Díaz and Allhands: Swapping water from farms to cities is a glimpse into Arizona’s future

Our next guest this morning gets a lot of emails like this: “Stop letting people move here.”

Joanna Allhands is a columnist who writes about water for the Arizona Republic, and readers often write to tell her that we could easily solve our state’s water woes — all we need to do is stop growing. But she is here to tell us it’s not that simple.

And that’s why it’s such a big deal that state water leaders agreed to open the door for landowners in one part of the state to sell their water to allow for more growth in places that need it, like Queen Creek and Buckeye.

Allhands joined The Show alongside Republic editorial page editor Elvia Díaz to talk about it all.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Joanna, begin for us with this deal between landowners in the Harquahala Valley and places like Buckeye and Queen Creek who signed up for this water deal. How is this gonna work?

JOANNA ALLHANDS: This has been something that’s been talked about for probably several decades now. It’s always been sort of this someday idea. But now, at least in the Harquahala Basin, this is a now idea. They finally were able to get the amount of water quantified that they could transfer over 100 years. So now that process is in play.

It’s really an interesting way that they’ve done this. All of the landowners in that Harquahala Basin got together and said:

“OK, we’re basically gonna master plan the way that we pump this water out of our basin. And we’re going to do this over time. We’re going to transition all of this land that is currently being farmed. We’re going to stop farming that and then pump that water out over time, put it in the Central Arizona Project canal and deliver it to the cities.”

It’s a really new thing that’s been talked about for a very long time, if that makes sense.

GILGER: Right. So this is part of this broader idea that lawmakers addressed last session. It’s called “ag-to-urban” — taking agricultural land, which uses a ton more water than urban cities and houses, and giving that water basically to the urban areas, stopping the farming where the water is being used.

ALLHANDS: Generally. Harquahala has been in play and has been something that’s been talked about for many, many years, way before anybody was talking about ag-to-urban. But the concept with ag-to-urban is just that, where knowing that farmland uses a lot of water, taking that land out of commission and then using that water for houses — which use a lot less — is considered to be something that might at least help us continue to grow over time without completely depleting the aquifer.

GILGER: Right. So Elvia, what do you think this kind of deal says and this idea of ag-to-urban says about what might be possible in terms of growth in the future of our state?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, it tells me that they are serious about dealing with the water issue. And going back to the reader, he or she — I can’t remember if it was she or he — was asking the right question about development, right?

I, too, laughed when I saw it. But it is about how much do we want to grow, and at what expense? In this case, we’re talking about using agricultural water to build more homes. And so eventually we may not have an agriculture at all, and when I say eventually, I’m talking about, I don’t know, 100 years from now.

So that is concerning as well because Arizona is one of the agriculture states in the nation. Joanna writes a lot about we are the only state that grows lettuce in the winter, for instance, and that kind of a thing.

So we’re talking about the Harquahala basin, one basin, but then it could expand to others. So that’s something that it concerns me about. Another thing that I always have questions about is that this deal, it sounds great on paper, but it will take a lot of money to actually do it. They have to build the infrastructure. They have to build the pipelines to bring the water into the urban areas. And I just hope that we the taxpayers are not hooked for that bill in the future.

So the deal sounds great, but what is that gonna do to our agriculture, and whether that opens up to less agriculture, more development, and then it’s a vicious cycle.

GILGER: Right, let me ask you about that, Joanna, because Elvia brings up an important point here, which is that if the future of the state relies on basically getting rid of agriculture because it uses too much water and using that water instead to develop and continue growing, what does that say about the future of the agricultural industry in our state? Like, don’t we need that?

ALLHANDS: Well yeah, and I think if that is the goal, if that is what the MO is, is to get rid of agriculture in Arizona, I think we’ve, we’re kind of misplaced.

Agriculture does have a place here. The question is how much and, and how do we continue to help farmers be successful at the same time understanding that we have these water realities?

I think what’s interesting about the ag-to-urban bill is that the people that are going to be selling their land, this isn’t going to be a mandated kind of thing. It’s gonna be a farmer who decides, “Hey, I’m at retirement age,” or honestly, a lot of the places that own land out there are developers that bought that land many, many years ago to develop and then just leased it to farmers who are going to say, “You know what, it’s in our best interest to try to get some additional value out of our land” and that they’ll be replenishing that water, too.

It’s not like with agriculture, there is some replenishment that has just with the amount of water that they’re using in irrigation, but largely, a lot of that is not being replenished. Housing does replenish that water. So it’s choices, right? It’s trade-offs. It’s trying to figure out, how do we balance all of these very different but very valid uses of water to move forward?

GILGER: Elvia, let me ask you about that. You also have the argument that we can’t stop developing. We can’t stop people moving here, like actually you just can’t stop doing that.  But also if we do, there would be economic implications, right? 

DÍAZ: There are economic implications for everything. And yes, we can’t stop people from moving here. I mean, if there are no places to live, you know that that choice will be theirs. Where, where are they gonna rent? Where are they gonna buy a house?

Agriculture and vegetables and what have you are very difficult to grow here, and we’re not growing enough of that. In the United States we’re importing most of that. This will exacerbate the problem instead of helping.

GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, Joanna, about how you think those puzzle pieces should be balanced in the future. What you’re looking at here is taking water from one place and giving it to another so we can develop agricultural interests versus urban interests.

Do you think that this will be an ongoing shuffle as we continue forward?

ALLHANDS: Oh, absolutely, yeah, this is going to be something that we will continue to wrestle with for decades. And the thing that I continue to say, and I’ll probably say it until I’m blue in the face, is that nothing that we do moving forward is going to be perfect.

There’s no perfect water deals because there’s not enough water to go around in the way that we used to use water. And so we’re gonna have to think in new ways. We’re gonna have to do things.

And so I say all the time, don’t wait out for the deal that is the deal that you want. Take the deal that you can live with, because that’s kind of the way that we move forward.

And so it’s gonna take those kinds of compromises between farmers and cities and, you know, data centers and giant semiconductor factories and all of the different water uses that we have and that are emerging in our state, they all are going to have to make sacrifices and compromises to sort of have a rising tide lift all ships.