by NBC News tell the stories of residents of groundwater-dependent regions within La Paz and Cochise counties whose households have been affected by falling water tables. When wells do not reach the diminished aquifer, families have to haul water from friends’ properties or spend thousands of dollars to dig new wells and replace equipment. The uncertainty pushes down property values.
The affected residents have at least one thing in common: their neighbors. Each lives near a large corporate farm with wells over a thousand feet deep, pumping water to irrigate the desert farmland. An installment of The Arizona Republic’s investigation identified seven companies, most of which are from out of state and two of which are foreign enterprises, as major groundwater users. The earliest arrived in 2012.
Arizona must effectively allocate and protect its groundwater, which recharges very slowly in its desert climate. Management of the scarce, semi-renewable resource of groundwater is crucial in an age when climate change renders uncertain the future of renewable water sources such as the Colorado River. Arizona’s state lawmakers are preparing to add regulations this legislative session, breaking with previous inaction; but political roadblocks, ideological disagreement, and the continued prioritization of today’s economic concerns inhibit action to avert a long-run catastrophe. Challenging as it may be politically and economically, the only clear hope down the line is ending overdraft by imposing a state-wide safe yield requirement, whereby no more water than is recharged into an aquifer may be pumped.
A Crisis Staved Off
Arizona’s history proves the state has the capacity to forge the political agreement necessary to pass water regulation. As Arizona’s population grew after World War II, groundwater overdraft developed into a major concern, as it lead to aquifer depletion and land subsidence. The federal government funded a canal system providing Colorado River water to central Arizona on the condition that the state regulate its aquifers.
This pressure gave rise to the Groundwater Management Act of 1980, a progressive piece of legislation that imposed usage restrictions. In an interview with the HPR, University of Arizona law professor and water policy expert Robert Glennon highlighted three provisions of the act: “[It] first put a moratorium on new wells. Second, it put limits on how much water people with existing wells can pump. And third, it made those rights transferable.” The third is crucial, considering the act’s implementation “in a state where growth is like a religious tenet.” A law sacrificing development in favor of conservation would have been a non-starter, while the transferability provision allows developers to buy existing rights, balancing growth and conservation concerns.
But this was not the only provision needed to gain the support of opponents of regulation. Glennon explains that during the Act’s planning, “the rural areas made it plain that they wanted nothing to do with it. They wanted to be left alone.” To earn bipartisan support, the act was written so that its regulations would apply only in designated Active Management Areas, mostly urban and suburban.
At the time, these AMAs included the most at-risk areas, so a water crisis was averted. But the last several years of large-scale farming using groundwater for irrigation have made unsustainable the 1980 compromise that left some areas unregulated. Glennon says he considers the resistance to regulation in rural areas to have been a “folly” in the first place. Now, a new cooperative effort is in order.
The Path Forward, and Its Roadblocks
While new regulations have been proposed in recent years, the resistance to regulation that affected the decision-making around the Groundwater Act survives. In an interview with the HPR, Tom Buschatzke, head of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, recalls the 2017 Governor’s Water Solutions Conversation, which produced proposals for mandatory reporting of water use for all non-exempt wells (exempt wells being small domestic ones) and the inclusion of projected water use in the determination of new Irrigation Non-Expansion Areas (regulatory units within which new irrigation is banned to protect at-risk aquifers), for which only existing water use can currently be taken into account. However, neither proposal gained sufficient momentum among legislators to make it into a bill during the 2018 legislative term.
The current legislative session is different. Rep. Kirsten Engel (D-District 10) has dropped a bill to require mandatory metering of non-exempt wells, and another that resembles Buschatzke’s proposal to change the requirements for determining INAs. Rep. Regina Cobb (R-District Five) said in an interview with the HPR that she also supports changing this determination method from “retrospective” to “prospective.” Her proposed bill would create a regulatory unit called a Rural Management Area, which local officials could impose in their area to require aquifer monitoring.
But dropping a bill is not enough — past legislative pushes for regulation have failed. Cobb has been drafting water regulation bills since 2015, and says several have made it to committee but were never heard. Her explanation is that legislators who “philosophically oppose” all regulation prevent such bills’ progress. Buschatzke seems to agree, saying that rural Arizonans tend to want minimal government intervention because they “view themselves as independent spirit-type folks.” Reasons for opposition also include practical considerations. Glennon mentions that “the cattle growers and the real estate lobby are two very powerful political interests,” and says he thinks agricultural interests have significant sway, too.
Many legislators share this anti-regulatory sentiment. Reps. Gail Griffin and Steve Pierce (R-District One) told the HPR that they oppose mandatory metering of wells, with Pierce citing his concern that another unwelcome incursion — the introduction of taxes on usage above a certain amount — would follow. Griffin also opposes the suggested change to INA requirements. “Well, they can’t do it on projections… That’s not science, it’s somebody’s guess,” she said.
The political divide remains primarily along rural-urban lines, as Engel describes it in an interview with the HPR. With cities favoring regulation and rural areas opposing it, it coincides substantially with the party breakdown (Democrats concentrated in urban regions and Republicans more so in rural ones). While Cobb, a rural Republican who describes herself as an “opposer of regulation” but supports new water law, is a counterexample to this trend and suggests the possibility for bipartisan cooperation, the Republican majority forms an obstacle to expanding water law.
One specific objection to increased regulation is the view of groundwater rights as inextricable from land ownership. For instance, to the question of what the ideal groundwater legislation would be, Pierce responded, “I own a lot of land. I own the water under the land. And I think everybody here does. […] Ideal legislation? I don’t know. We already own it. So are they going to take it away?” Seen as government seizure of property, groundwater regulation will not go over well with many rural Arizonans.
But this concept of groundwater rights may be founded on a misunderstanding of property. According to Glennon, one can have a property right only to something from which one can exclude others. Regarding groundwater, “that right is good only as long as and until someone comes in next door with a longer straw, a bigger, more powerful pump, and starts sucking the water out from underneath their property, but eventually they suck it out from underneath your property,” said Glennon. This is exactly what appears to be causing residential wells to go dry near large farms.
Despite the resistance, there are grounds for hope that change can happen. Buschatzke emphasizes the reconstitution of the Governor’s Water Augmentation, Innovation, and Conservation Council, which now includes legislative membership. While he expects contention in the council and doubts that much regulation will get passed, he said the “process was certainly designed to build up the consensus to actually have support, and maybe things can move forward in the legislature unlike 2018.” Engel offers the recent publicity around water depletion as a reason for optimism. “I do think that the press on this is making a difference. … I just feel the majority party just must be feeling the pressure that they need to address this issue,” she said. Garnering greater support among Republicans is indispensable to passing regulatory legislation, and the troubling reporting on aquifer depletion and failing residential wells may help.
Engel retains some scepticism, however. “I’ve said that about other issues and nothing’s happened, so we will see. We also have the issue of climate change here, and [press coverage] doesn’t seem to be making any difference on that score,” she said. While the existence of specific proposals for regulation appears promising, it remains to be seen whether regulatory efforts can overcome political opposition.
Planning for the Long Haul
Given the resistance, it is unsurprising that sweeping regulatory innovations have been absent in Arizona since 1980. Meanwhile, considering the long-term effects of overdraft, the policy has far to go beyond preliminary measures towards a stable solution.
One obstacle to long-run planning is the short-run economic effect of limiting water usage. Buschatzke cites the central role of agriculture in the economies of communities in rural Arizona as the reason certain regulatory outcomes are impossible. In areas where groundwater is the only means of irrigation and agriculture is the main “economic engine,” groundwater regulation would “tie up your economic activity,” he explained. He does not believe a safe yield policy prohibiting aquifer decline is viable, as in “most of these areas, the recharge is minimal: way, way less than what is needed to support population and economy.” Therefore, he favors the alternate policy direction of incentive-based conservation schemes.
However, there is expert backing for the opposite view that despite current obstacles, safe yield will eventually prove to be the only viable option. Engel, who besides serving as a legislator is an environmental lawyer and professor of law, said, “I think something like a safe yield goal for the entire state or for each aquifer would actually make a lot of sense.” She concedes that it would be difficult to achieve this aim, given that unlike areas currently subject to safe yield goals, the rural areas in question do not have a renewable water supply that can be used to recharge the aquifers. Nonetheless, in the long-run, safe yield is a necessity. “Otherwise, we’re using up a non-renewable resource faster than it’s being replaced and then we’re just going to run out of it,” Engel explained. By this logic, an economy based on groundwater overdraft is bound to collapse eventually. Glennon says he shares the view that safe yield is necessary in the long run.
Other solutions are less than promising. Buzchatzke believes that desalination will rise to the occasion before the groundwater runs out. However, the idea is in its early stages — Buschatzke says plant design has not begun, as the planners are still looking at “potential sites, potential methodologies” — and drawbacks of the technology may prove prohibitive. Engel cites the technology’s expense, energy-intensiveness, and brine byproduct to justify her scepticism: “I don’t really think it’s a viable solution, at least not in the short term. So I think we should be working on other things and not giving people the false hope that that’s going to save us,” she said. In any case, according to the plan currently in the works, the plant would be in Mexico, providing water to that country in order to free up for Arizona’s use some of the Colorado River water currently reserved for Mexico. The groundwater-dependent rural regions of the state do not have access to river water, so a future where desalination serves their populations and economies is even further away, if feasible at all.
Reforming agriculture to match the natural resources and thereby minimize water use is perhaps a better focus of efforts than finding a new water source. Rita Maguire, current water lawyer and former head of the ADWR, raises this question: “Do we need to be conscious of how much water [crops] use? Is it good to be raising alfalfa? […] Maybe that shouldn’t be grown in Arizona,” she said in an interview with the HPR. Choosing crops based on their compatibility with the desert environment would be a step towards a sustainable future.
This strategy has precedent, albeit on a relatively small scale. For instance, Ed Mendoza, a proponent of food stewardship and local agriculture, runs a small farm on which he grows mesquite trees. These trees are native to the area and resistant to drought. As a crop, he explained in an interview with the HPR, they are an efficient investment of water as they do triple duty: they provide food, shade that limits evaporation around crops planted beneath them, and eventually, wood. Brian Wong operates on a larger scale, running BKW Farms, which spans 294 acres and grows organic produce. Wong told the HPR in an interview that his farm is growing white sonora wheat, a crop native to the area and tolerant to the high heat and aridity of the Arizona desert.
Safe yield might be hard to achieve, but there are changes, like agricultural reform, that Arizonans can make towards this goal. While the agriculture-based economy might suffer now if water use is limited, ultimately, the catastrophic effect of unfettered pumping will render groundwater-dependent areas uninhabitable and farming impossible. Solutions must account for this long-term trajectory.
Part of a Greater Danger
When immediate economic and political considerations loom large while long-term consequences are given insufficient weight, sustainability suffers. The issue is neither limited to Arizona, nor at its worst in this state. California finds itself in a similar predicament — in fact, one of foreign conglomerates that farms land in La Paz county has bought farmland in the California desert as well. California lags behind Arizona in terms of regulation, lacking an equivalent to the Groundwater Management Act until 2014. According to a 2018 study, 13 states, including Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas, reported that their groundwater supply was in a critical condition, meaning that more than 30 percent of each state’s water use is supplied by groundwater and its aquifers are declining.
Given the insufficiencies of the state’s current regulation, Arizona’s position as a historic leader of groundwater policy in the American Southwest is troubling, and renders apparent the practical urgency and political difficulty of strengthening conservation efforts in the region. In the context of worsening droughts and uncertain precipitation and river flow caused by climate change, without adequate protections for its groundwater, the American Southwest finds itself in a precarious position.