Republican state lawmakers advanced an Arizona rural groundwater protection bill in the House on Tuesday, but rural stakeholders say the bill doesn’t do enough.
Groundwater aquifers are running low in rural areas of the state, but Democrats and Republicans haven’t been able to come to an agreement on a conservation plan.
The GOP management plan is in the form of a bill pushed by Sen. Tim Dunn (R-Yuma). It advanced out of a House committee on party lines Tuesday, despite the concerns of speakers and several lawmakers.
The main sticking point is the amount of water use the plan would allow. In Dunn’s bill, SB 1520, water users would have to cut up to 10% of their use.
Opponents say that isn’t enough.
A group of rural stakeholders held a hearing protesting the bill before the committee hearing and said the maximum cuts to water use should be 25%.
In January, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs announced her own alternative groundwater protection proposal, which would require even more cuts to water use, but that bill never got a hearing.
Republican Mohave County Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter is frustrated by the lack of compromise, and said the GOP bill in its current form will get vetoed, like it did last year.
“To just squabble and be so politically divisive on the issue of water; I mean, there's plenty of things for us to argue and fight about, but you can't argue about anything if you don't have water,” Lingenfelter said.
He added that one way he and the other members of his rural stakeholder group might be able to put some pressure on Republican lawmakers is to try and leverage a different water issue known as “ag to urban.”
Like rural groundwater protection areas, the ag-to-urban concept is supported by Republicans and Democrats, but a bipartisan agreement hasn’t come together yet. The proposal would let agricultural entities in protected groundwater areas sell their land to housing developers.
Since housing land uses less water than agriculture, it would ideally increase the state’s housing supply while conserving groundwater.
“I would ask the governor's office to tie the passing of ag-to-urban into law with the passage of something that's worthwhile and that everybody can live with on rural groundwater,” Lingenfelter said, adding that making it an urban issue might give it more urgency.
“We've been trying for decades and really trying with our sleeves rolled up since like 2017, he said. “And it's like, if it's a rural issue, our groundwater issues don't get heard, and we're tired of that.
Dunn, meanwhile, said he’d like to keep the issues separate.
“People think they have leverage on a lot of things. … I don’t do leverage like that,” Dunn said.
Another sticking point of Dunn’s bill is the representation of the agriculture industry on rural groundwater management councils. In areas like Mohave County, where there isn’t as big of an agriculture industry, Lingenfelter argues that it’s unnecessary to have multiple agricultural interests on a leadership council managing the aquifer’s water.
Also, there’s disagreement on how many members of rural groundwater councils should live in the areas they represent, whether one person can sit on multiple councils managing different basins, and how those council members are selected.
This is not the end of the negotiation. Dunn said he’s meeting regularly with the governor’s team and is willing to keep workshopping the bill.
Rep. Gail Griffin (R-Hereford) – chair of the House Natural Resources, Energy & Water Committee – said she’s also interested in having more conversations. She called the bill a “work in progress.”
“There seems to be folks on both sides of the situation that says, ‘We're going to, we're not doing enough.’ We got to do way more, but we have to at least do something. This is my version of doing something,” Dunn told his colleagues.
He said many people want all the water cutbacks to be imposed on the agriculture industry, but he doesn’t want all the impact on that industry’s shoulders.
Dunn didn’t commit to changing any specific pieces of his bill, but he said everything is on the table.
-
The Arizona Board of Regents has approved no-cost extensions for three Regents’ Research Grants, focused on finding solutions to a few of the state’s big problems. -
After more than 25 years of cleanup, the state Department of Environmental Quality recently announced that the groundwater and soil at a site in central Phoenix is officially considered safe. -
Earlier this year, Chandler city officials told residents that a part of their property taxes has been going down the drain — just not theirs. -
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a swath of bills on water issues this week, calling them “political cover” for what she says is the Arizona Legislature's inaction on water security. -
Data centers have become more common in Arizona; the Valley is one of the biggest markets for them in the country. But data centers often need water, which in some cases, is in shorter supply here.
