Arizona's top water official explains the reality of Colorado River cuts

MARK BRODIE: Arizona will see its allotment of Colorado River water cut over the next two years, under rules released by the federal government earlier this month.

The feds had to come up with those rules because the seven Colorado River Basin states couldn’t come up with an agreement among themselves on what to do with the overallocated river.

Shortly after the rules came out, Nevada announced it’s suing the federal government, calling its plan “fundamentally flawed.”

Arizona lawmakers have put money into a fund to pay for potential litigation related to the Colorado River, but the state has not yet decided whether it’s going to file suit.

It’s in that context that Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, came by the studios late last week. We started our conversation by taking a read of the room of sorts. I asked if it’s fair to say that folks here generally are feeling that the new rules aren’t great, but that they could have been a lot worse.

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TOM BUSCHATZKE: I think that somewhat sums it up, but we really have applauded the fact that California, Arizona and Nevada for 2027 and 2028 put 3.2 million acre-feet of water on the table to help prop up the elevation of Lake Mead.

And perhaps more importantly, California and Nevada, their volumes of water are on the table. It’s likely legally California didn’t have to put anything on the table. So I think that’s a great outcome for us collectively to show that collaborative nature, but it also results in less reductions for the state of Arizona.

Unfortunately, for the next three to 10 years — 2029 and beyond — there’s some huge risks under the federal decision. They might cut by 3 million acre-feet in priority. So, what that could mean in at least one interpretation of priority is that the Central Arizona Project could go dry.

My cities north of Yuma — Lake Havasu City, Bullhead City — would also lose their Colorado River water, and they have no alternative supplies. And even Yuma, who has a higher priority than those folks, could lose almost half of their water. So, that’s a very draconian outcome, and of course we’re very unhappy that that’s a possibility moving forward.

MARK BRODIE: So, I’m curious about the fact that all of the seven states — these plans are only for two years at a time. Do you have reason to think that the seven states can come up with some kind of agreement in the next two years when you haven’t been able to over the past however many years up until now?

TOM BUSCHATZKE: So, my view is that when all seven states feel risk to their water supplies, that will be the lever that gets us to an agreement. We asked the federal government in this current process to assess risk in the four Upper Basin states by looking at how they might be reduced if the compact was enforced in the way we believe it should be enforced.

Neither the former federal administration nor this one chose to do so. So I guess the other possibility of assigning risk is if you go to Congress. Nothing’s going to happen in Congress without all seven states. So, perhaps the third level of government that could assess risk or assign risk is the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

So that’s certainly not our preferred path, and we’ll see if the next set of discussions with all seven states can come up with a better outcome. But for three-and-a-half years we tried, and without that risk, I’m not sure what other levers can be pulled.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so you mentioned the legal system. Let me ask you — because one of your fellow Lower Basin states, Nevada, has sued over this plan. I’m curious what you make of that.

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TOM BUSCHATZKE: So, we are assessing the Nevada complaint. We’re assessing what it means, whether we want to participate in it. And we haven’t made that decision yet. But certainly my department is working in concert with Gov. Hobbs’ office on assessing that complaint and trying to figure out what our path forward is.

But I will say this: This proposal that we put together among the three states — Arizona, California, Nevada — we need to keep that in place. And so, that will go into our calculation of the Nevada complaint and how we respond to it.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a risk that Nevada filing the suit potentially on its own could put the agreement that we have right now at risk?

TOM BUSCHATZKE: I guess that is a potential outcome. Nevada put pretty much every issue on the table in its complaint, and you just don’t know where any of those will go in front of a court.

MARK BRODIE: What does it mean for Arizona that we’re going to be losing this amount of water?

TOM BUSCHATZKE: So, the 760,000 acre-feet that we would lose in 2027 and 2028 would almost all come out of the Central Arizona Project. A little bit for some folks on the river. But we are pretty well prepared to deal with that level of reductions.

There’s something called the Arizona Water Banking Authority. We’ve been storing water under the ground, and we have since 1996. We’re going to recover some of that water. And as a matter of fact, the bank a couple weeks ago passed a policy that for 2027, we’re going to completely 100% fill the reduction of folks’ water orders.

But we’re balancing in the water bank short-term fixes versus making sure the water bank has water for the long term. And interestingly, when we talk about collaborating with California and Nevada, in the early 2000s, Nevada was actually using more than their entitlement, so through the Water Banking Authority, we stored water under the ground for Nevada. That gave them some security, and then they started hyper-conservation programs — paying for people to remove their grass, and they went from a number — 325,000 acre-feet per year — they’re down to 250,000 acre-feet a year.

But I just say that because it’s been part of the evolution of the three Lower Basin states working together.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that there will be more of that kind of conservation mindset in Arizona, be it ripping out your grass, or maybe we rethink our relationship with agriculture, or anything like that?

TOM BUSCHATZKE: I think it’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of philosophy that needs to be implicated. I mean, Arizona has always been a leader in conservation. The cities have reduced their per capita use substantially, even with pretty large growth since the 1980 Groundwater Management Act was passed.

The other thing that we’ll be doing is maybe changing the way we use reclaimed water. But of course, you got to make choices about those uses that the reclaimed water is being used for now.

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about other sources of water, I’m wondering in the universe of things that you’re concerned about, where does groundwater fall? If some of these entities don’t get Colorado River water anymore, we know that groundwater’s being depleted at a pretty rapid pace. How concerned are you about that?

TOM BUSCHATZKE: So, we don’t want to go back to relying on groundwater for the long term, but we did pass the Groundwater Management Act of 1980 to preserve our groundwater for drought periods.

There are also basins outside of the Phoenix-Tucson corridor that were designated in the early ’90s by the Legislature for that water to be recovered and moved into our areas. Some of that’s already happening. We’ve approved some of those things — the town of Queen Creek, for example — and it gets transported through the CAP canal.

There are these other resources out there. Taking water away from agriculture at this point — the agriculture within the Central Arizona Project has already lost their water over the last four years because of the cuts we’ve already had to take. So, you look at the Yuma area, who has substantial Colorado River water, but if you take that water away and move it here, then the vegetable market, which comes from Yuma in the wintertime, that’s going to be impacted.

So, we have to create a balancing act of all the resource values that this water creates. And again, not only agriculture, but we’re making the most advanced microchips in the Western Hemisphere right here in Phoenix, for example. A lot of that’s Colorado River water.

And we’ve had these discussions with the federal government, like these issues of Arizona’s Colorado River water being reduced are really issues of national security on several levels, including food security.

So, there’s some tough times ahead in that regard, in figuring out how we’re going to continue to meet those important outcomes and still deal with what we have to do, at least in the near term, reduce our water take out of the Colorado River.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Tom, thanks as always.

TOM BUSCHATZKE: All right, thanks for having me.