The freeze on new home development in the Buckeye area west of Phoenix, due to a groundwater shortage, could be seen as the canary in the coal mine, Arizona’s water director says.
But the canary’s early warning for Arizonans really occurred three years ago in Pinal County, said the director, Tom Buschatzke. His Department of Water Resources already refuses to issue permits for new developments there that planned to rely solely on groundwater.
More to the point, he said, much of the rest of this drought-stricken state is headed that way absent some new source of water.
Communities are not immune just because they have an allocation of Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project, Buschatzke warned this week in a wide-ranging interview with Capitol Media Services.
That resource, too, is limited. And cities that can’t show their CAP allocations ensure a 100-year supply of water face similar restrictions.
Nor, he said, can developers rely on the idea there may be treated seawater available sometime in the future to justify building projects today.
And Buschatzke said his decision not to release until Monday the analysis of available groundwater near Buckeye was not an effort, as Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said Monday in her State of the State speech, to hide it from the public so developers could keep building.
He acknowledged the request to delay the report did, in fact, come from the staff of Republican Doug Ducey, Hobbs’ predecessor. But Butschatzke said Ducey wanted to have it released when stakeholders came up with “potential solutions that would be put out into the public world at the same time.’’
Hobbs, who took office this month, had a different idea when informed of the report’s existence.
“We can’t tackle this issue if we don’t know what we’re facing,’’ she said after her speech Monday.
Buschatzke said the timing is legally irrelevant: Public or not, Buschatzke said what’s in the report means his department isn’t issuing any permits at all for new residential subdivisions for an 886-square-mile area near Buckeye.
Water shortage gets worse
Release of the report has created a new focus on the fact the state faces a water shortage even as people keep moving here.
“We have this dual challenge, right?’’ Hobbs said. “We have to balance our needs to address the housing crisis with our need to address water shortages.’’
Lawmakers realized decades ago that the state was in a position where the amount of groundwater available would be outstripped by demand.
Arizona has long been entitled to a share of Colorado River water. But it took federal legislation to authorize construction of the CAP canal system, with the idea of reducing the need to pump.
And in 1980, with the CAP in place, state lawmakers approved a historic law designed to cut groundwater pumping in metropolitan areas, with the idea of “safe yield’’ by 2025, the point at which what is being taken out balances with recharge.
But that Colorado River supply, allocated in unusually wet years, has recently failed to fully materialize. The result has been mandatory cutbacks, with more to come if Arizona, California and Nevada don’t agree on a plan to use less water.
The report from Buckeye shows that, for much of the state, groundwater is not a solution for the future as CAP water becomes more scarce.
“We’ve been trying to take the easy way out,’’ Hobbs said.
Population growth at risk?
That leaves the question of whether Arizona can continue to grow at the rate it has. “I don’t know the answer to that,’’ she conceded.
“A lot of what we’re facing in terms of Colorado River shortages is that more of the snowfall is being absorbed and there’s less runoff,’’ which is caused by climate change, she said.
“It’s not something that we can fix by using less water,’’ Hobbs said. “It’s very complicated.’’
But could development actually be stopped?
“There’s a lot in that question I don’t have answers to,’’ Hobbs said. It will become part of what the Water Policy Task Force she announced this week will wrestle with. “What we need to do to balance our need to continue to house people and our water shortages.’’
Buschatzke said none of this should come as a surprise.
“Over the years, what I’ve said is that, given the fact that groundwater’s a finite resource, that we’ve been allocating groundwater since the 1980 Groundwater Management Act for a variety of uses, that it was kind of a matter of time,’’ he said.
Buckeye won’t be the last such area affected, he said. “I can’t exactly tell you who’s next and when that will occur,’’ but the decision will be guided by science, he said.
Can’t depend today on desalination, he says
So what are the options for continued growth?
For the Buckeye area, one is to pump water from the Harquahala Valley even farther west of Phoenix. A special law allows transfers from this basin into more water-starved areas of the state.
There is also some reclaimed water that hasn’t already been allocated to things like providing cooling for the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.
And the Colorado River Indian Community, known as CRIT, recently got federal permission to sign long-term leases for part of its 719,428 acre-feet a year of Colorado River water. An acre-foot, on average, supports a family of three for a year.
But even that has limits. Buschatzke said the tribe is looking at leases of perhaps 25 to 30 years, too short by themselves to become part of any 100-year assured supply for a community or developer.
“But you could take that CRIT water, you could put it under the ground, and you could divide the volume by the appropriate calculations to make it 100 years,’’ he said. “You could pull it out over the 100 years.’’
As for desalination, Buschatzke said the only thing that has happened so far is Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority has directed its staff to talk with IDE Technologies, an Israeli firm, about a possible plant on the Sea of Cortez in Sonora to provide water for Arizona at some future date. But that is far from a sure thing, he said.
“Right now I would not be able to put any potential desalinated water as an approval for anybody’s assured water supply program, none,’’ Buschatzke said.
“There hasn’t been a plant sited, there hasn’t been a plant under construction, it’s not producing any water,’’ he said. “You have to have water being produced.’’
And that says nothing about it being actually available for 100 years.
“Desal can be part of the solution,’’ Buschatzke said. “But none of the desal being discussed ... is going into anyone’s assured water supply at this time.’’
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