After some hesitancy, the Arizona Water Banking Authority has assured city utilities around the Valley that it will use its stored supplies to make up for all of the water they lose to Colorado River cutbacks. Measles continues to spread in Maricopa County. The Trump administration has announced plans to roll back a two-decade moratorium on mineral leasing around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Plus the latest politics, Fronteras Desk, metro Phoenix, and health news.
Transcript
TIARA VIAN: This is KJZZ, your news and information station in Phoenix and across Arizona. I'm Tiara Vian. And here are this week's stories you don't want to miss.
It's the podcast designed to catch you up on some highlights from around the region. Thanks for listening. Here are a few of the stories for the week of July 20, 2026.
After some hesitancy, the Arizona Water Banking Authority has assured city utilities around the valley that it will use its stored supplies to make up for all of the water they lose to Colorado River cutbacks. Alex Hager reports the two groups had been going back and forth about the amount of water the agency had to give back.
ALEX HAGER: The federal government is soon expected to cut back on demand for water by limiting the amount that flows to cities around the valley. Now, utilities know they'll be made whole with water that had been stored underground over three decades. Doug Dunham is with the private utility EPCOR.
DOUG DUNHAM: It will provide the bridge supply as we work on larger concepts, larger plans for more permanent alternative supplies to cover any future Colorado River shortages.
HAGER: The policy will last for a year. The water bank had been arguing that it should hold on to more of its water to stretch out supplies into the future, rather than giving a lot of it out at once. Alex Hager, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
VIAN: In tribal natural resources, the Trump administration has announced plans to roll back a two-decade moratorium on mineral leasing around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The Biden-era ban includes drilling for oil and gas. The public has until next Wednesday to weigh in. A thousand years ago, Chaco was an advanced civilization where ancestral Puebloans gathered to trade and pray. Today, this sacred landscape is seen as a cultural resource for some and a possible cash grab for others. Gabriel Pietrorazio went there.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Less than 30 miles away from the main highway, Diné activist Mario Atencio suddenly pulls over during our long ride to Chaco.
MARIO ATENCIO: Everywhere else, all the way up to Colorado, all's been leased. This is the last few lands. That's what the whole battle is.
PIETRORAZIO: This Biden-made buffer zone, bigger than the entire city of Phoenix, is something that the Trump administration now wants to eliminate. It's part of his unleashing American energy agenda, even though 90% of this rugged region surrounding the UNESCO World Heritage site has been sold off.
ATENCIO: No one lives on these roads, but right now we're sort of in the buffer.
PIETRORAZIO: What's left untouched is this very 10-mile-wide area. The Tucson non-profit Archaeology Southwest estimates as many as 25,000 notable sites, including burials, could be here. As Atencio and I continue on his so-called "toxic tour," we scour the snow-coated horizon through the windshield of his pickup truck.
ATENCIO: It looks clear, but it's not really. People don't realize just how impactful hundreds of tons of cancer-causing chemicals being dumped into your air shed. You can hear the monstrosity that basically sounds like a jet engine all the time. Listen to that.
PIETRORAZIO: That's a churning turbine, energizing one of roughly 40,000 wells here. Some belong to Navajos that hold royalty rights. These Diné allottees could find themselves going from living on fixed income to getting six-figure payouts, seemingly overnight.
ATENCIO: With the money, we've seen, if anything, it makes the people poorer, meaning that all that money goes to Walmart.
PIETRORAZIO: Back in 2024, then-candidate Trump made an Albuquerque campaign stop.
DONALD TRUMP: If Kamala is reelected, New Mexico's economy will be reduced to rubble. You're not going to be drilling oil. You're not going to be — there's no more drilling, there's no more oil, you can forget it.
PIETRORAZIO: "Drill, baby, drill" may soon be more than merely a slogan at Chaco, and that's exactly what the Navajo Nation government wants. No buffer whatsoever. Council delegate Brenda Jesus chairs the tribe's Resource and Development Committee. Jesus felt like they were on the outs with Joe Biden and his administration, but she and other leaders met with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
BRENDA JESUS: Just by comparison, Secretary Burgum was very open and sat down to actually listen to Navajo Nation.
PIETRORAZIO: The same cannot be said for New Mexico's 19 pueblos and the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, according to Acoma Pueblo General Legal Counsel Aaron Sims.
AARON SIMS: Under this current administration, we have not had any visits that involved pueblo leadership there at Chaco Canyon, and I am not aware of any other visits generally.
PIETRORAZIO: Burgum's predecessor, Deb Haaland, who is from the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, has been accused of playing politics when it comes to Chaco.
DEB HAALAND: When I was Secretary of the Interior, that's not true. I know what we did. This was a painstakingly steady drumbeat of conservation.
PIETRORAZIO: Haaland touts the buffer among her biggest accomplishments. Now, fellow New Mexican and Bureau of Land Management Director Steve Pearce is tasked with its pending downfall. The Chaco news comes on the heels of Trump shrinking two Utah national monuments by 3 million acres.
CHARLES RILEY: At some point, we as American citizens need to realize, you know, what have we done to this landscape?
PIETRORAZIO: That's Acoma Pueblo Gov. Charles Riley.
RILEY: And we still haven't learned our lesson.
PIETRORAZIO: Earlier this year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Chaco among the 10 most endangered sites in the U.S. after being targeted by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025.
RILEY: If we lose Chaco, who else are they going to go after? And it's happening now.
PIETRORAZIO: For KJZZ News, I'm Gabriel Pietrorazio, reporting from Chaco.
VIAN: And this is the Stories You Don't Want to Miss podcast. Thanks for listening.
ANNOUNCER: Rio Salado College, in partnership with ASU and Penn State University, is offering a free 12-week semiconductor manufacturing training. The next session begins Aug. 24. More information at riosalado.edu/veterantraining.
VIAN: In politics news, in a major decision last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from Haiti and Syria who may now be forced to leave the country. With their TPS set to expire in the fall, Ukrainians here in Arizona and around the country are worried they're next, even as the war back home shows no signs of ending. Phil Latzman has more.
PHIL LATZMAN: Originally from the town of Cherkasy in central Ukraine, Anna Ivashchenko had moved to the capital of Kyiv when the Russian invasion began in 2022.
ANNA IVASHCHENKO: Nobody expected, first of all, that it's going to happen, and secondly, that it's going to to be for so long.
LATZMAN: Anna was able to get out, eventually arriving 6,000 miles away in Arizona.
IVASHCHENKO: When I left Kyiv, I thought that I'm going to come back to my job, to my business, to my apartment, but it never happened.
LATZMAN: So, she started a new life, working for Lutheran Social Services, helping other refugees resettle in Arizona. That was until recently, when they lost their funding and had to let her go.
IVASHCHENKO: It's really stressful now, because work authorizations going to expire soon. There's no extension, no renewal. We don't know what is going to happen to those who are on the parole here, but also we don't know what's going to happen to those who have TPS.
LATZMAN: Temporary Protected Status was given to Ukrainians shortly after the war broke out, and many also found their way to the U.S. under the Uniting for Ukraine, or U4U initiative, which linked refugees with private sponsors. The U4U program has been paused indefinitely, and TPS for Ukrainians is set to expire on October 19th. And that has Anna worried.
IVASHCHENKO: We applying every year, we're doing everything we can. We working, we paying taxes, we paying for our applications. All we need is just documents so we don't have to worry that somebody is going to catch us on the street and going to deport us.
HOREST YENA: It's happening nationwide. This is a—we're in a crisis.
LATZMAN: Horest Yena is a Scottsdale judge and member of the Ukrainian American Bar Association. He says people coming from Ukraine are in a special category due to the war.
YENA: We're in a significant crisis for all of these individuals that came over, whether it be on TPS or on U4U. They're all in this quagmire.
LATZMAN: Thousands of Ukrainians like Anna have settled here in Arizona, and Yena says their future is uncertain and their options are limited.
YENA: We—we can push the administration and—and have been pushing the administration to deal with this issue. But it's—as you can see, in immigration issues in this country are slow-and-going, other than the fact that people are getting picked up off the streets and being deported.
LATZMAN: Ukrainian-born Olia Johnson is a longtime Arizonan and helped found the local group Cactus and Tryzub, which provides local support for refugees.
OLIA JOHNSON: Most of them are highly educated, highly skilled people that are able to find high-skilled jobs. Unfortunately, they are losing jobs not because of the performance, not because of the layoffs, but because the companies legally cannot keep them.
LATZMAN: Johnson says many displaced Ukrainians want to stay in Arizona permanently, but see no path to do so.
JOHNSON: People are losing jobs because they're losing permits to work. People want to stay legally here. People want to pay taxes. People want to develop businesses.
LATZMAN: KJZZ News reached out to federal immigration officials for comment on the future of Temporary Protected Status for Ukrainians. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said a renewal decision would be announced at an appropriate time. DHS did not provide an interview or elaborate on what Ukrainians here should do in the meantime. For Anna Ivashchenko, it just adds to the uncertainty.
IVASHCHENKO: We are grateful, really grateful for the United States letting us in and helping us to stay safe. But at the same time, we desperately need change in this system. We need to understand what is going to happen to us.
LATZMAN: With nothing to go back to, Anna says she just wants to stay here and continue starting her life over. Phil Latzman, KJZZ News.
VIAN: In science news, measles continues to spread in Maricopa County, and health officials are warning of several new possible public exposure sites. Katherine Davis-Young reports.
KATHERINE DAVIS-YOUNG: Measles is extremely contagious. The virus can linger in the air up to two hours after an infected person coughs or sneezes. A person infected with measles visited a Sonesta Select hotel in Chandler on July 12th and 13th. The person also went to a concert at Chase Field, Chandler Fashion Center, and multiple restaurants. If you were at any of those locations at the same time, health officials say you should watch for measles symptoms through early August. Maricopa County has reported 25 measles cases since the start of this year. Katherine Davis-Young, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
VIAN: And this is the Stories You Don't Want to Miss podcast.
In health news, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego is again calling on the federal government to do more to address extreme heat. Here's Katherine Davis-Young once again.
DAVIS-YOUNG: Phoenix has seen heat-related deaths decrease slightly over the past two years. Gallego says that was no accident. The city has made more investments in cooling centers and other heat relief programs. A lot of that has been paid for with pandemic-era federal aid that's now running out. So next year, the city will dedicate more general funds toward heat relief, and Gallego says the city can't do it alone.
KATE GALLEGO: This challenge is here. It is not going away, and the federal government could save lives if they stepped up.
DAVIS-YOUNG: Gallego says federal programs for energy assistance, transportation and infrastructure, housing, or disaster relief could all be expanded to help communities like Phoenix cope with rising temperatures. Katherine Davis-Young, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
VIAN: In Fronteras news, since the September 11th terrorist attacks, it has become routine for fighter jets to enforce temporary flight restrictions and treat non-responsive aircraft as hostile. The Air Force's civilian branch, the Civil Air Patrol, helps certify fighter jet pilots for these missions across the country. Connor Greenwall reports.
POLITS: Work your radar, try to get a lock here, and you can start your guard calls.
CONNOR GREENWALL: That is two F-16 pilots from the Arizona National Guard somewhere over the desert in Southern Arizona, close to the state line with New Mexico and less than 10 miles from the Mexican border. They are looking for a Civil Air Patrol Cessna 182, which is currently flying in circles.
JOHN GIDDINGS: We just are going to loiter in this area until it's time to execute the mission.
GREENWALL: That was Captain John Giddings, the Cessna pilot. His aircraft is holding in place, waiting for the go-ahead to fly its set course directly into restricted airspace. It's part of an exercise the Civil Air Patrol regularly participates in. In just a few minutes, this small, four-seater, propeller-driven plane will be intercepted by fighter jets from the Arizona Air National Guard.
GIDDINGS: The first mission is just for a lost airplane.
GREENWALL: In a real situation, a lost pilot might be distracted and might not realize they are flying into a restricted area. So, fighter jets are scrambled to pull up alongside to alert the pilot. But fighters are not meant to fly as slow as civilian aircraft, so pilots need to train for the difficult maneuver.
GIDDINGS: They're going to try to call us on the radio and fly by us. Obviously, it's going to make some noise.
GREENWALL: We get the go-ahead from command and set on course.
PILOT: Do we know when he's going to arrive?
GIDDINGS: It'll be a surprise.
GREENWALL: Our instructions are clear: fly in a straight line and enter the restricted airspace.
PILOT: Showing him about 50 miles away, east side of Tombstone, east.
GREENWALL: But before the F-16s could reach our position, the Cessna encountered a large barrier.
GIDDINGS: I can't go into Mexico.
GREENWALL: Our course had us headed directly for the Mexican border, and we had to turn around before we violated international airspace. After barely avoiding the border by less than a mile, the fighters were finally in sight over my shoulder.
GIDDINGS: Traffic 6 o'clock.
PILOT: He's off my nose, about 1 mile.
GREENWALL: The fighters whipped around in a big loop behind us to fly in the same direction for the intercept. Faster than we expected ...
GIDDINGS: There he is. He's right off of our wing.
GREENWALL: Only 500 feet off our wing, waving his wings back and forth to signal us, the fighter passed close enough to see the pilot inside for just a brief second.
PILOT: This is the U.S. Air Force on Guard. Aircraft on the east side of Tombstone airspace, westbound at 9,500, you have entered a restricted area. Contact FAA ATC and exit the restricted area immediately.
GREENWALL: After the F-16s got our attention, mission observer Lieutenant James Venley finally responded.
JAMES VENLEY: Exercise, exercise, exercise, ATC, we have a fighter jet alongside. Our radio volume was set low, please advise, exercise, exercise, exercise.
GREENWALL: The CAP pilots made sure they played their roles. Giddings reminded Venley to act lost.
GIDDINGS: You're a lost guy, just say OK.
VENLEY: CAP 279, maintain 270, 9,500, CAP 279 out.
GREENWALL: The F-16s successfully intercepted our position and directed us out of the restricted airspace. Back on the ground, Incident Commander Brett Russo says the training is an important part of protecting America's skies.
BRETT RUSSO: We are qualifying actual alert pilots that do real-world interceptions to protect TFRs like the president, sporting events, and, you know, the border and other different situations.
GREENWALL: Intercept training is one of several missions the Civil Air Patrol flies, including search and rescue, locating downed aircraft, and providing aerial photography in disaster areas. Founded in 1941, just six days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the volunteer civilian pilots of the Civil Air Patrol patrolled the coast during the war.
RUSSO: It's obviously evolved to providing disaster relief operations, cadet programs, aerospace education.
GREENWALL: As the civilian branch of the Air Force, the Civil Air Patrol volunteers are vigilantly ready to provide assistance when duty calls. Connor Greenwall, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
VIAN: And finally, from KJZZ's original production, The Show: How does a data center work? We go inside one with co-host Mark Brodie.
MARK BRODIE: Why do we need them? What do they do? Over the next few days on The Show, we'll try to answer those and other questions about data centers, in some ways by taking a step back in a series we're calling Centers of Attention. We'll look at how data centers work, why some communities want them and others don't, and the impact they can have. We start on the inside.
This is the inside of a data center run by Iron Mountain. You may remember them as a paper storage company; they now also store data. This particular center is one of three buildings at roughly 48th Street and Loop 202, pretty close to the airport, a few freeways, and downtown Phoenix. And it's big, really big, like 540,000 square feet big.
JASON PAPP: So, the building that we're in today, it has upwards of 300 customers. Some of those range from a single cabinet all the way up to custom suites that are built for them.
BRODIE: That's Jason Papp, Iron Mountain's general manager for North America and today's tour guide. This building is what's known as a colocation facility, meaning there are different companies of different sizes with different needs that have servers inside. It could be telecommunications companies or healthcare organizations. The names of those firms, by the way, were not part of the tour. We were told clients like their anonymity when it comes to this kind of thing. Those companies basically rent space for cloud storage, AI, and processing transactions, among other things.
PAPP: So, what we try to do is take away those things that aren't inherent to what they're trying to do, right? So, they have their business they're running. We want to take all of the electrical, mechanical, security, all of those worries off of their plate so that they can just run their business.
BRODIE: One of the other warehouse-sized buildings on the campus has only one customer, while the third has a few. Papp says data centers have been around since the early days of computers and servers, but back then, he says, data centers were shoved into closets or wherever else a company could find space. Now, some companies—think Amazon or Microsoft—have big data centers like this one all to themselves, while others share space.
PAPP: So, what you're seeing now, this gives you a really good view of what a colocation facility looks like. So, what we're looking at now is open room here with cabinets, cages, private suites, all of those that allow customers to come in and take space. And then right in front of us is what we call a main distribution frame. One of the things that people come here for is connectivity. Well, this is how we do that connectivity out to the data center. So, every one of those cables that you see on all this goes to a customer, and that's how they connect to the internet, connect to each other, all of those types of things.
BRODIE: To get a sense of it, picture a space even larger than your typical big box store, but instead of TVs or refrigerators, there are cables, cabinets, and cages. There's also a lot of security; you really can't get anywhere without proving you're supposed to be there.
PAPP: This is our what we call phase two, which was modular data centers.
BRODIE: This section is less massive open room and more small cabinets, and it's much quieter. Papp says these were built specifically for customers' needs.
PAPP: Everything's contained within these—the modules that we're looking at, whereas the data center we came out of before, you were in the open area in the data center. The data center is now inside of the box that you're looking at, so that's why you don't hear it.
BRODIE: And does the same kind of thing happen in here as the other rooms?
PAPP: Absolutely. I mean, no matter what data center you have, you're removing heat, right? So, you're bringing power in, and you're using the chillers and the cooling to remove that heat. So, I'll open the door here and you can see that it's noisy inside, just like before.
BRODIE: These modular facilities more closely align with how Iron Mountain says it's building new data centers: smaller space, more efficient. This building was originally a bottling facility, so the specs aren't exactly ideal for a data center. Higher ceilings, for example, mean more space to cool. This particular facility also has something called the "meet-me room." Papp describes this as where all the carriers bring their fiber so data center customers can connect to it. And that connectivity is really key to the whole operation.
Standing inside the data center, it's not hard to see and hear all the cables, wires, servers, and other equipment doing their thing. But what exactly is their thing?
YIZHI YANG: In a nutshell, a data center is basically a farm of computing hardwares.
BRODIE: Yizhi Yang is an associate professor in ASU's School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. He says the machines in the data centers are doing the heavy lifting for a lot of what we do on our phones and computers every day.
YANG: The input and what you are interacting on your cell phone is just the front end. So, the front end takes in the question, it's through the internet sent to the data center, and data center in some of the machines is doing the processing for you.
BRODIE: The amount of processing or storage space you need depends on what you're doing, whether it's opening a Google Doc, asking AI a question, or storing all those vacation photos in the cloud. And that's just the stuff we're doing on our own personal devices. Iron Mountain's Jason Papp points out there's other technology out there that also needs lots of processing.
PAPP: One self-driving car creates somewhere between 1 and 15 to 20 terabytes of data per day. So, if you think in 10 years, you know, how many cars might be on the road that are self-driving, all that data has to sit in a data center.
BRODIE: To put that into some sort of perspective, online estimates suggest 15 terabytes would get you enough space to store nearly 4 million photos. Papp gets why people feel nervous or worse about data centers ending up in their communities. They're big, they use a lot of power, they're noisy, and there are concerns about water use. But he says we like our tech and our conveniences, so...
PAPP: I heard something one time, you know, somebody said, he says, "Why do we need data centers? I can do everything I want right here on my phone." Well, everything you do on your phone or your computer at home, all happens in a data center. All of that data, every selfie you take, every social media post you do sits in a data center. So, unless we can figure out how to store stuff not on physical equipment, which I don't see how you ever are able to do that, you're going to need data centers.
BRODIE: Papp says we just keep creating more demand from our phones, AI, and smart devices, and that data has to go somewhere—at least it does if we want to keep it. And he says ideally, that somewhere should be relatively close to where the demand is coming from.
PAPP: Anytime you go on your phone, anytime you do a search, anytime you're streaming on your thing, the closer you are to where that data sits, the less latency you're going to have. The faster it's going to work, the faster things are going to perform for you. So, the closer you can be to it, the better.
BRODIE: But how close is close enough? Could we end up with neighborhood data centers? Papp didn't say yes, but he also didn't say no. Mark Bauer is vice chairman at the real estate firm JLL in their Data Center Solutions Group. He doesn't think the idea is so far-fetched.
MARK BAUER: I think we're going to see more data centers, but smaller data centers spread out through a community.
BRODIE: And those communities will likely continue to be in the Valley. Iron Mountain's Jason Papp says Phoenix is probably the second biggest market in terms of data center demand behind only Virginia. And JLL's Mark Bauer says one reason why is another of the area's growing industries.
BAUER: We've now got some of the largest technology companies, you know, right here. Then, you know, add on our — you know, you've got the semiconductor industry. I think that's a big proponent. The semiconductor industry is producing these chips for companies all over the world, but many of them are right here, too. These chips go into data centers that serve, so I think that's why Phoenix has just exploded.
VIAN: And this has been the Stories You Don't Want to Miss podcast, made possible in part by the Katina Foundation, BASIS Charter Schools, Palo Verde Generating Station, SRP, and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust. Thank you for listening and for your generous support.
I'm Tiara Vian. This is KJZZ. Listen more, learn more online and on the KJZZ mobile app.
