New rules to allow developers to build in areas that don’t have the necessary 100-year assured water supply have won the approval of a key panel.
The plan, known as Alternative Path to Designation of a 100-year Assured Water Supply, calls for developers to find other sources of water to supplement groundwater supplies, and to eventually wean themselves off groundwater. This would apply in areas that do not have the needed century’s worth of groundwater, like Buckeye and Queen Creek.
The approval late last week by the Governor’s Regulatory Review Council came over the objection of homebuilders and others, who argue the new rules are unfair. But, the head of the Arizona Department of Water Resources defends them, saying they’ll help both builders and the state’s groundwater supplies.
Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, joined The Show before the council’s approval to discuss why Buschatzke thinks this is the right plan.
Full conversation
TOM BUSCHATZKE: So designations of a short order supply are kind of the gold standard of the program because a designated provider has an obligation to replenish mine groundwater for all of the uses that it supplies, not just home building under the certificate of assured water supply, it's just the home building uses that have to have the mine ground are replaced.
And so in that situation, you could have industries or other users pumping groundwater away. And we want to try to incentivize entities to achieve designations of assured water supply. One of the challenges there is these providers that are not yet designated have uses historically, that have not had replenishment requirements and then they're going to take that on. So they're gonna end up with a pretty big kind of overnight replenishment requirement, which is a big challenge for them.
MARK BRODIE: Do you have a sense or do you have like an ideal situation in mind for where developers or others who would have to find other sources of water would find those sources of water?
BUSCHATZKE: So there are some sources of water that are available within our state. There is a groundwater basin called Harquahala, west of the Phoenix area. In the 1990s, the state Legislature by law made that water available to kind of the Phoenix-Tucson metro areas and the corridors in between. So folks can go out there and move that water from that area to this area. That's one example.
Another with a more renewable supply is on the Colorado River. The Colorado River, Indian tribes were recently granted authority to lease or market their water. So that's another possibility.
One that's a little bit less popular and carries some more debate is again, moving water from farm land along the Colorado River. But farmers along the river are concerned about giving up their water for the cities and how that all plays into the balance between the policy choices of how our water is used for agriculture, industry or municipal use.
BRODIE: Is it a safe assessment of your thinking that should these rules go into effect that there are enough places where developers and builders could get water to make up for the groundwater that they can't use to allow the kind of building that they want to do to go forward.
BUSCHATZKE: So the answer is yes.
BRODIE: How optimistic are you that this plan will be able to go forward? And I know that it's been talked about that this might be the subject of a lawsuit, whether or not the governor and ADWR have the legal authority to actually do this. Like how optimistic are you it would take effect.
BUSCHATZKE: I am extremely optimistic. As you can imagine before we even proposed this rule, we had lots of internal discussions with our staff and in this particular case with my legal counsel and we have a strong legal opinion from my legal counsel that this is legal.
I know that there are several water providers, the Arizona Water Company which has service in both Maricopa County and Pinal County, but especially Pinal County, Epcor Water Company, same thing. The town of Queen Creek all have issued, registered their support with the Regulatory Review Council for this new rule.
BRODIE: There are of course, though, people who don't love it. We heard from the head of the homebuilders of central Arizona who basically says this is, it's too expensive, home homes are more efficient than industrial or manufacturing type uses, so maybe there should be some differentiation there. I'm curious what you make of concerns like that, of criticism like that.
BUSCHATZKE: So the law requires replenishment for mine ground or use for home building. The program again, which is designed to incentivize designated providers then expands that requirement to all of the use of the designated provider. So from a water management policy standpoint, it's a better outcome.
In terms of concerns raised by the homebuilders about the expense. How much of the price of a home is tied up into the water supply for that home, I think varies, but it's a very small percentage, probably single digits in terms of the total cost of the home. I'm not a homebuilder, that's not my business, obviously.
BRODIE: Sure.
BUSCHATZKE: But in the alternative, given the conditions of our groundwater aquifers in Pinal, in Maricopa County, we cannot continue to build on groundwater. This new rule allows some groundwater to be used to give a phase in period for those renewable supplies to be accessed and implemented. But when you look out over a 100-year time frame, the net effect on the groundwater aquifers is strongly positive.
So we are benefiting over the 100 years, the groundwater aquifer, we're giving some lead time in this program. And it's a good balancing, and I think it's a really good policy, because it does at the end of the day, create consumer protection for the homes and create an additional benefit to the Growler aquifers that does not exist today.
BRODIE: Let me ask you about something else that you're very heavily involved in that is negotiations over the Colorado River. Another source of water that is not as strong as maybe we would like it or it has been in the past and you kind of floated recently, the idea of maybe the states not being able to come to an agreement, the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin states and maybe this having to go to the courts.
BUSCHATZKE: So first, the big goal of the state of Arizona and what we want is a collaborative outcome among the seven states. There's a pretty big gap or I use the word chasm to describe where we are between each other. And that gap really is that Arizona, California and Nevada have put on the table large reductions in their water use as a starting point.
And then if additional reductions are needed, we wanna share with the four Upper Basin states, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, those additional reductions.
And essentially at this point in time, those four states have not offered any volumes of reductions with any certainty. They've talked a little bit about maybe voluntary programs. But unfortunately, if those voluntary programs don't come to fruition, we in Arizona could still be on the hook for coming up with those volumes.
So we're looking for a more equitable outcome and the proposal put forth by the three states, California, Arizona and Nevada. We didn't start the negotiation from one end of the spectrum so we can negotiate towards the middle. We already started in the middle by stepping up and taking and proposing to take the first cuts. There's certainly room to negotiate further for us, but we need to see participation by those four states.
BRODIE: As a negotiating strategy, I guess, like, do you think that by saying what you said that it will lead to a better deal for the three Lower Basin states? I mean, the Upper Basin states perhaps not surprisingly, aren't real thrilled with what you had to say.
BUSCHATZKE: So when we, when we talk with each other and we have for many, many months, we all say to each other, we don't want litigation. That is not an outcome. I think actions speak louder than words. Sometimes we have not seen anything in terms of action that would make you believe that, that's an outcome that they really want.
So obviously, they are, they are unhappy that I went down this path. Hopefully, that will move the needle. But I think as a general proposition in these really difficult negotiations, there needs to be a view that you have risk. If you do not think you have risk to an outcome worse than what you might negotiate, you're not going to negotiate. And again, we're trying to show that there is risk despite maybe the differences in legal opinion about what that risk might be or how big that right risk might be.
BRODIE: So, understanding that crystal balls are often cloudy, you've been doing this for a long time. Now, what's your gut feeling about how these negotiations are going to end up?
BUSCHATZKE: So, gut feeling is we're going to probably continue to see and move towards brinkmanship and at the end of the day, when deadlines start coming up and decisions absolutely have to be made, we're gonna end up with a collaborative deal.
BRODIE: All right. That is Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Tom, thanks for your time.
BUSCHATZKE: I appreciate it. And thanks for inviting me. This is a really important topic to me.
