Water In Arizona

Proposal: No water, no rural growth

 

Water shortages that plague fast-growing communities in the White Mountains and near Flagstaff could spread across rural Arizona unless the state imposes some of the same controls it did in the state's metro areas.

In a study to be released today, the nonpartisan Arizona Policy Forum recommends that developers not be allowed to build homes where a long-term water supply can't be proved and that local governments be given the authority to reject projects if water isn't there.

Without those measures, the group warns, the demand for water will produce new conflicts, strain fragile economies and ultimately spawn long-term water shortages.

It would be up the state Legislature to approve changes to the water code.

"We're at a sort of a crossroads," said Roger Manning, executive director of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association and one of the study's authors.

"We either make some choices or live with the consequences. There's a whole area of the state where water is not guaranteed."

Manning was among 17 leaders from around the state to study the rural water situation for the Phoenix-based policy-research group, which included representatives from Yavapai and Gila counties and Yuma and Flagstaff.

The final report offers three recommendations that the leaders said could help avert a water crisis in areas of the state outside Phoenix, Tucson and Prescott. It would:

· Require developers or communities to show a 100-year water supply before new homes were built. Under existing law, a builder can sell a lot or a house even if state engineers say there's not enough water. Subsequent buyers don't have to be informed of that finding.

· Require proof of a 100-year water supply before a new well could be drilled for residential use.

· Establish a resource fee of $500 per house to provide matching funds to find new water sources, purchase the water or build pipelines or canals to move it from one place to another.

The proposals are likely to run into opposition from developers and even some rural communities fearful of impeding growth.

Members of the study group said the real question is whether state and local governments should continue to allow growth when the water doesn't exist to support it.

"This is not a growth-control mechanism," said Larry Tarkowski, public works director for Prescott Valley, one of the state's fastest-growing rural communities.

"This is water-resource management."

The report's proposals, which suggested changes to state groundwater laws, will be submitted to the governor and members of the Legislature, but Arizona Policy Forum will leave lobbying for those changes to water managers and local leaders.

The report identifies several areas where growth has already tightened water supplies and led to brief shortages in some instances.

Overpumping has occurred in Douglas, Willcox and the Upper San Pedro Basin, while shallow aquifers plague areas in the Tonto Creek Basin, leaving Payson, Pine and Strawberry with almost annual shortfalls.

Drought has exacerbated problems in those areas and farther north in Williams and Flagstaff.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources has focused on many of the same issues through its rural watershed initiative, but that effort has suffered at times under budget cuts and conflicting laws.

The real problem facing rural communities, the policy group found, was that since 1980, they've operated under a different set of laws than do Phoenix, Tucson and other more urban areas.

"In retrospect, that was probably a horrendous mistake," said Manning, who represented rural interests at the time the code was adopted.

The key to the Groundwater Management Act of 1980 was the requirement that all new subdivisions prove a 100-year water supply before construction could even begin. That supply had to include renewable surface water, such as that delivered by the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

However, cities and counties lack authority to reject projects if they don't have an adequate supply.

"It's outrageous to me that we protect home buyers in the active management areas but not outside," said Kathleen Ferris, an attorney who helped write the 1980 laws and worked on the rural study. "I would say 25 years after that the assured water-supply rule is the most significant provision of the groundwater laws. It makes good sense. It protects home buyers."

That protection is so lacking under existing laws, the group found, that a finding of insufficient water doesn't even have to be reported once a property has been bought and sold once.

Loopholes like that have allowed wildcat subdivisions to proliferate, which strains the resources of nearby communities. When wells drilled to serve those homes run dry, rural officials say, water providers demand help from a city or county. The drought has drained more wells in recent years.

Group members say their proposals won't solve every problem the rural areas face. Chief among those not addressed by the recommendations are new water sources. That's not easily solved because rural communities don't have access to CAP water and aren't allowed under existing laws to move groundwater from one geologic basin to another.

Rural leaders will probably support changes to water laws only if they come with some level of financial help to fund water projects, Tarkowski said. Without that carrot, he added, most communities won't accept the regulatory stick.