Arizona is moving forward with ideas to import more water. They won't be cheap

As Arizona prepares to get less water from the Colorado River under recently announced plans from the federal government, the state is moving forward on plans to bring in more water from elsewhere.

The Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, or WIFA, has approved what are called scopes of work for two water augmentation projects. There are a handful more that will follow.

One of the initial projects involves recovering excess runoff in California. The other deals with treating wastewater — again, out of state.

Chelsea McGuire is WIFA’s director. She joined The Show to talk more about these projects and what might come next.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Chelsea, you’ve sort of whittled down these augmentation proposals, and now you have two that WIFA is pursuing more seriously. Is that right?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: Sort of. We still have seven overall water importation proposals that we are going to look at more closely as an entity, but we have two that we have finalized the scope of work for what that looks like, for what kind of information we need to know about the project to allow the board to continue to make those go or no-go decisions as we learn more.

So we have two that are ready, they’re starting the work. We have five that are getting ready, and I think we anticipate we’ll be able to start that work by the end of September. But these two are ready to go.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So let’s talk about these two projects, and let’s start with the California groundwater storage and recharge. What exactly would this entail?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: Absolutely. It’s a little bit of a misnomer in the name. There is going to be water stored in the ground, but it’s not groundwater as that is actually defined.

This is a project that would take excess runoff from California in a series of to-be-determined sites — that’s some of the information that we’re asking these teams to work on providing to us. It would take that excess water, it would store it underground, allow California to utilize that water however it sees fit, in exchange for a portion of California’s Colorado River water flowing instead to Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: So is it safe to say then that those two numbers would be roughly equal, like the amount of water from California’s allocation of the Colorado River Arizona gets is equivalent to the amount of excess water that California gets under this deal?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: I wouldn’t say equal, I would say equitable. What we’re really looking for in this project and any of the projects that are before us is a win-win situation. California, we are hoping, wants this groundwater storage, or they want this excess water storage.

So if there’s a reason that they would need to take a higher cut of that and it would be more of a ratio of exchange, that’s something that we would work out with them. We’re not going into any of these projects assuming that we know what the needs of the state are in terms of the needs of California.

We’re not going into any of these projects assuming that we know what California is or isn’t willing to do. We’re going in saying, "We believe this is a possibility, we’d like to investigate this possibility with you, sort of a ’what would it take to get you in this water storage project today?’"

MARK BRODIE: Got it. OK. So the other proposal that is moving forward at this point is called the South Bay Potable Water Reuse. What does that one entail?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: That one entails something that many of Arizona’s San Diego expats, at least during the summer, may be familiar with. There is a water treatment plant that treats wastewater from Tijuana, and a lot of us know that sometimes there’s some real issues with that plant. The effluent from that plant ultimately discharges into the Tijuana River and therefrom into the Pacific Ocean.

Unfortunately, that plant is kind of fraught with issues in terms of the infrastructure that’s there. There are pipes that break frequently. And so often there are water quality issues in the Pacific, and so we’re unable to swim in San Diego or in Coronado Island. And there’s also real water quantity and quality issues in Tijuana.

So again, speaking of win-win issues or win-win projects, this project would expand the existing treatment in South Bay for that wastewater coming from Mexico, expand the treatment in terms of instead of treating that water to effluent standards, treating it to potable standards so that it’s actually usable by humans. Then that treated water would flow back to Tijuana for their use, to help that community and to make sure that they have adequate water, again in exchange for a proportion of Mexico’s Colorado River water coming into Arizona.

One of the things that the board also talked quite a bit about in its meeting and that the team that’s developing that project talked quite a bit about is that there are options to change the way that this project is designed to either facilitate that exchange or to facilitate delivery of that water to a point perhaps above Morelos Dam.

So there’s some flexibility with this. So we’re very optimistic about something like this being the exact structure that we’re looking for. How do we solve multiple problems with one project, hopefully getting as much buy-in as we possibly can from all the impacted communities?

MARK BRODIE: So I’m curious about some of that flexibility, because I was going to ask if most of the projects or some number of the projects, these two anyway, seem like the additional water would not be made in Arizona, that it could potentially be brought here or it would be used somewhere else in exchange for that other place’s allocation of Colorado River water.

Does that seem to be maybe one of the easier ways to do this, that if you’re going to create more water, that it happens somewhere else and we just take their allocation of Colorado River water in exchange for that?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: I certainly wouldn’t call any of these easy. But what I would say is that, yes, if you’re looking at — I guess I’ll answer this question in two ways. The first is that WIFA’s mission, our mandate, is actually that process of going out and developing those water sources outside of Arizona. That’s what our statute requires us to spend 75% of our augmentation funds doing.

And so part of it is that that’s where more water is. We don’t have a lot of excess water to develop in Arizona, and so we’re looking to our sister states, our sister nations, that either have access to an ocean or maybe have different water supplies available. So that’s part of why we’re looking there.

But to your point, part of why we are looking at so many of these as exchange options is that that’s most likely going to be the most economical way to make more water available in Arizona. As opposed to building the infrastructure to physically move a molecule of water from one place to another, it would be building the infrastructure to make that water available locally and then facilitating some sort of exchange on the river.

That may not always be possible, though, and we are at a point right now where I think everyone has quite a bit of attention on the Colorado River for very good reasons. So we do want to keep our options open.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so you mentioned economics, and I’m wondering what WIFA’s financial situation is at the moment, because I know that you’ve had concerns with money not being allocated or money potentially being swept for other purposes. What is your situation financially now to get some of these pilots off the ground?

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: What I will say is that financially we are in a very good position to get to the end decision-making side of the road, right, to get to the point where our board can say, "We know which of these projects or project is the best for Arizona to invest in."

Apart from that, though, when it actually comes to building that project, to investing in that project, to making it so that the water coming from that project is reasonably affordable, we’re definitely going to need to come back to the state and come back to others to say, "How do we make this happen?"

Now, we are under absolutely no impression that this water is not going to be significantly more expensive than any other water source that Arizona is used to, but that’s going to be the way of the future. When there isn’t a lot of water and when there’s not enough water to go around, expensive water becomes sort of the name of the game. It’s the thing that’s going to keep our portfolios afloat.

And so we fully anticipate the need to go back to the state legislature and say, “Look, there was a promise of $1 billion to WIFA. We have about a third of that. We are in a water crisis. Let’s figure out ways to make state resources available to continue to make these projects not just possible, but also palatable for the rest of the state.”

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Chelsea McGuire, director of the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, otherwise known as WIFA. Chelsea, thanks as always, I appreciate it.

CHELSEA MCGUIRE: Thank you, Mark.