Groundwater issues have halted developments in Buckeye. Arizona has plan to move forward

A little more than two years ago, the state Department of Water Resources announced a moratorium on building new homes in some parts of the Valley that rely on groundwater. That came after the agency determined that there wasn’t an assured hundred-year water supply in those areas, as required under state law.

Tony Davis spent time in one of the most affected cities — Buckeye — to find out how that change is impacting development — and residents. Davis is an environmental reporter for the Arizona Daily Star. He reported this piece for High Country News.

And then last week, Arizona announced what it sees as a solution to some of the problems Davis reported on — it’s called the Alternative Designation of Assured Water Supply.

Basically, it allows water providers to show proof of an assured hundred-year supply of water other than groundwater that they acquire to supply to a new development.

In the first case, water company EPCOR Utilities got the alternative designation for a housing development in the West Valley.

Kathleen Ferris is a senior fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University and one of the crafters of the original Groundwater Management Act of 1980.

Full conversation with Tony Davis

MARK BRODIE: (You) started (your) story at a so-called "bridge to nowhere" in Buckeye, which in some ways, it seems like a very visual representation of the issue (you were) looking into.

TONY DAVIS: Oh, definitely. I mean, it's a symbol. There's no question. [Buckeye’s “bridge to nowhere”} was a very visible, obvious symbol. This developer for this project, North Star Ranch, had already gotten approval for the project 20 years ago from the city of Buckeye, but he was trying to increase the number of houses.

But even before that was done, he built this bridge. And the bridge was gonna cross over the Central Arizona Project Canal, and it was gonna take drivers to where the houses were gonna be. But before they could even get approval, before anything else happened, the ADWR — the Department of Water Resources — put a halt to that.

And they stopped approving assured water supply certifications for any new development in the Phoenix area that would be served by groundwater, which this one would be, or would have been.

BRODIE: Do we have a sense of how many homes or potential homes, I guess is the better way to say it, were affected by this move from ADWR?

DAVIS: Well, I have documented two or three times over somewhere between 460,000 and 500,000 homes. I think, I strongly suspect that's an underestimate, that there are more because I actually had higher numbers at one point. But when I went back to try to document it, it wasn't easy to find. But I think with enough research, I think we would say that it probably was 500,000 or more. But all I can document right now is about somewhere between 460,000 and 500,000.

BRODIE: I mean, half a million homes.

DAVIS: That's a lot.

BRODIE: That's a lot. And especially when you consider the numbers that experts say especially the Phoenix area needs to meet demand, that seems like a pretty good percentage of the homes that would get us there.

DAVIS: Yes, there's no question. That's why the home builders were so upset about this, because it was a lot of houses.

But on the other side, the water researchers at the Kyle Center for Water Policy at Arizona State said there can be any number of factors guiding housing prices. And it isn't just those 500,000 homes, that it's not clear what the biggest issues are and what the biggest problems are.

And the other side insisted that that was the biggest problem. They hired a consultant to do their own study. And that study made a very clear conclusion that the state had really choked off the supply of affordable housing. But the Kyle Center's report questioned some of that and said it's not as clear cut as they think it is.

BRODIE: So how exactly did we get here? Because this is an issue that the idea of not issuing the certificates of assured water supply is reasonably new, within the last couple of years or so. But this is not just a two- or three-year issue.

DAVIS: Well, the groundwater law, the Arizona Groundwater Management Act, was passed in 1980. And it contained this provision that was heavily fought over requiring an assured 100-year water supply for all new subdivisions in not just Phoenix area, but also Tucson area and the Pinal County area.

And it took almost 10 years for the state to even propose regulations for how they're going to carry out this assured water supply provision. And at the time, they wanted to use it to limit growth on groundwater, and they wanted to force people into buying renewable supplies because they felt the groundwater supply was totally non-sustainable just to keep pumping as they were.

And the developers and the cities fought that tooth and nail, and they forced the department to not do it, to back off. And so they came up with this new system in the '90s called the groundwater replenishment district. And what that is, is you could develop on groundwater, but you had to pay this district to replenish renewable supplies somewhere else. And that's what really opened the door for this large scale amount of building on groundwater.

So I would say this issue has roots of 30 and 40 and 50 years. It just didn't happen overnight. And what happened is that over time, more and more people kept building houses out in the desert. And eventually ADWR, they looked at the numbers and they looked at their computer models and they said, we can't do this anymore and meet the requirement of the law.

So for a 100-year water supply, the more we keep doing it, we'll have what they call unmet demand. And that's what got us to where we are.

BRODIE: So you talked to some of the folks who live out in homes that were built in Buckeye where there were supposed to be many, many more. And those have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely at this point. I'm curious what they had to say about the situation in which they find themselves.

DAVIS: Well, they were not very happy because they'd moved out there under what they felt were assurances from the real estate salesmen and the city officials and everyone that that area was going to boom, that there was going to be tens of thousands more houses built out there.

And this gets kind of complicated, but basically they were having to drive 20 miles to get groceries or 10 miles to get gas, and they had to go to schools that were long distances. Their kids had to be bussed long distances to school.

So they were not very happy. There were even a few people who had put their houses on the market, but they were having trouble selling them. And that's in some of the areas like Tartesso, which I focused on, which is this subdivision west of the White Tank Mountains, way out there along the main drag there, the Sun Valley Parkway.

Now, there are other people who lived north of the White Tank Mountains. They lived in this development called Festival Ranch. And they knew that without this assured water supply ruling, that that other development at the end of the “bridge to nowhere” was going to have 9,600 homes, and they were very concerned about the traffic and the pollution and congestion and all that.

And so they're relieved or happy that the thing has been stopped, although nobody believes it's going to be stopped forever. But for right now, they can't build those houses. So it depends on where you are and who you are and who your neighbors are as to what you think.

Emilie Eaton/Cronkite News

Full conversation with Kathleen Ferris

MARK BRODIE: Kathleen, first off, what do you think about this new alternative program?

KATHLEEN FERRIS: I like it for a couple of reasons. First of all, a designation of assured water supply is so much better for determining water supplies than individual certificates issued to individual developers.

Now why is that? It’s because a designation applies to all of the uses served by the water provider, not just to subdivisions. So it’s a much preferred way of managing water supplies. The other thing I would say is that this particular idea, this alternative designation of assured water supply wasn’t developed by the Legislature, which makes it in my mind a pretty good thing.

It was developed by water professionals at the Arizona Department of Water Resources in conjunction with the Governor’s Water Policy Council. So a lot of hard work and thinking went into this, especially by the water professionals at DWR.

BRODIE: One of the things that that supporters of this plan are saying — folks from ADWR, folks from the Hobbs administration — is that this is a way to sort of balance the need for growth and for more housing with the need to make sure that we are using water in a responsible way.

Do you see this plan as achieving those two goals?

FERRIS: I think those are the goals of the plan, and always the proof is in the pudding. In other words, the way this works is that over the long term, the department has determined that if implemented correctly, the program would reduce groundwater pumping. And that’s always good. We can’t continue to grow on groundwater. That’s a finite supply, and it’s not a sustainable approach.

Now what do I say over the long term? Well, these designated water providers, they don’t stop their groundwater pumping immediately. They are given an allotment of groundwater that they can use. But in conjunction with that, they have to acquire new alternative water supplies as part of their water portfolio. And for each new water supply secured, the amount of groundwater that’s available to the water provider and its designation will be reduced by 25% of the new supply.

So it’s an incremental approach to weaning a water provider away from groundwater and onto renewable water supplies.

BRODIE: How important is that last phrase there, of renewable water supplies? Because it seems to me that if a developer is going to be, let’s say, taking x percent less groundwater but taking more from the Colorado River or from the Salt or Verde rivers, or from some other source, in a sense you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul there, right?

How important is it that the source that is replacing the groundwater is one that is also not endangered?

FERRIS: Well, that’s a very good point, Mark. And we of course know that the Colorado River is stretched to its limits. I mean, it’s not going to be able to provide these water supplies.

So the kinds of these water providers will be looking to are things like reuse of treated wastewater, which is already really being used a lot in our Valley.

They’ll be looking to import groundwater from outside of the AMA out of the Harquahala Irrigation Non-Expansion area, which is a basin, which, like or not, the Legislature has decided that groundwater can be used to support growth in the Phoenix AMA. So they’ll be looking to import that groundwater. They will be looking to find new water supplies if the Verde River is able to produce more water with the new dam that is being discussed to do that.

So it’s not looking at the Colorado River per se. It’s really looking at a mix and match of other water supplies that are out there.

BRODIE: Well, so you mentioned the Harquahala Valley, for example. So I wonder if you think that on a political level this maybe does this preclude further regulation of groundwater in Arizona, which has been a really big topic of discussion at the state Capitol over the last few years?

FERRIS: I do not think it does, and I wouldn’t support it if I thought that was the case. I’ve been a strong proponent of increased groundwater regulation outside of the active management areas. And as you say, it has been a very difficult issue for the Legislature to grapple with. And we’ve seen five years come and go, and nothing’s been done.

BRODIE: How creative do you expect developers to get in looking for other sources of water that they can use to — as we’ve talked about — sort of wean themselves off the groundwater that they otherwise previously would have used?

FERRIS: I don’t expect developers to do much of anything, quite frankly. They’re not the folks who are really having to bear the burden of this growth. It’s going to be the water providers, the cities, the towns, the private water companies like EPCOR who are going to bear the burden of acquiring, finding these supplies, building the infrastructure, demonstrating to the Department of Water Resources that they can actually get this water to where it’s needed and to pay for it.

Some of the developers have claimed that this was a tax on the development community. It is not in any way a tax. The responsibility is on the water providers.

BRODIE: Well, so I guess maybe the better question is: Do you expect the water providers to be more creative in terms of where they are looking for and getting water for some of these projects?

FERRIS: Absolutely, I think they’re going to have to be. And I think we see that already.

BRODIE: Do you think there are enough solutions and maybe creative solutions to get back on track all of the projects that were stopped when ADWR stopped issuing the certificates of assured water supply?

FERRIS: I don’t think so. I think that what we saw a lot of, and we still see a lot of big master plan communities, they’re so far away from the existing service area of any major water provider that it’s hard to imagine that they can all come online.

And you know, I guess it depends on how creative people can get in the future. But I don’t think everything is going to be solved by, for example, this ADAS program.

BRODIE: So you think more has to happen.

FERRIS: More will have to happen, and we’ll have to recognize the limits of what we can do, which is a very difficult thing for a growing state to do. We will as a state, I believe, at some point have to have a vision for our long term future. And that vision may not include having everybody get to do everything they want to do.

But what we’ve seen — Mark, we’re seeing this so much now — is that our Arizonans want a secure water supply. They want a secure future, and they don’t want to have that future eroded by growth that is not sustainable.