The cities of Phoenix and Tucson are setting up a new system for sharing water among cities, towns and other water users in Arizona. City officials are framing it as a way to help keep cities around the state from going dry in the face of a shrinking Colorado River.
The program, which will be called the “Secure Water Arizona Program” or “SWAP” will create an emergency reserve of water and connect cities that are interested in buying and selling water from other cities and businesses.
“At the end of the day, this is about more than policy,” said Betty Guardado, a Phoenix City Council member. “It's about whether our kids and grandkids can continue to live, work and thrive here in Phoenix.”
SWAP is designed to be a completely voluntary program that can help cities and towns facing water cutbacks.
In an emergency, a municipality could use the small pool of stored water to make sure taps don’t go dry in the short term. In the longer term, a city or town could use the program to find someone willing to sell them water — such as an agricultural district, a mining company or a different city with a more secure water supply.
“We believe that by taking these steps,” said Max Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix, “Building the next generation of water resource infrastructure, creating a safety net to protect us all, working together to reduce the impact of cuts and experimenting on water saving and sharing projects in the future, water users from across the state can work together to solve water problems.”
The plan, particularly the emergency reserve, is partially aimed at protecting the reputation of the Phoenix area.
“Water insecurity on even the smallest communities in Arizona can have an enormous impact on public perception and economic development for all of Arizona,” Wilson said.
In 2023, the small community of Rio Verde Foothills, north of Scottsdale, saw taps run dry. News outlets around the country ran lengthy stories about the issue.
City leaders elsewhere around the Valley say Rio Verde Foothills is an outlier. Homeowners there had private wells or got water delivered by trucks. The community does not have a traditional system delivering water through pipes, like all of the incorporated towns nearby.
While a similar crisis could not happen in Phoenix, which is better prepared, its leaders said they are willing to help stop the next one from happening, and prevent the national news stories and subsequent negative attention they could bring upon the Phoenix area.
Because of that willingness, one of the first places that could benefit from the new water sharing plan is Cave Creek. The small town, just past Phoenix’s northeast edge, could face massive cutbacks. Cave Creek gets 95% of its water from the Colorado River, and federal proposals for water reductions could slash that allocation by as much as 59%.
Cave Creek has been storing excess water underground for years, but it would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to access.
Instead of building a new system of wells and pipelines to bring that water to Cave Creek, the town is planning to enter an agreement with the city of Phoenix and two other nearby cities that would help keep water flowing for five to eight years.
The scale of Colorado River cuts for most Valley cities — and the need for creative water dealmaking to adapt — may be decided by the federal government in the next few months. Leaders from the seven states that depend on the Colorado River may be able to bring down the size of cuts to Arizona water users by breaking an impasse in negotiations and forging a water-sharing plan.
Transcript
MARK BRODIE: Phoenix officials this week got an update on the city’s water future, including Colorado River supplies and coming up with new water sources. And part of that future is a mutual aid program of sorts in which Phoenix and other cities and agencies can share water.
With me now to talk about this is KJZZ’s Alex Hager, who was at the meeting. Good afternoon — morning, Alex. Getting ahead of myself here.
ALEX HAGER: All good. Good morning, Mark. Good to be here.
MARK BRODIE: So top line, like what does the water situation for Phoenix look like right now?
ALEX HAGER: Well, across the West, we are seeing cities, farms, businesses looking at the possibility of cutbacks because the Colorado River is shrinking and we do not have a new plan to allocate its water accordingly. So there’s a lot of uncertainty in the air and that is definitely the case for Phoenix.
Phoenix gets a significant portion of its water from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project. It’s a big canal you’ve probably driven past on the interstate. And the amount of water that is delivered through that canal, it could go down significantly. And cities across the Valley are looking at how to adapt accordingly.
The city of Phoenix specifically is better positioned than some of them because it has a fairly diverse water portfolio. All around the Valley, cities have a different level of dependency on the Colorado River. The rest of their water might come from groundwater or from the Salt River.
And the amount that cities are prepared to weather potential cuts that are coming from the Colorado River is based on how diverse the rest of their portfolio is. And in the case of Phoenix, it’s fairly diverse.
MARK BRODIE: So does that mean then it’s relatively speaking, anyway, better able to sort of weather whatever potential cuts on the Colorado River might be coming?
ALEX HAGER: That seems to be the case, yes.
MARK BRODIE: So you had reported on this program, this sort of mutual aid program that Phoenix is setting up here. How exactly would this work?
ALEX HAGER: This is really interesting. For what it’s worth, we don’t know a ton of the details yet, but it is designed to be a program where cities that are in a pinch and need more water in a hurry can go to get it.
It is being designed by Phoenix and Tucson, and we’re going to learn more details as it develops, but so far it consists of three big parts and this is what they outlined at that city council meeting the other day.
The first part is an emergency reserve of water. So if a city is running out of water in a hurry and needs to just patch it up while they work on a longer-term solution, there will be kind of a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency bank that they might be able to access.
There will also be something of an exchange program, where willing buyers of water and willing sellers of water can go to make that deal happen. Right now, a lot of times these relationships between a city and someone else who can sell them water — whether it’s another city or a mining company or maybe a farming district — they have to kind of approach each other one-to-one.
But the idea here is they’re creating a centralized place where you can be someone who has enough water that they might be able to sell some off and go and say, “Hey, I’m willing to take offers,” and you can be a city that needs more water and go and look and see who’s offering.
MARK BRODIE: Almost like an eBay for water kind of situation.
ALEX HAGER: In some senses, yes. There’s also a third component of this new potential program that is being called a sandbox for water ideas. I think the designers of this program framed it as they want cities to talk more amongst one another to work on more innovative ways to save water and extend the supplies they already have.
MARK BRODIE: Is it interesting in any way that there are sort of willing sellers of water at a time when there’s so much conversation about everyone sort of trying to gather up and sort of hoard everything they can possibly get?
ALEX HAGER: I think that’s a really interesting point, Mark. Cities that have water are certainly defensive of it, but they also recognize that their neighbors running out of water could bring them reputational damage.
So one thing that comes up a lot is what happened in 2023 with Rio Verde Foothills. It’s the small unincorporated community near Scottsdale. Their taps ran dry, and it launched a raft of national headlines and negative attention on the Valley.
City water leaders tell me that what happened in Rio Verde Foothills is a major outlier. That couldn’t happen in most parts of the Valley. Towns where you are plugged into the city water system are completely different. But because of what happened in that small community, there was a lot of negative attention brought to Phoenix and its neighbors.
And so they want to prevent that from happening again to prevent the negative attention from coming to this area. Prevent the negative attention that might stop people from moving here or investing their money here. So they are more willing to share water with their neighbors to protect against those negative outcomes.
MARK BRODIE: They don’t want headlines in national outlets saying, “Hey, Phoenix is running out of water” or “Arizona city runs out of water,” something like that? And as you say, it’s worth it to them to maybe give up or sell some of their water to make sure that doesn’t happen.
ALEX HAGER: That seems to be the case.
MARK BRODIE: Interesting. Phoenix has been for a while working on sort of a reclaimed wastewater program. Did we get an update on—on where that’s at?
ALEX HAGER: It seems to be coming along in a way that, you know, will make reclaimed water and recycled wastewater a big part of Phoenix’s water portfolio going forward. We’re definitely a few years out from it coming online, but the idea is that for Phoenix and and some other large cities around the region, in addition to trying to make sure — well, basically with water supplies coming in getting smaller, they want to make more out of the water that they already have.
So they are taking the technology that can turn sewage basically into drinking water, completely safely, and spending millions and millions of dollars to make it part of the water system. So when I talk about a diverse portfolio, making sure that if the Colorado River allocation gets smaller there is something else to back that up, this kind of wastewater treatment is going to be a part of that backup.
MARK BRODIE: Well and Alex, and you’ve reported on this and we’ve talked about it on The Show, that there it seems like there are two sort of challenges that Phoenix and other entities that are trying to do this deal are facing. One, the technical, like how do you physically do it? And second, sort of the—the ick factor, right? The public perception of trying to convince residents that it’s OK to drink reclaimed wastewater.
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, and it looks right now like they are trying to start, you know, a pretty significant campaign to get that messaging out there. You know, the science backs it up. This is safe to drink. it is a technology that is being used in other parts of the world, in other parts of the country. The science all checks out.
But a big part of making sure that this is successful is that people around Phoenix know that and believe it. One of the things they told me when I toured their advanced water purification plant was some of the first people in this city to be plugged into that system will be some of the top executives, some of the top decision-makers at the Phoenix Water Department who live near that treatment plant.
MARK BRODIE: Ha, interesting. OK. Lots more to come on this. That is KJZZ’s Alex Hager. Alex, thanks a lot.
ALEX HAGER: Thank you, Mark.
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