The legislative session is officially over after Arizona lawmakers struck a deal with the governor to craft a budget over the weekend. To do it, they had to make some big cuts – big enough to fill a $1.4 billion deficit. And a lot of those big cuts came as a hit to one of the biggest challenges facing the state: water.
Lawmakers completely swept funds meant for the Water Infrastructure Financing Authority (WIFA), which was bulked up under former Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022 to speed up water projects and bring water to Arizona from elsewhere.
And, while they talked a good game early in the session, lawmakers went home without passing a whole lot of major efforts to address our state’s water future.
Columnist Joanna Allhands writes about water in the opinion pages of The Arizona Republic and she spoke more with The Show about it all.
Conversation highlights
What's the back story of WIFA?
JOANNA ALLHANDS: Well, I mean, I think you can just look around and see that we have a water situation in Arizona and we've known this for a very long time. We need to conserve the water that we have, but we're also going to need additional supplies and additional supplies are not cheap. That is expensive water.
And it's gonna take a long time and a lot of effort to find that water and distribute it, get it to the people that need it. So it's a huge effort. It's something that's going to take a lot of money.
And so three years ago, the Legislature and the governor set aside what they had promised to be a billion dollars for finding sort of these long-term augmentation supplies basically to find more water for Arizona. And, but that, that amount was split over three years.
Well, the first year obviously got funded, the $333 million got in the first year. Hey, we did good. Second year, only maybe about half-ish got there. The rest sort of went to other things even though there was money in the budget. I mean, we still certainly could have had that money . This year, staring down, you know, a pretty decent size deficit, there is no money heading to that fund.
How much of this has to do with Ducey's water desalination effort?
ALLHANDS: Well, I think that was definitely the huge black eye that happened at the beginning. You know, once the money was in this fund, the governor was about to leave office and made this last minute pitch for a favored desalination effort in Mexico that would bring water to Arizona. And it was something that had been sort of quietly whispered about pretty much all that session saying, oh, really? That's what this money is going to go to. And everybody sort of publicly said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're going to do. And then lo and behold, that was the push.
Now, granted WIFA is completely backed away from that. They're, they're not pursuing that deal. They're now saying, all right, look, let's try to figure out a way to fairly evaluate all different types of proposals for how we're going to get the water. Really what matters is that the water is wet and it gets to people when we need it.
Could there be some real long-term implications here of not funding WIFA?
ALLHANDS: I, I think so if this is something that continues. So, you know, hey, I get it. We're, we have a deficit. We're out of money, things are going to have to, you know, something has to give this year. I get that. But, you know, if we go two, three, four years, you know, and don't end up putting additional money towards this goal, and not only just this goal, you know, there is also, WIFA is using, also has money for, you know, water conservation efforts that they've been doing, too. And they've already given out the money that they have for that, but they could do a whole lot more. There is so, so much need and interest for additional money there, too.
So, you know, we just fall behind the longer it takes for us to get those additional monies in the can and being able to start making plans for this stuff because it's not cheap and it takes a long time.
So then there's the broader picture at the Legislature this session. You wrote that they introduced more bills on water than we probably ever seen before, but not many were passed.
ALLHANDS: Well, you know, actually in the very, very last part of the session, there was a ton of flurry and there were some efforts to address kind of some urban groundwater issues that we had that were in this giant omnibus bill that did die. And that were then resurrected and did end up passing in some smaller bills. And so it's largely what was proposed there, but in some slightly different configurations.
So there's a lot of people are still really trying to weed through, wait, what just happened, what happened there? It could be something that's pretty wide reaching.
But I think people are really just trying to get their hands around, like, wait, what did you do with the rural groundwater issue? And that was something that people talked about all session. I mean, it was, it was something that people just worked on and, and efforts died and people came back to the table and compromised and then efforts died again and all that sort of happened. And at the very, very end, the very last day, a bill came back on that as well and it very narrowly died.
Is there still uncertainty on the impact of what did pass and if the governor will sign it?
ALLHANDS: Yeah, that's the big question. You know, there is a governor's water council meeting [Tuesday, June 18] and there's lots of speculation today about what's going to be discussed there. What's going to happen? Is the governor going to take parts of what passed? Will she agree to everything? Will she veto everything? There's a lot of questions about what happens next.
The governor has said all along that if the Legislature fails to do anything significant to do with water this session, she'll have to step in and kind of do do it herself. What does that mean?
ALLHANDS: Well, that was the big, that was the big ballyhoo at the very beginning of the session. I mean, she used some very, very strong words to lawmakers saying basically, if you don't do it, I will. And so there's a lot of speculation about what that means, too.
You know, she's sort of been dropping hints kind of throughout the session that she may come into some of the rural groundwater basins that don't have any sort of regulation, especially the ones that are, are showing the most problems with water, and designate them as an active management area, which is the state's most stringent regulation. And one where a lot of farmers in those areas say, this simply won't work for us. This is too much for us.
So it really could start a huge fight that, frankly, I don't know that I want to fight.
