Arizona will be getting less water from the Colorado River starting next year, under new rules implemented by the federal government.
But for most of us living in metro Phoenix, those cuts may be difficult to see on a day-to-day basis. That’s because cities have been preparing for this for years, and coming up with backup plans — and backup water sources.
KJZZ’s Alex Hager has reported on this and joined The Show to talk more about what some of those plans look like.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Alex, good morning.
ALEX HAGER: Good morning, Mark. Thanks for having me.
MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So, let's start with Phoenix, kind of the big dog in the Valley here. What sorts of plans have they been working on to make up for lack of Colorado River water?
ALEX HAGER: The fact of the matter here is that water managers in the Valley have seen this crisis coming for years, sometimes decades, and they have been planning to weather the storm. And in this case, and in many cities' cases, that looks like finding other sources of water.
So, when there are cuts to the Colorado River, there is less water coming through the canal that brings the Colorado River to the Valley. You just lean harder on another source of water. And for most cities, that's water from the Salt and Verde rivers, which is a different river system that's Bartlett Lake, Roosevelt Lake, all those reservoirs in the foothills to the east, or groundwater, which is sometimes naturally occurring groundwater, and sometimes water that has been stored there specifically for dry times like this one.
MARK BRODIE: So, are Valley cities looking at those other sources in proportion to how much they had been using of Colorado River water?
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, that's correct. For a lot of these cities, they're looking at cuts in the ballpark of 20% less Colorado River water coming in every year. And because they have diverse portfolios, they can fill that 20% by taking something like 20% more from one of those other sources.
MARK BRODIE: Are those other sources sustainable enough for the cities to continue doing that for some time into the future?
ALEX HAGER: This is a big, murky question. So, right now, the backup plans that they have are pretty rock solid for the near-term future while we figure out what the next chapter is for the Colorado River. Things like the Salt and Verde rivers, those river systems are generally a little bit easier to predict and have been for water managers. And they have plans to keep those in a way that they're using them sustainably. Groundwater, we know can be a useful plan B, but those reserves could be tapped pretty quickly if you lean on them too hard. So, that is why cities are going to the next chapter and building systems, manmade infrastructure that can go even beyond these short-term backup plans.
MARK BRODIE: That's sort of where the augmentation comes in, right? Either we've heard about desalination or water purification, things like that.
ALEX HAGER: That's right. And water purification is going to be a really big part of that next chapter. The city of Phoenix, for example, is spending more than $300 million on just one facility to take sewage and clean it back up to safe, pure drinking water standards.
And the water leaders that I've talked to say if you can build infrastructure like that, you can guarantee, or come close to guaranteeing, a long-term water supply, because it isn't dependent on how much it rains or snows somewhere or how much water has been naturally occurring underground or how much you stored there underground, because you can very predictably say: "We have this much water in the system and we can keep a large percentage of it there if we just clean it back up into drinking water."
MARK BRODIE: All right, so you mentioned hundreds of millions of dollars for one facility. I would imagine that these sort of backup plans come with pretty hefty price tags.
ALEX HAGER: That is how people are going to notice these water shortages. You will not notice it in water not coming out of your tap. You will likely not notice it in mandatory restrictions where you get a letter in the mail that says, "Hey, you can't water your lawns on these days."
What you will notice is a gradual increase — and sometimes less gradual — in how much you're paying on your water bill every month. Cities that are building these multi-hundred-million-dollar infrastructure projects and say that they will likely be building billion-dollar infrastructure projects in the future, they say that they're going to have to find the money to pay for those, partially by leaning on the people who use that water.
MARK BRODIE: I think this is maybe a misconception for some water customers that when the prices go up, that it's because of scarcity, it's because trying to encourage conservation. But it sounds like what you're saying is, at least in many of these cases, it's not necessarily that — although if people use less water, that's great. It's because cities and water utilities need money to upgrade pipes and build new facilities and things like that.
ALEX HAGER: It varies city to city, it varies depending on the time of year and where you live. But overwhelmingly, the big changes that we're going to see in the long term to price increases for water coming out of your tap has much more to do with the physical infrastructure that's built to get the water there than the cost of the water itself.
MARK BRODIE: And are various cities building various things? I mean, you mentioned Phoenix building the water purification plant. Are other cities also having these pretty big capital projects?
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, that's right. I mean, not all of them are quite as big, but cities are a lot of times collaborating on big projects. So, instead of building their own water purification facility, a few cities might band together and build one that can serve three or four at a time.
MARK BRODIE: And share the water between them.
ALEX HAGER: That's right. And we're also seeing a lot of cities build new wells to access that groundwater, make sure that they can get enough of it if they need to draw more of it when there's less water available from the Colorado River.
MARK BRODIE: And ... how long-range are those plans?
ALEX HAGER: I have talked to city water leaders who are looking decades into the future. There is a great degree of uncertainty right now. The new plan for managing the Colorado River only lasts two years, and they don't know exactly how much water they will be losing after 2028.
But some city leaders, especially in the larger cities with more money, they are able to look decades into the future and say, "... We're going to build a plan where it doesn't matter as much what happens in these two-year cycles of making new decisions about exactly what percent of water is not going to come down the Central Arizona Project canal." They are trying to build systems that can go beyond that.
MARK BRODIE: Kind of future-proof themselves in a way.
ALEX HAGER: That's right.
MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, that is KJZZ's Alex Hager. Alex, thanks as always.
ALEX HAGER: Thank you, Mark.
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Then join us at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 8, as KJZZ senior field correspondent Alex Hager presents your questions and concerns to a panel of experts. -
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