At least now they’re talking about it.
For decades we have known water has been a festering issue in Arizona, with the state’s booming population dependent on declining groundwater and the overburdened Colorado River.
But the voters and the candidates have chosen to rank the issue down somewhere around pack-rat infestations as a political priority. As long as water ran from the tap, it wasn’t an issue most voters or candidates chose to talk much about.
This year it’s different — finally. Both candidates for governor, Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs, have placed addressing Arizona’s water supply as a top priority. They have put out policy proposals with some details, enough to figure out how they view the problem and their top solutions.
Lake has emphasized finding a big new supply. She initially focused on desalination of ocean water but more recently shifted toward the idea of building a pipeline from the Mississippi or Missouri River basins. She also has proposed large infrastructure projects such as dam and reservoir improvements, as well as lining and covering canals.
“Long term, we need more water. Period,” Lake says on her campaign website. “Our population, along with that of the entire Southwest and Northern Mexico continues to grow. Unless we develop a new, sustainable source of water, we will soon be facing a very bleak future.”
Hobbs, on the other hand, dismisses what she called “silver bullet” solutions, focusing instead on water efficiency, conservation and reuse, while also calling for the 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Act to be reformed.
“There is a danger in laser-focusing on any single idea and failing to move forward now on a portfolio of proven water security strategies,” she says in her Plan for a Resilient Arizona. “There are no easy ‘silver bullet’ solutions to Arizona’s water challenges.”
If you’re like me, though, you don’t know enough about the issue to evaluate the candidates’ policies intelligently on our own. So I consulted two out-of-state experts on water in the West to give me their thoughts on the candidates’ proposals.
One, Douglas Kenney, is senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Law School and former director of its Western Water Policy Program. The other, Felicia Marcus, is the William C. Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program, a former regional EPA administrator and the former chair of California’s State Water Resources Control Board.
Kenney told me in an emailed analysis of the candidates’ positions, that he is impressed with the discussion. Here is what Kenney said:
It seems clear that both candidates understand that water scarcity is a critical issue in Arizona, and that past efforts to address this evolving crisis have been woefully inadequate. That is real progress.
Hobbs has a much better understanding of the problem and, particularly, a much better understanding of what the solutions can and should be. In emphasizing the need to “incentivize conservation,” to make decisions through highly collaborative processes, to reform AGMA (the Arizona Groundwater Management Act), and to involve the tribes in a meaningful way, she presents a very reasonable blueprint for moving forward.
The devil, of course, is in the still largely vague details, but she’s at least pointing in the right direction. Her acknowledgement of the overarching importance of climate change, and the water-energy-fire nexus is a sound foundation for the solution-oriented discussions that have yet to occur.
Kari Lake, in contrast, still clings to the notion that the root problem lies in population growth (rather than changing climate), and that big-technology solutions like desalination, new dams, and cross-country water pipelines are the solution. There’s no doubt that clever engineers could implement this vision, but the economics of doing so would only be possible with massive and ongoing federal water subsidies.
To the extent federal monies are available, they are likely to be targeted at cost-effective solutions which, in most cases, are focused on reducing water demand. Lake’s assertion that “we need more water. Period.” is naive and a century late. Sure, that would be a wonderful future, but no southwestern state should make that Plan A. The states that will thrive in an increasingly arid Southwest are those that learn to accomplish more with less water.
Finally, both candidates appear unwilling to address the elephant in the room: agriculture. There is simply no way for the agricultural sector to continue to consume water at its historic pace. The cultural significance of agriculture in Arizona is huge, but the economic contribution does not and will not justify maintaining current levels of water consumption.
Marcus and I went back and forth by email and phone.
I asked her, “How you would describe or categorize the differences in their approaches?” Marcus answered:
Hobbs talks about a range of more immediate tools to use and talks extensively about prioritizing and creating a program. She talks about a range of options and a lot about the process of engaging the range of stakeholders in a more classic governance approach. Lake agrees with some of the examples but reaches for the big dream of bringing in oodles of water from desalination from Mexico or importation from other parts of the country.
These are multibillion- or trillion-dollar pipe dreams that sound good but aren’t realistic because of cost, because they are probably not feasible for a variety of reasons, and because they would take decades to accomplish even if affordable and doable. There is a crisis around the corner in the next year. Even the immediate solutions that deal with more aggressive conservation in the urban and agricultural contexts need to be implemented and accelerated.
“What do you find most realistic and unrealistic in their policies?”
Both could use more detail and action steps, though Hobbs has more that falls into the things one could realistically do sooner. Some timelines and metrics are called for. The notion that desal or massive importation from other states will happen is simply not realistic at the moment.
“What do you think of their approach to agriculture?”
I thought that Hobbs did a good job talking about stakeholders. You do need to talk these things through. There’s no silver bullet. There’s just silver buckshot. You need to talk to a lot of people.
You can farm far more efficiently than the existing models. We need to be thinking about how we, for example, invest in water efficiency without farmers thinking they’re going to lose their water rights. You have to make sure a farmer doesn’t feel like they’re giving up their historic patrimony.
“Do either of them approach the problem with the urgency necessary?”
Nope. But no-one appears to be in many of the seven states, which is both surprising and not surprising. To be fair, to have water be up front in a gubernatorial candidates’ papers is unusual, but not surprising in a historic drought. So they both have that going for them.
