Arizona’s future water shock

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May 16, 2022

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue – March 28, 2022

The Biggest Dry: Arizona, third of three reports. Read the rest of the series here.

PHOENIX – On a Saturday morning in late January a chill wind kicks up dust on the high desert ridge north of Scottsdale where wood skeletons of new homes appear above the mesquite and cactus of the Rio Verde Foothills. Along Rio Verde Drive a white tent marks the corner where Karen Nabity and Jennifer Simpson, longtime Foothills residents, collect petition signatures to head off a water emergency bearing down on them and hundreds of their neighbors.

Last year Scottsdale authorities, concerned about the effects of the megadrought and the August 2021 federal Colorado River water shortage declaration, decided to protect the city’s 241,000 residents. They issued an order under Scottsdale’s drought management plan that will bar tanker trucks from using a city-owned depot to haul water to homes outside the city limit. Rio Verde Foothills, where Nabity, Simpson and at least 500 other homeowners rely on the depot for their drinking water, falls into that category. The city set a December 31, 2022 deadline for the water shut off.

Scottsdale’s water shut down and Rio Verde Foothills’ scramble for a new supply is unique to Arizona at the moment. However, the significance of the community’s encounter with the real-life menace of drought and shrinking groundwater reserves is more than a one-off water shortage event. It is a flashing red warning that Arizona’s growth-centered economic determinism is crashing hard into severe ecological constraints.

What’s happening in the million-dollar homes of Rio Verde Foothills, one of the Phoenix metropolitan region’s choice places to live, is a future shock “buyer beware” scenario certain to be replicated over the next several decades in many other Arizona communities contending with urgent water constraints.

Tempe cleaned up and dammed a dry section of the Salt River, filled it with reclaimed water, and in 1999 opened 2 mile-long Town Lake, a signature recreational asset at the heart of the city. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Another view

About 50 miles south, another scenario of 21st century Arizona is taking shape. The nearly 23,000-member Gila River Indian Community is modernizing: adding to its group of casinos, preparing to expand its irrigated farm acres, and elevating its influence in Arizona’s politics and economy. It’s doing so by virtue of one of the most secure and abundant water supplies in Arizona and the entire Southwest.

Following decades of brutal discrimination and abuse by white settlers and state authorities during which the two Gila River tribes’ rights to their historic water supply were not honored, Congress approved an agreement between the United States and the State of Arizona that essentially guarantees tribal access to 653,500 acre-feet of water per year. That amounts to 213 billion gallons, or three times more water than industry and the 1 million residents of the Tucson metropolitan region use in a year. Almost half, or 311,000 acre-feet, comes from the Colorado River. Much of the rest comes from groundwater and reservoir storage on the Salt, Verde, and Gila rivers east of Phoenix.

Tribal leaders did not respond to requests for interviews. But from previous statements by tribal leaders and in interviews with state water authorities, it is clear that the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC, is using its abundant water to build a new age of wealth and influence on the 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix. GRIC is constructing a federally-financed irrigation network to increase farming operations to 75,000 ancestral acres from the current 35,000. It negotiated lucrative agreements to lease water to Phoenix, Chandler, and other communities. It is also marketing water that it stores in aquifers to willing suburbs and subdivision builders interested in long-term leases.

Since 2016, GRIC has played a central role in storing over 370,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead, plus 130,000 more acre-feet this year to keep lake levels high enough to prevent a water shortage declaration more dire than the one the federal government issued last August. GRIC received $274 per acre-foot from the state and federal governments. In short, ample and secure water supply is the basis of the community’s plan to rebuild the vitality of its 8,000 year-old desert civilization that was ruined in the 20th century.

Newly planted pecan trees that are irrigated by finite and shrinking reserves of groundwater in Cochise County in southeast Arizona. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Arizona’s future water shock

The water-abundant and thriving Gila River Indian Community amounts to one bookend scenario of Arizona’s 21st century condition. The other bookend is the arid Rio Verde Foothills, where government decisions and meteorological disruptions trap residents in a water-related crisis that heat and drought aggravated, and state law did not anticipate.

In 1980, Arizona enacted an innovative groundwater management program intended to ensure adequate reserves of water for rapid home development and expansive population growth by designating four regions from Prescott to Tucson as Active Management Areas. (Santa Cruz, the fifth AMA, was carved out from the Tucson AMA in 1994.) The program included two important exemptions, however: its provisions did not apply to groundwater withdrawals outside of the AMAs. And within the AMA boundaries, owners of private wells that pumped less than 35 gallons per minute — in other words, many of the wells drilled for the state’s exploding residential real estate markets — did not come under state oversight.

In 1995, the law set in place a consumer protection measure to require developers building subdivisions in AMAs with six or more homes to assure buyers that their houses had a 100-year supply of water. But the requirement did not apply for residential construction projects with less than six homes. Builders constructing individual homes, or clusters of five homes or less in an AMA, avoided the 100-year water requirement. Outside the AMAs, groundwater safeguards did not apply, creating what amounted to a home construction free-for-all.

Little more than 40 years after the statute was enacted and less than 30 years after the 100-year assured water supply rules were adopted, the subdivision and private well waivers have resulted in Rio Verde’s emergency. They also influenced a boom in home construction that has caused — and continues to cause — thousands of wells to fail inside and outside of AMAs. It is clearer by the day that, without significant strengthening, the state’s water management program is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The emergence of serious instances of water shortage from Kingman in the north, to the Chino Valley north of Prescott, to Cochise County in Arizona’s southeast has prompted civic campaigns for reform. They have yet to attract sufficient legislative support.

That seems certain to change. And soon, because of climate change.

This year alone, the latest scientifically respected studies reveal a number of disconcerting findings. The megadrought that has Arizona in its tightening grip is the worst in 1200 years. Climate change is responsible for at least 40 percent of the decline in Colorado River water supplies. And the Southwest, like other desert regions, is getting steadily hotter, drier, and more dangerous. Though future weather conditions are always difficult to accurately predict, a worst-case scenario for Arizona looks like this: Population growth stops. Residents start to migrate in droves away from the stifling hot and dry state. Home values collapse. The state enters an era of relentless decline. By 2060, according to several published projections, extreme heat and water scarcity could make Phoenix one of the continent’s most uninhabitable places.

It’s not much of a reach to conclude that Arizona is at the intersection of two paths to the future. By mid-century it will be a model of desert dwelling resiliency. Or it will be a weakened civilization that is starting to waste away.

A water shutoff order from Scottsdale hasn’t slowed the construction of million-dollar homes in Rio Verde Foothills, one of the Phoenix metropolitan region’s choice places to live. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

A cogent look at what to expect

When asked what the future portends, none of the senior state water management authorities interviewed for this project delivered a firm projection. But in 2014, as the megadrought was exerting its unmistakable influence on water supplies, the Arizona Department of Water Resources prepared “Arizona’s Next Century,” a well-regarded “strategic vision” for future water supply.

The report’s authors projected colliding trend lines of rapid growth and declining water supply that plainly showed that the status quo will not hold in Arizona. According to the study’s findings:

— Over 3 million more people are expected to live in Arizona by 2035, or 40 percent more than the 7.1 million who reside there today. By 2060, Arizona could be home to an additional 6 million people.

— As a result of anticipated population growth, annual water demand in Arizona will increase 1.2 million to 1.6 million acre-feet, or 17 percent to 22 percent above 2022 demand.

— By 2060, the population in the seven states served by the Colorado River, which supplied almost 40 percent of Arizona’s water until this year, could increase to 76 million, nearly double the number today.

— Demand for Colorado River water from its seven basin states is anticipated to increase by mid-century to 18 million to 20 million acre-feet, a nearly 70 percent increase from now. But due to drought, climate change, and extreme heat, the water supply from the Colorado River will drop to roughly 9.4 million acre-feet, 25 percent lower than today.

Taken as a whole, the data mean that Arizona’s share of the Colorado River will likely shrink to less than half the current 2.8 million acre-feet allotment. Arizona will rely much more heavily on its finite groundwater reserves to support population growth, residential construction, and new business starts that state officials continue to encourage. And though Arizona has stored over 13 million acre-feet of water underground to supplement supply during years of water shortage, never since statehood in 1912 has Arizona encountered such a long and deep period of water scarcity that science predicts will grow steadily more severe.

It’s not at all difficult to project that “home buyer beware” warnings will be emailed, Tweeted, Instagrammed, Tiktoked, and taped to bulletin boards in many more communities than Rio Verde Foothills, Cochise County, north Chino Valley, Kingman, and Flagstaff, where water wells are failing.

Unless.

Unless, said the authors of “Arizona’s Next Century,” the state’s Native American tribes make much more of their secure yearly right to 1.9 million acre-feet available for sale or lease. And unless Arizona’s elected officials, water authorities, and engineers develop and quickly execute an array of policy changes and infrastructure projects that converge over the next generation to head off calamity.

Those steps include amending existing water laws or enacting new laws to increase water efficiency and conservation, more stringently oversee groundwater use in and outside the Active Management Areas, and make it much easier to move available water around the state. Another idea, already in place in Las Vegas and Aurora, Col. is to ban grass and “non-functional turf” because half of U.S. urban water use goes to maintaining outdoor spaces. Austin, Tex. is developing systems within its own buildings to stop flushing potable water down the toilet. Instead, the city turns wastewater into greywater for various uses inside and outdoors, a practice that could reduce demand by another half.

The Next Century authors also called for somehow increasing the state’s water supply, as it did in the 20th century. A favored proposal is to construct desalination plants. “Arizona’s future success is tethered to how effectively we continue to manage our water resources and develop new water supplies and infrastructure,” they wrote. “Yet, our present success cannot sustain Arizona’s economic development forever.”

In the desert west of Phoenix, the city of Buckeye is growing faster than almost any other city in the U.S. City leaders anticipate housing 1 million residents by mid-century. At current rates of water consumption, Buckeye would need over 100,000 acre-feet annually, or 90,000 acre-feet more water than today. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Acting on future scenario

The response by state leaders to the 2014 study has been methodical but by no means urgent. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey formed expert committees. Finding more water is their most popular option. Last year, Ducey convinced the Legislature to invest $160 million to investigate “augmentation,” which is Arizona’s term for developing new sources of water.

This year, the governor proposed establishing a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, to pursue new supplies and also asked the Legislature for $1 billion more, framing the request around the need to build a desalination plant, perhaps in Mexican waters, to produce 250,000 acre-feet a year.

Other ideas for securing Arizona’s water supply — regulating groundwater use in rural areas, metering private water wells, increasing use of recycled wastewater, restricting natural grass lawns, and imposing land use and urban design requirements to collect and store stormwater — haven’t reached nearly the same level of clarity and legislative purpose.

There’s a reason for that. Regulatory changes in water policy and practice are some of the steepest cliffs in Arizona’s political landscape. Any proposal judged by lawmakers to challenge property rights, raise costs, and impede growth is dead on arrival in the Legislature. Such proposals generate powerful winds of opposition in the executive offices of home builders, chambers of commerce, and every other economic development agency.

Arizona’s leaders and communities vow to continue growing. One prominent example is Buckeye, a suburb in the desert west of Phoenix that is one of the country’s fastest growing cities. Buckeye supplies over 11,000 acre-feet of water annually to its 97,000 residents and businesses, according to city figures.

Buckeye has enough land — and its current leaders sufficient moxie — to welcome 900,000 more residents by mid-century. At current rates of water consumption, Buckeye would need over 100,000 acre-feet annually, or 90,000 acre-feet more water than today.

Where will it come from? The city’s latest master water plan includes a lengthy list of potential water sources that are either unreliable (Colorado River), difficult to secure and transport, and certainly more expensive.

One idea, for example, is to help finance construction that will raise the height of 83-year-old Bartlett Dam, located east of Phoenix, to add 130,000 acre-feet to Bartlett Lake’s storage capacity. Whatever portion of the added supply that Buckeye gains would then be transported to the city over 100 miles through existing canals.

Another idea is to build a treatment plant to remove salts and impurities from a brackish aquifer within the city limits to use as water for landscaping, and maybe for drinking water.

Two more ideas involve purchasing groundwater from basins distant from Buckeye and transporting it by pipe and the Central Arizona Project (CAP) aqueduct to the city. Sounds simple in concept. In real-life application it’s not. The administrative challenges, water leasing contracts, and infrastructure requirements are costly and tricky.

One of those sources is the Harquahala groundwater basin beneath the desert further west of Buckeye, in Maricopa County. The state says it holds a total of 15.5 million acre-feet, though not nearly all of that can be recovered. If Buckeye relies on the Harquahala basin for most of the 90,000 acre-feet it will need, that represents perhaps a 50-year supply. Existing state law requires subdivision builders in Buckeye to assure they have a 100-year supply of water before they can begin construction. Harquahala, in effect, helps a bit in meeting that requirement. Buckeye needs more than Harquahala for its new sources of water.

Second, transporting groundwater out of the Harquahala basin to Buckeye involves 1) building a 30-mile long pipeline, 2) transporting water via the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal, and 3) paying a fortune for the water.

The first obstacle likely requires a formal environmental assessment, or a more complex environmental impact statement required for state, and perhaps the federal government’s review and approval.

Transporting water in the CAP is similarly complex. It involves review and approval by the director of the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. secretary of the Interior. Following those approvals, Buckeye would need to negotiate and sign a wheeling contract approved by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the leadership board that oversees the CAP.

The third element, actually gaining access to Harquahala groundwater, significantly raises the cost of water in Buckeye. Buyers seeking a long-term lease for Harquahala water told Circle of Blue that the current price quote is a one-time fee of $7,000 to $10,000 an acre foot, or somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion.

When asked whether Buckeye will have sufficient supplies of water to meet the demand of 1 million residents, Annie DeChance, the city’s communications manager, did not hesitate. “Absolutely,” she replied. “We have the water we need. We are aware of the complexities and challenges.”

Karen Nabity (l) collects a signature on a petition to head off a water emergency bearing down on hundreds of residents of Rio Verde Foothills. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Rio Verde scarcity

The majestic Four Peaks mountain range was painted in a luminous morning shade of purple the day Karen Nabity and Jennifer Simpson collected petition signatures in support of a plan to secure a permanent source of Rio Verde Foothills water. Nabity and Simpson had waded into the complexity of Arizona law and regulation, and the rugged terrain of politics, to find a solution. They are leading a local campaign to establish a domestic water improvement district, in effect a state-sanctioned community utility would have the authority to negotiate agreements to secure an alternative source of water.

It’s a big idea for a distinctive Arizona community. Beneath Rio Verde Foothills lie groundwater supplies that never were robust. Some of the community’s homes were built without wells and buyers knew they would always rely on trucked water. Most others had private wells that delivered sufficient water.

But as development occurred, competition from new homes put pressure on the aquifer. Private wells failed and more homes turned to water hauling. Then came the megadrought, which eliminated most of the natural aquifer recharge, and dried up hundreds more private wells.

At least a quarter of Rio Verde’s 2,100 homes, Nabity said, are supplied with water by tanker trucks filled at Scottsdale’s water fill station, about 10 miles away. It’s enough water in a water-scarce era for Scottsdale to pay attention — 38 million gallons or 117 acre-feet annually and increasing. City authorities last year told Rio Verde residents their access to the depot would stop at the end of this year.

Water shortage emergencies like the one occurring north of Phoenix were not supposed to happen in Arizona. The 1980 groundwater law, plus provisions put in place in 1995, required home builders to prove that a 100-year supply of water was available before construction could start. But the 1995 rules exempted construction projects with fewer than six homes, and the 1980 law exempted wells that pump less than 35 gallons per minute. Both decisions enabled builders and buyers to avoid regulatory constraints and accelerate development.

Homes and property in the community are now valued at $1.3 billion, according to Maricopa County records. Rio Verde residents are encountering a new truth about vulnerability that less fortunate people already knew: wealth and stature are no match for water scarcity.

Nabity and Simpson, real estate professionals, propose a difficult legal and logistical solution that also has encountered some local opposition. The proposed community water district, a unit of government enabled by state law, gives homeowners the legal authority to collaborate and secure a new source of water.

The steps to formally establish the district and then acquire the new source are intricate and formidable without a deadline. Nabity and Simpson formed a non-profit, RVF Water Resources, Inc., to raise money and collect signatures on the petition to meet the legal requirements for establishing the water district. If the district is approved members will pay $1,000 per home to become district members and get the project started.

In its most basic outline, the community needs Maricopa County to approve the water district’s formation. It hasn’t yet due to opposition from some Rio Verde homeowners. Following that step, the district’s leaders, among them Nabity and Simpson, need to find a source of water. They are talking with water developers in the Harquahala groundwater basin to buy land with water rights to 200 acre-feet annually. That would mean piping it under Interstate 10 and into the CAP for transport. Both steps require intensive federal review. The total cost of the water lease, legal counsel, engineering, construction, and transportation could well exceed $4 million, plus the monthly cost of administration and hauling water to their homes. The Rio Verde Foothills homeowners also need to build a new community water depot where trucks can fill their tanks. The earliest all of this could occur, Nabity says, is 2026.

So she and Simpson opened a second path to end the water emergency – negotiating one-year water leases for 170 acre-feet from the Gila River Indian Community or another tribe that already is delivering water to Phoenix-area communities through the CAP. The one-year lease of tribal water, plus transportation and treatment to drinking water standards will be roughly $250,000.

It’s a full-time job without pay. “Did we ever think we’d be leading this charge?” remarked Nabity. “Never. Not even close.”

One more significant impediment. In order to meet Scottsdale’s December 31 deadline, the Rio Verde Foothills residents have until June 30 to negotiate and sign separate contracts for water supply with a tribe, and with Scottsdale to receive and treat the new supply. If those steps are completed the city told Nabity it will suspend the December 31 shutoff deadline and allow tanker trucks to use the fill station.

“It’s such a critical time crunch. I can’t even tell you,” Nabity said.

West of Prescott, Granite Mountain rises to secure a magnificent view of dry Skull Valley. Never since statehood in 1912 has Arizona encountered such a long and deep period of water scarcity that science predicts will grow steadily more severe. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Mid-century outlook

What’s happening in the Rio Verde Foothills — the causes of the emergency, the arduous path to solutions — is a small act in the mammoth, momentous, water shortage epic unfolding in Arizona. The state’s powerful resolve to keep growing is confronting much more potent limits on its water supply, the essential resource for attracting and supporting a civilization that is now at the peak of its human appeal and economic influence.

Extreme heat and deeper drought are forcing a reckoning. Over the next generation governments, farms, residents, and businesses will have to adjust to the new conditions. The challenge is immense. The bar for measuring success is high and terrifically difficult, especially viewed in this era of disruption, diversion, and dissent.

What will Arizona be like in 2060?

A reasonable projection is a state of active farm regions — Yuma, Pinal County, and Native American reservations — that cultivate half the number of irrigated acres that they do now.

The Tucson and Phoenix metro areas are smaller in order to better balance demand and available water supply. Homeowners and small businesses pay more for water than they do for electricity, a factor in diminishing the region’s economic competitiveness and residential allure.

Native American tribes that hold 2 million acre-feet of secure water rights will have built impressive desert economies and elevated to the top tier of policy influence and economic wealth.

Beaten by heat and drought, Arizona’s rural regions are a scorched landscape of expanding desert and empty towns where farmers and residents once lived in more hospitable conditions.

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Unsafe yield

By

Circle of Blue

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May 16, 2022

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue – March 21, 2022

The Biggest Dry: Arizona, second of three reports. Read the rest of the series here.

WILLCOX, Ariz. – Nobody who knows Peggy Judd would mistake her for a political progressive.

At age 59, Judd is in her second term as one of three supervisors in Cochise County, a nearly 4 million-acre expanse of mesquite and cholla cactus, irrigated cropland, and pecan orchards silhouetted by towering mountains in southeast Arizona. Raised on a Cochise County farm and true to her allegiance to private property rights, Judd has no interest in hampering the development of this high desert county’s farms and ranches, which are an economic growth sector accounting for over $100 million in annual sales.

One more detail about Judd. Like many other Arizona Republicans, she is preoccupied by former President Donald Trump’s big lie that he won the 2020 election. County voters called for Judd’s resignation last year after she bragged on her Facebook page about marching on the Capitol during the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

Peggy Judd, one of the three supervisors in Cochise County, where water scarcity is steadily becoming more apparent and more severe. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Yet when it comes to water in a county where groundwater is the sole source for irrigation and drinking, and where demand is racing ahead of supply, the boundaries of politics and ideology can change. Clear proof has emerged in recent years of the serious consequences of dropping groundwater levels in water-scarce Cochise County. A surge of aggressive groundwater pumping by new homes in the county’s southern region, along with recently arrived and thirsty livestock, pecan, and pistachio farms, has impaired the protected San Pedro River and caused irrigation and homeowner wells to go dry.

In order to develop acceptable responses, Judd finds herself surveying the region’s rugged political terrain of private interest, anti-government, free market zeal. Confrontations over water don’t always fit neatly into these spaces. Her assessment, swayed by conversations with constituents, is a more nuanced view of science, the public interest, and government’s role in brokering solutions.

She’s been active in organizing support for a new water district to supply piped water to over 1,000 homeowners south of Willcox, where water levels are falling and more than 100 drinking water wells are useless.

Reversing an earlier stance, she has also expressed interest in exerting some measure of local authority to oversee water use. “Six years ago I was kind of against it,” Judd said in an interview. “I have friends who farm, though. They convinced me that I needed to keep my mind open.”

Last year Judd joined her Democratic colleague on the Cochise board in aligning the county with the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense – which manages an Army garrison at Fort Huachuca – to secure water supplies and improve the condition of the depleted San Pedro River near the border with Mexico.

In approving the formal memorandum of understanding, Judd defied the other Republican supervisor, the county’s Republican leadership, and many of her friends who are suspicious of big government. “I’ve really been rubbed and rolled over the coals for voting to do things that are beneficial to the environment or beneficial to the people,” Judd said. “I’m told it’s not the government’s business. We shouldn’t be doing it. We shouldn’t be at the table on these things. I say we should.”

That the needle on Cochise County’s water supply meter is drifting away from full — actually slipping steadily closer to empty — is not in doubt. A 2018 study by the Arizona Department of Water Resources found that groundwater levels dropped 300 feet since 1950 in one basin. In other places it is declining 10 feet annually. According to the state, irrigation wells that cost millions of dollars are starting to be drilled to a depth of 2,500 feet.

Exactly what to do, whatever path is taken, is a journey across a desert of policy and practice that is getting steadily harsher as options become more expensive and political divisions widen. “Nothing happens without consensus, you know,” Judd said. “That’s what I’m trying to build on these water issues.”

Arizona’s campaign to tame the fierce Southwest desert began in 1911 with the opening of Roosevelt Dam, the first of the West’s great federal dams, which stores Salt River water for Phoenix. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Though they make life in the Arizona desert more comfortable, air conditioning, private vehicles, and concrete highways are not the primary equipment that enabled one of history’s greatest desert civilizations. That distinction goes to the dams, reservoirs, and powerful pumps that secured access to the state’s surface and groundwater supplies. And to the aqueducts and irrigation canals that transported water to where it was needed.

Arizona’s impressive water infrastructure, most importantly, is the result of the disputes resolved and the consensus built on public policy, public investment, and oversight that unfolded in three overlapping policy-making eras in the 20th century.

A fourth era dominated by extreme heat and drought is underway to save what’s been built.

The short course goes like this. The first era, opening at the start of the 20th century and continuing until World War Two, secured surface water, which provides nearly 60 percent of Arizona’s water supply. Roosevelt Dam (1911), Coolidge Dam (1930), Bartlett Dam (1939), and four others were completed to store the waters of three rivers to serve Phoenix and surrounding farms. Hoover Dam was completed in 1935 to store the waters of the Colorado River in Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir. And in 1944 Arizona signed the seven state compact, initially negotiated 22 years before, to share the waters of the Colorado River and gain 2.8 million acre-feet annually of its flow.

The second era — call it the groundwater alert years — started in 1938 when Arizona appointed its first commission to study the increasing reliance on water stored in the state’s aquifers, a 1.2 billion acre-feet reserve, comparable to what Lake Ontario holds. Groundwater supplies 40 percent of Arizona’s water. But many desert aquifers are essentially a finite water source, and differ in depth and distribution. A great deal of Arizona’s groundwater is unusable because it contains high concentrations of salts and other impurities. And when it is pumped the land above often sinks, causing big cracks and deep trenches on the surface.

In 1945, two years after the Legislature funded a U.S. Geological Survey investigation of serious depletion, Arizona approved the first Groundwater Code that required irrigation wells to be registered. Three years later Arizona prohibited drilling new irrigation wells in ten designated Critical Groundwater Areas.

An irrigation canal in Pinal County. This is the year the limitations of Arizona’s 20th-century engineering and policy innovations are readily apparent. Groundwater withdrawals in and outside the AMAs are increasing. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

The third water supply era merged the surface water supply goals of the first era with the groundwater protection goals of the second. It opened in 1968 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Colorado River Basin Project Act authorizing construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. The 336-mile aqueduct would eventually transport 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to Phoenix, Tucson, and Pinal County, the agricultural region that lies between them. Its primary purpose: supply the Phoenix-Tucson corridor and replace the groundwater being drained there with Colorado River water.

In 1979, six years into its construction, the aqueduct project came under scrutiny by the Carter administration, and not only because of its multi-billion dollar cost. Unconvinced that the project would actually lead to less groundwater pumping, the Interior Department threatened to shut down construction of the aqueduct unless Arizona adopted a more stringent groundwater code. The warning galvanized then Gov. Bruce Babbitt and the Arizona Legislature to enact the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, a regulatory regime to reduce groundwater pumping. It also established a new state agency, the Arizona Department of Water Resources, to administer the law.

Essentially, the statute had three primary objectives. First, it halted expansion of irrigated farmland in Pinal County and regulated groundwater use in three other designated “active management areas” (AMAs) – Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott. A fifth AMA in Santa Cruz, south of Tucson, was established in 1994.

Second, it set a 2025 goal for the Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott AMAs to put as much water back into aquifers through artificial and natural recharge as was being withdrawn, a groundwater supply balance that lawmakers called “safe yield.”

Third, it required developers to prove they had a 100-year assured supply of water before they could sell subdivision lots. The law set a 1995 deadline for the Arizona Department of Water Resources to promulgate rules to meet the requirement.

As that deadline approached and demand for new housing mounted, the Legislature jumped in to help a powerful constituency. Subdivision builders in undeveloped parts of the Phoenix and Tucson AMAs had no access to water from the Central Arizona Project and were having trouble meeting the 100-year assured water supply requirement. They pressed the Legislature to make it easier to get the water they needed.

In 1993, the Legislature responded by establishing the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District, a project administered by the operators of the Central Arizona Project that is required to replenish water in regional aquifers comparable to the amount of groundwater being pumped out for new developments. In most cases the replenishment source is the Colorado River.

With surface and groundwater supplies more secure than ever before, Arizona raced to the head of the national pack in economic growth, housing starts, and new jobs. In 2000, Arizona counted 4.8 million residents, 70 percent more than in 1980. The state has added 2.3 million more residents in the two decades since.

Phoenix and Tucson became magnets for sun seekers. Yuma, along the banks of the Colorado River in southwest Arizona, developed into the country’s winter leafy green capital. Sedona, near the Grand Canyon, surfaced as a nationally known retreat for spiritual healing and red rock adventure. Groundwater levels, particularly in Pinal County, actually started rising.

As water supplies from the Colorado River drop the demand for Arizona’s finite reserves of groundwater are increasing. Here, pumping fills an irrigation canal near Gila Bend, Ariz. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Earth pushes back

That momentum carried into the first decades of the 21st century even as a new era of water supply and demand opened. Call it the years of survival, when Earth’s power to heat and dry the state began to overwhelm the achievements of the first three eras, draining surface water supplies, increasing reliance on finite groundwater reserves, and causing water supply stress in almost every region.

No consensus has yet developed for its opening date, though several are candidates.

It could be 2000, the year the Southwest’s megadrought started and Lake Mead began its bathtub ring decline. It could be 2007, the year the Interior Department set guidelines on cutting Colorado River water supplies to Arizona if Lake Mead water levels continued to drop.

Or it could be August 16, 2021, the day the U.S. Department of the Interior issued the first-ever water shortage declaration on the Colorado River. Arizona’s 2022 supply of Colorado River water was cut 512,000 acre-feet — a third of the water typically transported in the CAP canal — causing farmers in Pinal County to fallow 30 to 40 percent of their land and sustain $100 million in lost income.

To calm public anxiety, governments and water authorities stressed that the shortage declaration came as “no surprise.” It nevertheless produced an ominous mark on the graph of Arizona’s water supply and use. This was the year that the lines for rising municipal and industrial demand for water and falling supplies crossed, confirming the extent of water stress across Arizona.

In northern Arizona’s Mohave County, two studies found that at current rates of use the region’s aquifer would be empty before the end of the century. According to water hauling companies, groundwater pumping dropped aquifers so low in the Chino Valley (near Prescott) that thousands of residential wells have gone dry.

Flagstaff, close to the Grand Canyon, has proposed building a 40-mile-long, $200 million-plus pipeline to tap a distant aquifer beneath a ranch. Authorities in Scottsdale, reacting to the federal water shortage declaration and requirements of its own drought contingency plan, set a December 31, 2022, deadline for shutting off access to a city-owned depot used by tanker trucks that deliver drinking water to over 500 homeowners in the Rio Verde Foothills north of the city.

Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott are withdrawing more groundwater than they are replacing and will not meet the 2025 “safe yield” goal, according to a 2021 study by the Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

“We’ve reached that point. You can’t have it all,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at the Kyl Center who helped write the 1980 groundwater law and co-authored the 2021 study. “You can’t grow and grow and grow on these far-flung lands on groundwater, have agriculture just continue to be such a dominant water user, and put industries anywhere you want. You have to be smarter. We have to change how we grow.”

There is not yet consensus on that assertion in official Arizona. State water authorities point to data that shows Arizona’s water use is 7 million acre-feet annually, which is 30 percent or 3 million acre-feet less than in 1980 when the state had 4.5 million fewer people. A sizable share of that reduction, though, is the 200,000 fewer acres that Arizona farmers are no longer irrigating.

What is clear is that 2022 is the year that the limitations of Arizona’s 20th century engineering and policy innovations are readily apparent. Groundwater withdrawals in and outside the AMAs are increasing. Water supplies from the Central Arizona Project, a paragon of design and industrial competence built to reliably substitute surface water for groundwater and solve water scarcity in one of the nation’s fastest growing states, became unreliable.

“Arizona has come to this moment to more deeply acknowledge that groundwater is finite. But that is happening without the comfort of a new supply,” said Amy McCoy, a research scientist and water supply consultant who’s worked in Arizona and Colorado. “On the contrary, it’s happening with dramatic decline in Colorado River supplies, and in snowpack, and in water recharge in general.

“That is where the state is at right now,” McCoy said. “We have one cup of tea. What are we going to do with it?”

Climate change is intensifying heat and drought in the mountains east of Phoenix and has left San Carlos Lake, formed by 92-year-old Coolidge Dam, 97 percent empty. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Responses

That is an acute public interest challenge, just the kind that in previous eras was answered by federal, state, and local leadership sufficiently skilled in sorting out the details, negotiating differences, and reaching consensus on responses. That capacity is weaker now as fixes become more complex.

The lift is especially heavy due to the limitations of the state Legislature — one of the forums that Arizona has traditionally turned to for help — which is controlled by Republicans.

Last year, the state Republican Party and many of its elected lawmakers were primarily intent on conducting an audit and overturning the results of the 2020 election, the first loss in Arizona by a Republican presidential nominee since 1996. This year the party’s legislative focus is to game the system. In January, Republicans introduced 100 bills devoted to making voting harder. They include measures to stop early voting, end mail-in ballots, and enact other restrictions to curb participation.

Even without significant legislative attention, a number of water-related ideas currently command an audience. A proposal to reduce groundwater demand that is supported by city and county authorities is nonetheless experiencing turbulence in the Legislature. In Mohave County, which depends on aquifers for all of its water, and where bigpecan farms are blamed for dropping groundwater levels 200 feet over the last decade, officials support changing state law to allow local oversight of groundwater withdrawals.

State Rep. Regina Cobb, Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a resident of Kingman, the county seat, has introduced legislation every year since 2017 to accomplish that objective. She’s been rebuffed four years in a row. This year, her last in the House, she’s asked Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers for help. The prospects for passage are uncertain.

“I’ve been told water is a private property right and leave it alone,” Cobb said. “My thought is it’s a private property right until it affects everyone in the county, and everyone in the state. Then it’s no longer private. It’s a resource all of us need.”

Another group of responses to water scarcity in Arizona is aspirational. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, reflecting the popular views of industry, real estate, and the farm community, wants to develop new water supplies. Ducey budgeted $160 million last year to study the potential for what he and others call “augmentation.” That term reflects a number of approaches like building desalination plants, designing homes, streets, and parks to capture and store stormwater, and increase supplies from recycled wastewater.

The latter already accounts for over 500,000 acre-feet of water available for landscaping, irrigating golf courses, and cooling Palo Verde, the state’s lone nuclear generating station. Ducey wants more. It could come from California.

Arizona and CAP are investing $6 million in a $30 million, three-year feasibility study by the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles that could lead to construction of a $3.4 billion wastewater recycling plant capable of producing 168,000 acre-feet annually. Instead of being flushed into the Pacific, the water would be available for the dryland metropolises. The new supply would offset some of the 4.4 million acre-feet that California is entitled to withdraw annually from the Colorado River.

The new recycled supply also could provide more water for Arizona and other Colorado basin states, or it could be used to keep water levels in Lake Mead high enough to prevent more emergency shortage declarations that come with even larger cuts in the state’s surface water supply.

This year Ducey proposed establishing a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, to find new sources of water and called on the Legislature to approve $1 billion for it to spend. Ducey is particularly intent on building a desalination plant capable of delivering 250,000 acre-feet of water annually. The proposed location is the Gulf of California in Mexico. A plant of comparable size in Saudi Arabia took three years to build and opened in 2014 at a cost of $7 billion.

Given the 10-year to 20-year timeline to plan, design, finance, and build major infrastructure projects, including the necessary pumping stations and pipelines for a Mexico-based plant, the price would be much greater. The cost of an acre-foot of water would be thousands of dollars.

Nor is it clear where the new supply will go. Given the location, the new supply could go to Mexico to offset the 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water that Mexico has been entitled to since 1944. In that case it would be a cross-boundary trade.Mexico’s allotment of Colorado River water would drop by the same amount that Arizona supply increases.

Whatever occurs, if the plant is built, Arizonans will almost certainly spend considerably more for water than they do today.

An even more frantic and fanciful idea, offered by Tim Dunn, a Republican House member from Yuma, is making its way around the state Capitol: somehow capturing water from the Mississippi River for use in Arizona. Such a project would rival China’s South-North Water Transfer Project — the construction of three immense water pipelines for siphoning water from the Yangtze River and transporting it 890 miles north to Beijing.

The federal government contemplated a similar and ultimately unsuccessful diversion from out-of-state basins in the 1960s when it proposed diverting water from rivers in the Pacific Northwest to supply the Colorado River.

The Colorado River near Cibola, Ariz. A plan to transport river water from here to Queen Creek, a fast-growing Phoenix suburb, is supported by the state Department of Water Resources and protested by Colorado River counties. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

And in 1968, following a deep drought and two comprehensive federal and state studies that projected severe deficits in water supply, Texas water authorities proposed withdrawing 12 million acre-feet of water each year from the Mississippi River near New Orleans. The proposal called for the new supply to be transported through a modern day Roman Empire-scale network that crossed Louisiana, spanned much of Texas, and encompassed 1,000 miles of concrete-lined canals, 67 new reservoirs, and electricity-generating stations to power hundreds of pumps. Voters rejected the idea principally due to the cost — $74 billion in current dollars.

A third group of proposed water supply solutions in Arizona is changing how existing supplies are allocated and transported around the state, which essentially means reducing agriculture’s share of available water. “The economic reality is that irrigated agriculture uses 70 percent of Arizona’s total water use for 2 percent of the state’s total G.D.P.,” said Bruce Babbitt, the former governor. “What we ought to be doing is setting up a regulatory system which provides incentives to move a small proportion of that irrigated agricultural use into urban industrial use. If you reduce the agriculture footprint in the state by 10 percent, that would free up nearly a million acre-feet of water, which would easily be enough for the entire foreseeable future for urban industrial use.”

Babbitt’s idea is gaining traction. The Colorado River Indian Tribes, who farm 80,000 irrigated acres, have rights to more than 600,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water. The tribe is seeking federal legislation to allow it to market some of its allocation to users outside of reservation lands, located on the banks of the river.

South of Phoenix, the Gila River Indian Community farms 35,000 acres and is already marketing some of its water entitlement, which is more than 650,000 acre-feet annually. Since 2016, the tribe has kept 370,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead to help slow the reservoir’s decline. And though the August 2021 shortage declaration cut its Colorado River water supply by 41,000 acre-feet, the tribe agreed to leave almost 130,000 more acre-feet in Lake Mead this year, receiving nearly $36 million dollars from the state and federal government.

Arizona’s groundwater law allows for water from several aquifers in rural farming counties west of Phoenix to be tapped and moved into the metropolitan area. But moving water from a rural region to the Phoenix metro area also has ignited fierce opposition. Queen Creek, a fast-growing Phoenix suburb, purchased a small farm in Cibola, along the Colorado River, to gain access to 2,000 acre-feet of water annually to serve residents and businesses. The transfer, supported by the state Department of Water Resources, was protested by citizens and elected leaders from Colorado River counties, among them Rep. Cobb, who has introduced the groundwater oversight bills.

The regulatory process also is an impediment. Most basin-to-basin water transfers would require transport in the Central Arizona Project canal, requiring approval by the Department of the Interior. The department is reviewing the Queen Creek transfer.

A surge of groundwater pumping by thirsty livestock, pecan, and pistachio farms has caused irrigation and homeowner wells to go dry in Cochise County, in southeast Arizona. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

A reckoning in Cochise County

On a temperate January day, as the sun began to set on the dark peaks west of Willcox, Peggy Judd explained the intricacies and difficulties of securing Cochise County’s groundwater supplies.

The dropping water table, which appears to be principally due to aggressive pumping for irrigation, is causing subsidence and opening deep fissures in the earth, some of which are damaging highways. But in a county that has been losing population for most of the century, and where old downtowns are a collection of empty and ragged structures, agriculture is attracting new jobs and tens of millions of dollars in investment.

“It’s hard. We all just need to stop arguing,” Judd said. Then she grabbed her phone and started dialing. “I need you talk to this guy,” she said. “Get his thoughts.”

“This guy” is Calvin Allred who, at age 75, has spent most of his adult life as a lawyer in Willcox, where he moved in 1978 and represented many of the county’s farmers and ranchers. Raised on a farm, Allred returned to active agriculture production in 2003 when he started growing 800 acres of pecans. Two instincts guided his farming principles. First, Allred recognized that pecans were poised for growth in Arizona’s productive farm sector. Cochise County, with 1,100 farms and nearly a million acres of farmland, was a sensible place to settle.

Calvin Allred raises 800 acres of pecans on a Cochise County farm where groundwater levels are dropping 5 feet a year. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

His second instinct was the certainty that in the hard work of drilling wells, planting trees, and raising food, regulation was not needed since Cochise County seemed to have water and land in abundance. “The agricultural footprint then was sustainable,” he said.

Though Allred did not know it at the time, starting his farm in Cochise at the dawn of this century coincided with a boom in the county’s farm sector. Cochise is now one of the largest producers of pecans and pistachios in Arizona, which is a $52 million crop for the state. The same virtues that lured Allred — land and groundwater — also attracted other big water-thirsty farms, including a Minnesota-based dairy company that built one of the largest agriculture operations in the Southwest. Riverview LLP’s two dairies in Cochise manage a herd of 120,000 animals, and grow feed on 39,000 irrigated acres. The dairies and the irrigated fields, according to a company spokesman, draw 110,000 acre-feet of water annually from the Willcox aquifer, which is close to what Tucson’s residents use.

Not surprisingly, drinking water wells have gone dry for homes closest to the dairy. Vance Williams, a disabled Air Force veteran who lives on $1,200 a month, owns one of the wells. It dried up a year ago, forcing him to spend $1,600 he could ill afford on a 2,500-gallon water tank and pump. He pays $100 a month for 1,500 gallons hauled to his tank by truck. His life, never easy, has become much more turbulent.

“We’re really careful about what we use,” he explained while standing in front of the home where he lives with his girlfriend. “A few gallons for cooking. Quick shower every three days. I really can’t afford $100 for water. It’s a saga, man. It’s kind of horrific.”

Hundreds more Cochise County homeowners are contending with dropping water levels in their wells, which could result in huge costs — $50,000 or more — to deepen them or drill new ones. Steve Kiesel and Mark Spencer are neighbors who own handsome desert homes southwest of Willcox. Their homes are close enough to share a well that has a finite life.

Water levels are dropping 5 feet a year. “I would say right now it’s not an immediate emergency,” Kiesel said. “I also would say with where we are right now with water levels, we have 20 years tops before it goes dry. Do we pay for a new one at that point? Don’t know.”

That’s not the only threat from dropping aquifers. Three times in the last five years land subsidence split apart two highways and rangeland just up the road. “It’s not just the water,” Spencer said. “Earth fissures are showing up all over the county. You’re thinking, ‘What do we do if one shows up in our driveway?’ The thought of moving is always around. But who’s going to buy?”

Steve Kiesel surveys a fissure, caused by gr0undwater pumping and land subsidence, that opened close to his home in Cochise County. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

More than 50 miles north, Calvin Allred confronts similar risks. He says his wells also are dropping over 5 feet a year. Keeping the farm operating likely means reworking existing wells to reach water 1,000 feet below the surface, or drilling new irrigation wells that could cost $500,000 each.

He’s come to accept that the solution is some sort of local oversight program that prevents excessive pumping from Cochise aquifers. In other words, a rebalancing of priorities to give more weight to the public interest.

Williams, Kiesel, and Spencer are actively participating in a new local campaign, similar to the one being organized in Mohave County, to establish a rural water management area in Cochise County. Allred won’t get involved. In 2015 he participated in a local effort to bar new irrigation wells in the county and prevent any expansion of irrigated farmland. That plan would have required state approval. The Cochise campaign got rough and divided the farm community.

As a grower, Allred has real-world knowledge of water and economics. As a lawyer, he knows the outlines of water law. And as a longtime Cochise County resident, he’s intimately aware of differing opinions, clashing private and public interests, and the unforgiving politics that determine water supply, demand, and use.

How does Allred assess which way the balance should tilt? He put it this way: “My neighbor says he has the right to pump as much water as he wants to raise his crop. But what about my right to have enough water to raise mine?”

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

At Peak of Its Wealth and Influence, Arizona’s Desert Civilization Confronts A Reckoning Over Water

By

Circle of Blue

-

May 10, 2022

Golf course photo — Severe water scarcity now invites an urgent question for Arizona. Can this desert civilization survive another 100 years, or even another 50? Photo © J. Carl Ganter/ Circle of Blue

By Keith Schneider

CASA GRANDE, Ariz. – Tales of personal anguish are the typical start of serious articles about Arizona’s conspicuous confrontation with scarce water. The distraught Chino Valley homeowner buying water out of a truck because her well dried up. The Pinal farmer losing income because his water-starved fields lie fallow. The Phoenix golf course operator, burdened by high irrigation costs and declining revenue, selling out to a home developer.

This report, the first of three on how Arizona copes with a drought more serious than any in 1,200 years doesn’t start there. Instead it begins with this: A brief on how adept engineering for dams and aqueducts, government subsidy, technological development for pumps and water recycling, surpassing marketing, and an advantageous assemblage of natural resources – sun, warmth, blue sky, and open spaces – produced one of the greatest desert civilizations in human history.

Arizona’s population, 7.1 million, has increased by an average of 1 million people a decade since the 1950s, when the five C’s ruled the state: cattle, copper, cotton, citrus, and climate. Even as the first four have declined in relative importance, the appeal of warmth and sunshine has not diminished. In fact, it’s boom times. Phoenix, with 1.7 million residents, is now the nation’s fifth largest city. To spend time in Arizona is to understand why it’s been one of the fastest growing states for four generations. The state embodies a century of pure American capitalist exuberance.

Arizona’s annual gross domestic product, nearing $380 billion, has more than doubled since 2000. New solar installations, electric vehicle makers, computer chip manufacturers, data centers, and corporate farming companies are piling into the state.

Arizona added nearly 200,000 new jobs last year and issued construction permits for 65,000 new homes, according to state and federal figures.

State government has amassed a budget surplus every year since 2016. The general fund last year, in an unmistakable rebuke to the pandemic, collected $2 billion more in tax revenues than it did in 2020. State economists forecast a $4 billion budget surplus over the next three years.

The economic boom transformed the landscape. Arizona built an impressive array of beautiful homes, attractive neighborhoods, wide highways, thriving businesses, fine universities, high-tech manufacturers, and state-of-the-art irrigated farms. All of it — 114,000 square miles, 73 million acres — is saluted by cactus forests, towering mountains, mesquite desert, and transcendent vistas that touch the horizon.

Arizona, in other words, reveled in its location in a mighty desert, commanded the contemporary 20th century rules of the development game, and reached the pinnacle of its lifestyle appeal and economic influence in the first decades of the 21st.

The question now, as it has been since 1911 when the first big reservoir was completed to supply Phoenix with water, is one of longevity. Can this desert bounty be sustained for another 100 years, or even another 50? That question is more urgent and more relevant than ever. Climate change is disrupting the rules of the development game. Drought and extreme heat are emptying rivers and reservoirs, fallowing tens of thousands of acres of farmland, forcing thousands of homeowners to secure water from trucks and not their dead wells, and pushing Arizona ever closer to the precipice of peril.

The most revealing and menacing evidence of that fact has emerged on the Colorado River, which supplies 36 percent of the state’s water. The river’s flow is 20 percent lower than it was in the 1990s. The country’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Mead, which opened in 1934, and Lake Powell, in 1963 — are on the river and were designed to hold 55 million acre-feet of water. (One acre-foot equals 325,852 gallons.) At 30 percent of capacity combined, they now hold less water than at any time since soon after they were opened. In total, 36 million acre-feet, or nearly 12 trillion gallons, of storage space is empty.

Last August, as extreme heat and drought dropped the lake levels further, the federal government issued a formal declaration of water shortage. Translated into the legal details of the pact involving two countries, seven states, and 30 tribes that guides the river’s management, the declaration meant that Arizona’s share of the river will be cut by 512,000 acre-feet this year, or 166 billion gallons.

The Salt River photo — The Salt River is the single largest source of water for metropolitan Phoenix, and provides about 60 percent of the region’s water demand. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

River Water Lost

It’s a lot of water on paper, amounting to 8 percent of the 7 million acre-feet of water that Arizona uses annually. And it’s almost 20 percent of the 2.8 million acre-feet that Arizona is legally entitled to receive each year from the Colorado River.

Arizona was already using less Colorado River water in the years before the declaration, and there is wiggle room in the math for how much the state will actually go without. Nevertheless, the federal declaration was a body blow. It formalized what the state has managed to avoid for a century. Arizona’s demand for water in metropolitan regions and industry has crossed the line delineating diminishing water supply. The consequence is a slow motion collision that puts Arizona’s desert economy and way of life, along with its governing capacity to adjust and evolve, in the direct path of nature’s power to drive out and dry up much of what was built.

State lawmakers and business executives have anticipated the confrontation for nearly a decade and insist that there is no immediate crisis. More than 13 million acre-feet of water — a nearly two-year supply — has been purposefully stored in underground reserves specifically for use in emergencies. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has convened expert committees. He’s also urging the Legislature to establish a new state agency, the Arizona Water Authority, and commit over $1 billion to a new strategy for securing additional sources of water, like building desalination plants and harvesting flood waters from the Mississippi River. Arizona and the six other Colorado River Basin states have a 2026 deadline to reach a new agreement on sharing the river’s water.

Invoking words of assurance principally designed to quell anxiety in the markets for housing and new business starts, state leaders display determined allegiance to the message that Arizona has sufficient supply and know-how to continue to thrive. As Gov. Ducey likes to say: “Arizona is open for business.”

That’s true, for the time being, for the more than 5 million people in Phoenix and its suburbs, and the 1 million residents of metropolitan Tucson. Both cities have developed secure sources of water, and applied effective techniques of water conservation, recycling, and reuse.

But both cities also are served by the Colorado River. Phoenix receives 40 percent, and Tucson 60 percent of their water from the river. Climatologists project the worst is yet to come and the river could lose 3 million more acre-feet from its flow by mid-century, or another 20 to 30 percent. If that occurs, water supplies for Phoenix and Tucson would be substantially cut. Residents and businesses will contend with dramatic shifts in lifestyle and water consumption. Green grass, swimming pools, golf course water hazards, even golf courses would be amenities of the past. The price of water could rise well above the cost of electricity and thereby influence all sorts of economic outcomes like changes in housing values, residential construction, and business starts.

The Central Arizona Project photo — The Central Arizona Project transports Colorado River water 336 miles across the state, serving 40 percent of demand in Phoenix and 60 percent of Tucson’s demand. A federal water shortage declaration last year significantly reduced the aqueduct’s flow. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Drier Conditions Projected

If those meteorological projections are accurate, and if decades can be described as a race for time, Arizona has about a generation to figure out, finance, and execute a new resilience strategy. The state appears to have two paths, and just two, to pursue. One that rallies federal, state, tribal, and local governments to unify opposing forces and bring water supply and demand into balance in the era of accelerating climate change. The second path is more perilous, strewn with impediments of politics, civic disagreement, financing, litigation, and inaction that yields a catastrophe where everything goes wrong.

“Most of the press, it’s the second one not the first one,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “There’s hard policy choices to be made. For instance, how much farming do we need? Where will you get your farm products? Are we going to rely on another country for our food? There’s that kind of debate that’s going on.

“Part of our mission statement actually has the words ‘lifestyle.’ So what lifestyle do you want? Do you want not one green thing in the city? City environments to the point where use is 18 gallons per capita? We need a different, more holistic look at how everything fits together. It’s conservation. It’s about augmentation. It’s about a whole bunch of things.”

“We’ve got 20 or 30 years,” added Grady Gammage Jr., an attorney who’s written extensively about water and is distinguished fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “We’re still so addicted to growth as the solution to everything. But where’s the water going to come from? I used to tell people, ‘Relax. We don’t need to worry about that for a long time.’ Not anymore. Now is the time that we need to worry about that.”

New construction in Pinal County photo — Water scarcity has not disrupted demand for new housing in Arizona. From January 2019 to December 2021 municipal authorities in Pinal County issued construction permits for 161,519 new homes. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Outside Metro Areas The New Sound of Alarm

That message is starting to penetrate more deeply. There’s a reason. A dress rehearsal for contending with serious water shortage is in process for 1 million residents who don’t live in Arizona’s two big metro regions. During a month of frontline reporting in Arizona, Circle of Blue encountered unmistakable signals of extreme water stress:

Wells have run dry for thousands of residents who rely on groundwater for drinking, from Cochise County in the southeast, to Maricopa County north of Phoenix, to the Chino Valley north of Prescott.
Industrial livestock and nut farms have settled in Cochise County, and in Mohave County in the north. Because demand has increased, and moisture to recharge groundwater reserves has diminished, aquifers are dropping 5 feet a year. Irrigation wells on existing farms already have gone dry and more are in jeopardy of going dry.
Water scarcity is driving two of Arizona’s fastest growing business sectors. Water hauling companies are adding trucks and drivers to keep pace with demand. And water well drilling companies, prompted by customer lists so long that orders are filled six or more months after they are made, are buying new equipment and hiring more staff.

The San Carlos Reservoir, formed by 92-year-old Coolidge Dam, is designed to store 1 million acre-feet of water from the Gila River to irrigate 100,000 acres of farmland between Phoenix and Tucson. Rain and snow melt in the high desert where the reservoir is located have been so altered by climate change that it’s filled only once since 1980 and now holds a mere 37,000 acre-feet.
Though 40 of its 140 miles are protected in a national conservation area famed for wildlife and migrating birds, the San Pedro River in southeast Arizona is hardly a river at all. The aquifers that sustained its flow have been drawn down by extreme heat, drought, and hundreds of wells drilled for housing. Once promoted as one of the state’s last “free flowing” rivers, the San Pedro is now but a trickle, and altogether dry along much of its path.
The dollar value of water is climbing to heights never before seen in the state or hardly anticipated. Arizona last year approved the sale of 2,083 acre-feet of Colorado River water annually to Queen Creek, a Phoenix suburb. The cost of the deal: $21 million or $10,000 per acre-foot. Queen Creek is anxious to pay. It needs the water. The city’s population — 60,000 — is 15 times higher than in 2000. Its water demand is 10 times higher.

The tightening supply of water, in effect, is testing Arizona’s growth-focused operating system, and producing losers and winners. That is especially true in Pinal County, a Connecticut-size expanse of mountains, desert, farmland, copper mines, Native American reservations, and growing cities set between Phoenix and Tucson. One other feature distinguishes Pinal: about 100 miles of the 336-mile-long Central Arizona Project, one of the country’s longest aqueducts that transports Colorado River water from Lake Havasu to south of Tucson. At its peak in the early 1990s the project delivered 550,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water annually to irrigate a $2.3 billion dairy-alfalfa-cotton-melon farm sector, one of the most prosperous in the country.

Because of agreements that Arizona reached from 2004 to 2019 as the river waned, the federal shortage declaration last August cut the water supply to Pinal County’s four irrigation districts from more than 200,000 acre-feet in the 2000s to 31,000 acre-feet in 2022. The state has promised $40 million to drill or rehabilitate groundwater wells to make up a portion of the loss.

Houses replace farmland in Pinal County. Between 2012 and 2017 almost 180 Pinal farms went out of business, a nearly 20 percent reduction. Some 100,000 fewer acres were farmed, an 8 percent decline. Photo © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue

Pinal’s Pain

On a crisp January morning, Atanacio “Nacho” Gonzalez returned from a distant field to his Pinal County farm headquarters, within sight of the treeless Table Top mountains, and described what drought and water shortage are doing to 1,500 acres of Bermuda grass and alfalfa that he raises for horses and livestock.

“I’ll give you an idea of where we are,” said Gonzalez, who is 62 years old and has farmed this piece of ground since 2002. “Before the cuts I order 18 CFS for 1,000 acres.” (That’s 18 cubic feet per second or 36 acre-feet per day.) “I apply that nonstop for about two weeks at a time, then alfalfa grows or grass grows. We do that, usually, nine times out of a year.

“What am I going to get this year?” he continues. “Very little, according to what my water companies tell me.”

A University of Arizona analysis published last year projected that because of the federal water declaration Pinal farm income would drop $100 million annually. It’s not a killing blow. It is, however, the latest of the economic hits steadily driving the Pinal farm community to threatened status. Between 2012 and 2017, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census, almost 180 Pinal farms went out of business, a nearly 20 percent reduction. Some 100,000 fewer acres were farmed, an 8 percent decline.

Gonzalez is one of 176 farmers who receive water from the San Carlos Irrigation and Drainage District, all of whom are contending with a double dose of water shortage. First is the loss of all Colorado River water delivered by the Central Arizona Project. Second is what’s happening with the San Carlos Reservoir, which is 97 percent empty. Turning on wells to supply groundwater will not make up the difference.

“Our wells don’t put out so much water,” Gonzalez said. “I’m thinking that I’ll grow on 600 acres, not 1,000. How many cuttings can we do on 600? I’m hoping to do seven to nine. But that’s yet to be seen. We’ll have a 40 percent reduction in the crop.”

Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis photo — Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis, the leader of the Gila River Indian Community, which has rights to one of the largest reserves of fresh water in the Southwest.
Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

Tribal Water Abundance

The federal shortage declaration also produced winners, especially the Gila River Indian Community. Most of the tribe’s 372,000-acre reservation is spread across the northern section of Pinal County. In 2004 Congress approved a huge water settlement that confirmed the tribe’s right to more than 650,000 acre-feet of water, about half from the Colorado River. The long-term goal of the tribe, whose ancestors date back to the people who inhabited the region 8,000 years ago, is to restore its ancestral farming ground to about 75,000 acres. It currently farms about 35,000 acres. A $92 million appropriation from the Interior Department is funding the expansion of the tribe’s irrigation network.

In the meantime, the nearly 23,000-member tribe is marketing some of the 311,800 acre-feet of Colorado River water it is entitled to each year. It agreed to lease 33,000 acre-feet annually for 25 years, starting this year, to operators of the Central Arizona Project to support residential development. As a requirement of the 2004 settlement, it leases 41,000 more acre-feet annually to supply drinking water to cities in the Phoenix region.

Since 2016, it’s also kept 370,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead to help slow the reservoir’s decline. And though the August shortage declaration cut its Colorado River water supply by 41,000 acre feet, the tribe agreed to leave nearly 130,000 more acre-feet in Lake Mead this year. That amount is most of Arizona’s share of 500,000 acre-feet that the state, California, and Nevada agreed to keep in the lake last December. The price for that water: $274 an acre-foot, or $35.6 million. In effect, water has become an annual revenue item nearly as significant as the tribe’s three casinos.

Tribal officials did not make themselves available for an interview. But Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis, the tribal leader, said in a 2019 news release that the tribe’s goal in leasing water was to “protect Lake Mead,” and “ensure that water supplies are available for an important sector of Arizona’s economy.”

By economy, Lewis principally meant real estate construction, the engine that has propelled the state’s growth for 70 years. Pinal is an example. In 1950, just as the post-war population boom started, Pinal was still a lightly settled farm and mining county with 43,000 residents, nearly 1,200 farmers, 2.5 million acres of farmland, and 13,000 homes.

By 2020 the shrinking agriculture sector counted less than 800 farms and 1.1 million acres of farmland. But the county’s population soared to 425,000 people living in 181,000 homes, most of them built on former farmland.

Pinal County’s long-term plan forecasts that 5 million more residents could show up. At current rates of Arizona’s growth, that means that by mid-century virtually all new state residents will settle in the county. They potentially could if there is sufficient water.

The following data points are important. In 2020, the latest year for complete figures, Pinal’s annual water demand was 950,000 acre-feet; 40 percent from the Central Arizona Project and almost all of the balance from groundwater, according to state data. Farming used most of it, 750,000 acre-feet per year. Cities and industry used just 35,000 acre-feet.

The county anticipates that at current rates of water use serving 5 million more residents, equivalent to 1.5 million new residences, would require 840,000 to 1.7 million acre-feet of additional water supplies every year.

Where’s that water coming from? The Colorado? Not likely. And the state Department of Water Resources has changed its view of how much groundwater will be available.

In 2019 the agency took a fresh look with new groundwater models and announced it made a mistake. Its newest assessment of supply and demand showed that Pinal’s water demand over the next few decades would be 8 million acre-feet over and above the available supply.

Last year the state halted issuing water supply certificates for housing subdivisions. The announcement, though, hasn’t curtailed new construction for housing. Yet. From January 2019 to December 2021, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, Pinal’s municipal authorities issued construction permits for 161,519 new homes that already had been approved.

This project was made possible by a fellowship awarded by Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for The American West.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Two new Colorado River deals give parched Lake Powell temporary relief

By

Fresh Water News

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May 10, 2022

Lake Powell's Glen Canyon Dam is used to produce hydropower that is delivered over a 17,000-mile transmission grid, reaching six states and 5 million people. Photo courtesy Western Area Power Administration — Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam is used to produce hydropower that is delivered over a 17,000-mile transmission grid, reaching six states and 5 million people. Photo courtesy Western Area Power Administration

By Jerd Smith

Drought-strapped Lake Powell won a major reprieve last week with two emergency agreements that will provide 1 million acre-feet (maf) of Colorado River water this year to boost lake levels and protect its hydropower production.

The water will come from an emergency release of 500,000 acre-feet from Utah’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and a 500,000 acre-foot reduction in releases from Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam.

That’s as much water as it would take to fill Colorado’s Lake Dillon four times, and it will add a significant buffer to Powell, which has dropped to just over 5 maf of stored supplies. The lake has the capacity to store 26 maf.

“This is a short-term Band-Aid,” said Amy Ostdiek, who helped oversee the drought negotiations for the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s lead agency for water planning. “We are going to have to consider the long-term solutions and they have to be balanced.”

The Colorado River Basin covers seven states, as well as Mexico. The basin is divided into an Upper Basin — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — and Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada.

Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, Colorado and the other Upper Basin states must deliver 7.5 maf of water to the Lower Basin at Lee Ferry, Ariz., just downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, on a 10-year running average. This year the Upper Basin will deliver just 7 maf from Lake Powell.

But because the 10-year running average stands at roughly 9 maf, there is still time to help the system come back into balance before the Lower Basin states could legally call for more water than they currently receive.

Lake Powell is the Upper Basin’s largest storage pool on the system and is designed to ensure the four Upper Basin states can meet their legal water delivery obligations to the Lower Basin states. Because of those obligations, Colorado water users are closely monitoring the ongoing declines in Powell, with the threat to hydropower production seen as a dangerous precursor to a water shortage that could trigger a legal compact crisis.

Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation ordered the release of 125,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge, and another 36,000 acre-foot release from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir.

This year is expected to be slightly better from a snowpack and water supply perspective. In Colorado, for instance, snowpack ahead of the spring runoff, sits at 91% of average, above last year’s 79% mark.

But that’s not enough moisture to help any of the reservoirs on the Colorado River’s seven-state system recover, water officials said. It should be enough, however, to protect hydropower production, which has been steadily dropping as Lake Powell has declined.

*Colorado River Basin. Credit: Chas Chamberlin*

But it’s not just hydropower and water supplies that are causing concern. The drop in reservoir levels is affecting thousands of boaters and campers across the West, who flock to these storage pools every summer to camp, fish and boat.

John Rauch and his family have operated Cedar Springs Marina on Flaming Gorge for decades. Last year, as he watched the lake shrink, he acted quickly, moving boat docks and accommodating customers whose recreation plans were being altered on a daily basis.

This year’s announcement was no surprise, Rauch said, but the jump in the amount of water being released, a nearly four-fold increase, is worrisome.

Equally concerning is the prospect that more releases will be required next year, Rauch said.

“I think we’re going to lose a lot more water,” he said.

Lake Powell, which can store roughly 26 maf of water when full, and its sister reservoir, Lake Mead, with 29.4 maf of storage, are two of the largest reservoirs in the United States. But upstream are three more: Utah’s Flaming Gorge, which holds 1.8 maf when full, Colorado’s Blue Mesa which holds 900,000 acre-feet, and New Mexico’s Navajo Reservoir, with 1.7 maf of storage.

A 20-year megadrought, considered to be the worst in 1,200 years, including two back-to-back intense drought periods during 2020 and 2021, has left each of the reservoirs well below their former levels, with Blue Mesa, for instance, sitting at roughly 40% of capacity with no prospect of refilling this year, and Lake Powell down to about 25% of capacity.

After weeks of closed-door talks with officials from the seven states, Reclamation, which operates the reservoirs, opted to tap Flaming Gorge again this summer because it sits high in the system and could accommodate a release easier than Blue Mesa or Navajo, officials said.

That move, along with the 500,000 acre-foot cutback in releases from Lake Powell, should be enough to protect hydropower production this year, said Becky Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

How that water will be restored to the states is unclear. Under the terms of a historic set of Drought Contingency Plans approved in 2019, so-called “recovery” of these water supplies is to be considered when the federal government decides the system is healthy enough again, according to Reclamation.

Reclamation declined an interview request on the new agreements, but in documents released last week it said that little if any recovery is likely over the next four years.

Drought has plagued the Colorado River since the early 2000s and in 2007 the seven states agreed to a hard-fought plan to begin jointly managing the system, hoping that the drought would end before the agreement, known as the Colorado River 2007 Interim Guidelines, expires in 2026.

All seven states are gearing up to renegotiate those guidelines, a process expected to take several years. And water officials across the region are calling for a recognition that the river can no longer produce the water quantities envisioned even as recently as the early 2000s.

What that may mean for water users isn’t clear yet, but all seven states have begun cutting back their use of Colorado River supplies, either because the river has run physically short of water, as in the Upper Basin states, or in the Lower Basin, due to the 2007 guidelines, which tie water-use reductions to levels in lakes Powell and Mead.

For John Rauch, adapting to a more water-short world is going to be a huge undertaking, though not an impossible one.

“It’s a complicated problem,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can … but it’s going to take a lot of snow.”

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Lawmakers suspend attempt at legislative fix for water speculation

By

Aspen Journalism

-

May 10, 2022

An irrigation ditch on Orchard Mesa in the Grand Valley, bringing water from the Colorado River to orchards and fields. The Grand Valley has been the center of discussions and a legislative effort around investment water speculation. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

By Heather Sackett

Colorado lawmakers have suspended an attempt to prohibit outside investors from profiting off the state’s water.

On Thursday, the Senate Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee voted 5 to 2 to approve an amendment sending Senate Bill 29 back to the interim Water Resources Review Committee for more study and input from water users. However, at the end of Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, acting as chair, decided to “lay over” the bill, meaning the committee would take it up at another time.

But with the 2022 legislative session ending on May 11, there is probably neither time nor the desire from lawmakers to push the bill through, meaning that, to all appearances, the legislation is dead. The Senate Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee would now have to take the measure back up and move it along to the full Senate and then to the House in order for it to go back to the interim committee.

Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, and Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Eagle County, who initially proposed the back-to-interim-committee amendment and is a sponsor of the bill, were the two votes against sending the issue back to the interim committee. It’s unclear why Donovan, who did not return a call for clarification as of presstime, voted against her own amendment.

“We gave it a heck of a college try,” said Donovan, the twice-elected representative for Senate District 5, which includes Pitkin County, who will be stepping down at the end of the year due to term limits. “And I think we continued an important conversation. Water always takes a long time to figure out and I was certainly hopeful that by having a bill we would force conversation.”

Senate Bill 29, with Western Slope sponsors Donovan and Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose, was an attempt to stop out-of-state investors in agricultural water from making a profit off a public resource that grows scarcer in a water-short future driven by climate change.

Many say investment water speculation is a threat, but few agree on what should be done about it. A legislative fix, despite several attempts at tweaks with amendments throughout the session, failed to gain support from the constituency the bill aimed to protect: agricultural water users. Although some agricultural water rights holders recognize there could be negative impacts to their communities if water is sold to investors, they don’t want the state making the process of selling their ranch harder, placing restrictions on who they can sell to or limiting their ability to make a profit.

The original bill would have given the state engineer at the Department of Water Resources the ability to investigate complaints of investment water speculation and fine a purchaser of water rights up to $10,000 if they determine speculation is occurring.

That version failed to gain traction, as did a handful of proposed “strike-below” or “strike-through” amendments, including one put forth by the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which would have addressed speculation using the abandonment principle by saying that if someone was getting paid to not use their water, they could be punished by losing their water right.

Donovan then floated the most recent amendment that would have sent the issue back to the interim Water Resources Committee for further study and input from water users, a move Coram said was kicking the can down the road.

Lawmakers scolded some in the water community for what they said was a lack of cooperation and communication around developing legislation aimed at preventing speculation.

“We have an ineffective water group that won’t have a conversation with lawmakers anymore,” Sonnenberg said. “When we have a bill they just take a position and quit working with people.”

WAM bought this 57-acre parcel as part of a $6 million deal in January 2020, leading some to suspect the company was engaging in investment water speculation. WAM’s activity in the Grand Valley helped prompt state legislators to propose a bill aimed at curbing speculation. CREDIT: BETHANY BLITZ/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Bill opposition

At Thursday’s hearing, several people testified in opposition to the bill. Colorado Water Congress, Colorado Farm Bureau, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, as well as three Grand Valley water providers, among others, were opposed to the bill.

Former state representative from Gunnison County Kathleen Curry works as a lobbyist on behalf of the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, Grand Valley Water Users Association and the Ute Water Conservancy District, organizations that provide agricultural and domestic water to the Grand Valley. She said her clients would support taking more time to consult with experts and stakeholders.

“My folks have two major concerns regarding the legislation as it was introduced and as it’s been contemplated so far,” she said. “One has to do with the additional time needed to obtain feedback from the affected parties and water rights owners and secondly, they are still a bit unclear about the need for legislation, and the scope of potential impacts to water rights owners remains a concern.”

The Grand Valley has been the center of investment water speculation concerns, where New York City-based private-equity firm Water Asset Management has been acquiring irrigated farmland. WAM is now the largest landowner in the Grand Valley Water Users Association. But as long as WAM keeps putting the water to beneficial use and keeps the land in agricultural production — which it appears to be doing — it doesn’t count as speculation.

Still, the threat from out-of-state, urban interests loomed large at Thursday’s hearing.

“We were hearing across our districts and state about a new type of player in the water world,” Donovan said. “And that player was custom suits and shiny shoes that call big cities home. … There was concern from many in the water world that probably an investment firm was not going to be the best partner moving forward.”

In an attempt to address the issue in 2020, legislators convened a workgroup, made up of water managers and policy experts across sectors to explore ways to strengthen the state’s anti-speculation laws. Saddled with the incredibly complex task of figuring out how to protect Colorado’s water from profit-seeking investors without infringing on private property rights, an August 2021 report from the workgroup did not give recommendations to lawmakers because they could not come to a consensus about which concepts to implement. The group’s report did, however, lay out potential avenues new regulations to prevent investment water speculation could take.

For Loma rancher, workgroup member and President of GVWUA Joe Bernal, the lack of consensus meant that lawmakers should not move forward with any legislation.

“Our group found it very important that more information be gathered from landowners and stakeholders,” he told the committee Thursday. “I find it very concerning that bill sponsors moved forward with the crafting of an anti-speculation bill when there seems to be very little support from the people and the citizens it seems the sponsors are trying to protect.”

An irrigated field in the Grand Valley, near Grand Junction made green by water diverted from the Colorado River. Grand Valley water user groups were opposed to Senate bill 29, which was aimed at preventing investment water speculation. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Threats to agriculture

The concern at the heart of the speculation issue is not that investors could profit off of Colorado’s water. Underneath, there is a broader fear about the loss of agricultural land and with it, a way of life and a part of Colorado’s history, culture and identity. The work group identified the large-scale, permanent dry-up of agricultural lands as the No. 1 risk from speculators.

For Bernal, the bigger threat to Colorado agriculture comes from developers who would subdivide the land for houses and ranchettes and take it out of agricultural production. The acres that were sold to WAM, which are still being farmed, could have been sold instead to developers, an outcome he doesn’t want to see.

“I think it could be studied further, but at this point we don’t have a problem yet,” Bernal said. “I’m not saying I’m glad WAM is here, but it seems to be the lesser of two evils. Given the choice of having the land developed, it’s a better option.”

Aspen Journalism covers rivers and water in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the April 23 edition of The Aspen Times.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

New forecast: Lake Powell electricity production to drop, as officials race to boost water levels

By

Fresh Water News

-

May 3, 2022

Lake Powell's Glen Canyon Dam photo — Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam is used to produce hydropower that is delivered over a 17,000-mile transmission grid, reaching six states and 5 million people. Photo courtesy Western Area Power Administration.

By Jerd Smith

Electricity produced at Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam, which serves some 50 Colorado utilities, and dozens of others in the Colorado River Basin, has been cut in half by the 20-year drought, with power levels over the next two years projected to be 47% lower than normal, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

“We’re going to be generating less than we have in quite some time. It will be among the lowest years of generation ever,” said Nick Williams, power manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Region in an interview last week.

The grim forecast comes as water officials race to bolster Lake Powell’s water levels. On April 8, Reclamation announced it would likely keep more water in Lake Powell, reducing releases from the planned 7.5 million acre-feet to 7 million acre-feet, a move that could trigger emergency water cutbacks in Arizona, California and Nevada.

At the same time, electric utilities across the West are looking for other green options and hoping that hydropower production won’t stop altogether. According to Reclamation, there is a 27% chance that Powell will still stop generating electricity completely over the next four years.

“If Glen Canyon Dam ceases to operate, we are going to have to replace that power somewhere else and it will have a bigger carbon footprint,” said Bryan Hannegan, CEO of Holy Cross Energy, which buys Lake Powell’s hydropower to serve customers in Western Colorado.

The picture was much different 59 years ago, when the giant storage reservoir on the Colorado River was filling, its electricity helping power the West and the revenue from its power sales helping fund endangered fish protection programs across the Colorado River Basin.

Back then, Hannegan said, “We made an assumption that our WAPA (Western Area Power Administration) allocation would be firm, reliable and always there. Now, though, we know that it’s not firm, it’s not reliable, and it’s coming at a much higher cost.”

Late last fall WAPA, which operates the electric grid and distributes the power to utilities, raised rates 30% to cover reductions in power revenue. Few expected to ever see this drop in hydropower production, let alone consider what to do if Glen Canyon were to cease electricity production entirely.

“The forecast is changing daily and there are still a lot of variables,” said Lisa Meiman, a spokeswoman for WAPA. ”But it is concerning. This is the big warning bell.”

The drop in the power forecast comes as Upper Colorado River Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming prepare to finalize a new drought operations plan for the giant river system. The draft plan is expected to be released next week, according to Becki Bryant, a spokeswoman for Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Region.

The critical issue is how to maintain the lake at 3,525, which marks an elevation that is the top of the liquid buffer zone designed to protect the lake’s mighty electricity turbines.

Last July, to protect the 3,525 buffer zone, Reclamation ordered emergency water releases from three reservoirs in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Utah’s Flaming Gorge, Colorado’s Blue Mesa and New Mexico’s Navajo.

Despite those releases, Powell dropped below 3,525 last month, hitting 3,523, another historic drought landmark.

Though the 2022 forecast isn’t expected to be finalized until later this month, water officials expect that more water will have to be released from Upper Basin storage reservoirs this summer because inflows into the lake from the drought-stressed Colorado River are expected to be well below average again, in the 60% to 80% range.

Becky Mitchell is director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s lead water planning agency. She also sits on the Upper Colorado River Commission. Mitchell declined to discuss the pending drought operations plan. But in a statement, she said, “The Upper Basin States are working collaboratively with the Bureau of Reclamation to draft a 2022 Drought Response Operations Plan outlining potential releases from Upper Basin reservoirs in an effort to protect critical elevations at Lake Powell. The Upper Basin reservoirs have already provided 161,000 acre-feet of water pursuant to the ’imminent need‘ provision of the Drought Response Operations Agreement, including 36,000 acre-feet from Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado. Water availability, appropriate timing of releases, and impacts on other resources are all being considered as the 2022 Plan is being drafted.”

Across the region, water utilities are in high-alert mode, preparing for another dry year on the Colorado River and holding hope that the Upper Basin reservoirs can be protected as long as possible from large-scale drought releases.

“The forecast isn’t great,” said Kyle Whitaker, Colorado River Manager for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, one of the largest diverters of water in the headwaters region of the river.

“It’s better than last year, but we’ll just have to see what the next two to four weeks holds for precipitation.”

At the same time, power producers are gearing up to craft a fallback plan for extending hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam if water levels continue to fall.

“We have to take a strong look at what we will do in the unlikely event that Lake Powell stops producing hydropower,” said WAPA’s Meiman. “It’s not a hypothetical situation anymore.”

Correction: This article has been corrected to indicate that Lake Powell began filling 59 years ago, not 60 years, as the original article stated.

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

As Lake Powell dries up, the US turns to creative accounting for a short-term fix

By

Grist

-

May 3, 2022

A view of the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell photo — A view of the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell in Arizona in March 2022. *Justin Sullivan / Getty Images*

By Jake Bittle, Grist

Earlier this month, as water levels in the Lake Powell reservoir fell to record lows amid the ongoing Western drought, the federal government asked seven states that rely on the Colorado River to work out an emergency conservation deal. The states had been scheduled to receive river water that was stored in the lake, but releasing the water would have drained the reservoir further, threatening its ability to generate hydroelectric power for millions of people and raising utility bills for towns and tribes across the West. The feds also revealed that declining reservoir levels would endanger the tubes that carry water past the dam’s hydropower turbine, potentially depriving multiple communities of drinking water and compromising “public health and safety.”

Late last week, the states agreed to forfeit their water from Lake Powell in order to ensure that the reservoir can still produce power. The deal puts a finger in the metaphorical dike, postponing an inevitable reckoning with the years-long drought that has parched the Colorado River — and a wrenching tradeoff between power access and water access for millions. It does so, in part, through an unusual act of hydrological accounting.

The deal has two parts. The first and more straightforward part is that the federal government will move 500,000 acre-feet of water (about 162 billion gallons) from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir into Lake Powell, bumping up water levels in the latter body. Flaming Gorge, which stretches across Wyoming and Utah, is mostly used for water recreation, so the immediate effects of the transfer will be minimal. The feds could do more of these water transfers later in the year if things get worse, drawing on water from other nearby reservoirs.

The second part is more complicated — and less helpful. In ordinary circumstances, the Bureau of Reclamation releases water from Lake Powell into an even larger reservoir called Lake Mead, from which it then flows to households and farms across the Southwest. As part of the deal, the states that rely on Mead water are agreeing to leave about 480,000 acre-feet of that water in Lake Powell, thus lowering the water levels in Mead. (Reclamation already announced earlier this year that it would delay the release of 350,000 acre-feet of water in Powell in anticipation of spring snow runoff.)

The problem is that Lake Mead’s falling water level has huge implications for water access in the Southwest. Pursuant to a drought contingency plan worked out back in 2019, declines in Mead trigger mandatory water reductions for states like Nevada and Arizona. The first of these reductions arrived last year, when the river entered a so-called “Tier 1” shortage, resulting in a 30 percent cut to Arizona’s water allocation. This has forced farmers in the Phoenix area to fallow their cotton and alfalfa fields. Officials expect the river to enter a Tier 2a or 2b shortage in the coming years, which would mean even larger cuts. Keeping water in Lake Powell makes it more likely the reservoir will reach that threshold.

The deal contains an eyebrow-raising workaround for this. In exchange for leaving the water in Lake Powell rather than having it flow to Lake Mead, the states get something in return: Officials at the Bureau of Reclamation will act as if that the water did go to Mead, thus treating Mead’s water level as though it’s higher than it really is. The hope here is to avoid triggering the cuts that would accompany a Tier 2b shortage declaration, even though the actual water level in the reservoir will likely fall low enough to warrant such cuts.

A map of the Colorado River — Grist / Amelia Bates

In other words, the states have agreed to ensure Lake Powell has more water than it should, and in return they get to pretend as though Lake Mead has more water than it does. The deal protects the towns and tribal communities that rely on Powell for water, but only for a short time: The ongoing drought has shown no signs of letting up, and it’s only a matter of time before water levels in Powell fall back into the danger zone, jeopardizing hydropower access and drinking water quality.

For the millions of people who rely on Lake Mead, meanwhile, the deal just postpones a shortage declaration that was bound to arrive in a few years anyway. It may give states like Arizona more time to figure out how to cope with declining water allotments, but it won’t stop cotton fields from going fallow or absolve suburbs like Scottsdale of the need to drastically reduce their water usage.

For as long as there’s a drought on the Colorado, federal officials will have to choose between hydroelectric power in communities that depend on Lake Powell and water access in those that rely on Lake Mead. The sudden advent of this new short-term deal shows not only that these decisions are not going away, but that they will arrive faster than any of the parties on the river ever thought they would.

Update: This story has been updated to include comments from the Bureau of Reclamation that were received after publication.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Spring runoff forecast looks better than last two years

By

Aspen Journalism

-

April 27, 2022

The Roaring Fork River joins with the Colorado River in downtown Glenwood Springs photo — The Roaring Fork River (left) joins with the Colorado River in downtown Glenwood Springs. As of an April 1 report from NRCS, streamflow forecasts are tracking closer with snowpack than the previous two years. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM.

By Heather Sackett

Colorado’s predictions for spring runoff are looking better than the past two years, but streamflows are still expected to be below normal. And the lingering effects of the two previous drought years means reservoirs remain depleted and may not fill.

According to the April 2022 Water Supply Outlook from the National Resources Conservation Service, snowpack across the state was slightly below normal at 90% of median, precipitation was 96% of median and the streamflow forecast for the coming months is for 82% of median. Locally, the numbers are a bit better. As of April 1, snowpack for the Roaring Fork River basin was at 98% of median. The streamflow forecast is close behind at a predicted 94% of median.

In typical years, snowpack and streamflow track closely, but dry soils that sucked up snowmelt in 2021 and 2020 meant that a near-normal snowpack translated to streamflows that were far below average. Last year, streamflows in many areas of the state were down 15-20% compared to snowpack. And across the upper Colorado River basin, a near-normal snowpack resulted in an 2021 water-year inflow to Lake Powell that was just 34% of normal.

This spring should see a bit of relief from that trend, said Karl Wetlaufer, a hydrologist and assistant snow survey supervisor with NRCS.

“It’s much better than the last two years where the drought conditions in the summer dried out the soils,” he said. “We are expecting more of that snow to end up in the rivers and streams.”

An aerial view of Wolford Reservoir photo — An aerial view of Wolford Reservoir, which is upstream from Kremmling and owned and operated by the Colorado River Water Conservation District. The reservoir is not expected to fill this year, which means some junior water users who hold contract water in the reservoir may not get all their water. CREDIT: SOURCE: / COLORADO RIVER DISTRICT.

Reservoirs low, some won’t fill

But even though things on the whole are better than the previous two years, the lingering effects of drought means reservoirs are depleted and may take several seasons to rebound.

“The whole picture is looking better than the last two years in western Colorado, but low reservoirs are going to be a major component of the water supply people will actually have available,” Wetlaufer said.

According to the April report, the Colorado River basin ended March with 83% of median storage. Ruedi Reservoir on the Fryingpan River is currently just 54% full and dropped to its lowest level in almost two decades at the end of March.

The Gunnison River basin was just one of two basins in the state that was at or above median at 100% of median snowpack; precipitation was 108% of median and streamflow was forecast to be 95% of median. But several of the basin’s reservoirs are well below normal. Basin-wide reservoir storage in the Gunnison was at 63%. After federal emergency releases last summer and fall to prop up Lake Powell, Blue Mesa is just 29% full.

According to a memo from Dave Kanzer, director of science and interstate matters at the Colorado River Water Conservation District, to River District board members, Dillon, Green Mountain, Granby, Williams Fork and Wolford Mountain reservoirs are not expected to fill in 2022.

“For western Colorado within the River District, things are concerning, and our main reservoirs will not fill in the headwaters of the Colorado,” Kanzer said. “It’s obvious that we are going to have very little carry-over storage going into next year. It’s not the worst news, but it’s a challenge.”

Kanzer said some water users that do not hold contracts for water in Wolford, which is upstream of the town of Kremmling and is owned and operated by the River District, may have to take shortages this year. Inflow into Wolford this spring is projected to be about 60% of median. Some of that contract water is for augmentation, or replacement, which is released downstream to allow junior water users to keep using water when flows get low in late summer. Kanzer said the River District should be able to meet all of its contractual obligations even though Wolford won’t fill this year.

“The reservoirs provide the supplemental supply for when the rivers naturally fall,” Kanzer said. “The rivers will fall earlier, and contracts will run out sooner and the late season supply is most at risk and junior water users are most at risk.”

The statewide snowpack was close to the peak for the year when abnormally warm temperatures March 24-28 started the annual melting and a rise in rivers. But Tuesday’s snowstorm, which dropped up to a foot in parts of Colorado’s high country, added a bit more to the snowpack.

“A big storm this time of year definitely has the potential in many parts of the state to cause an additional even higher peak, which could be our final one,” Wetlaufer said. “But one day of warm weather and the whole snowpack will be melting again.”

Across the upper Colorado River basin, inflow into Lake Powell from April to July is expected to be 64% of average, according to the April projections from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. That is a 5% decrease from the March forecast. Lake Powell is currently at 3,522 feet elevation, and 24% full.

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the April 13 edition of The Aspen Times and the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent.

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to reflect that those water users who hold contracts for water in Wolford Reservoir will not have to take shortages.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

La Niña likely to continue, intensifying drought, wildfires; snowpack hits 91% of average

By

Fresh Water News

-

April 27, 2022

Blue Mesa Reservoir photo — Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, CO., Blue Mesa Reservoir is within Curecanti National Recreation Area and managed by the National Park Service. Blue Mesa Reservoir is Colorado’s largest lake, 20 miles long with a surface area of over 14 square miles. The reservoir was created by the damming of the Gunnison River by the Blue Mesa Dam in 1966 as part of the Colorado River Storage Project, helping control the flow of water into the Colorado River as well as generating hydroelectric power, flood control and storage. The Gunnison River is the 5th largest tributary to the Colorado River. Dean Krakel/for The Colorado Sun

By Jerd Smith

As warm spring winds whip the Eastern Plains, sapping soils of moisture, and the state’s reservoirs sit at below-average levels, water managers got more bad news Tuesday: this two-year drought cycle could continue through the summer and into the fall leading the state into its third year of below-average snowpack and streamflows and high wildfire danger.

Looking ahead the weather pattern known as La Niña, which has created the intense drought of the past two years, is likely to continue, according to Peter Goble, a climate specialist with Colorado State University’s Colorado Climate Center.

“La Niña is not letting go,” Goble said Tuesday at a meeting of the state’s Water Availability Task Force, a group charged with monitoring the state’s water supplies. “It may stick around for a third year and this will reduce our chances of any meaningful drought recovery this spring and summer.”

In Colorado, and other Western states, mountain snow levels are closely watched because when they melt in late spring, they supply the majority of water for cities and farms.

In January, holiday snows boosted the state’s snowpack to 119% of average, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). But spring snows have not provided as much relief as hoped.

Now, statewide snowpack is at 91% of average, according to the NRCS, an improvement over last year’s 79% of average mark at this time. But ultra-windy conditions and warm temperatures continue to rob the soils statewide of critical moisture, meaning a significant amount of the water from melting snow will be absorbed before it reaches streams.

Statewide snowpack at 91% of average

At the same time the state’s stored water supplies are at just 76% of normal, according to Karl Wetlaufer, a hydrologist and assistant snow survey supervisor with the NRCS.

“We’re seeing some of the lowest storage levels in more than 30 years,” Wetlaufer said.

Blue Mesa Reservoir is Colorado’s largest reservoir, able to store some 800,000 acre-feet of water. But due to the drought, and an emergency release of 36,000 acre-feet last summer to aid Lake Powell, Blue Mesa is just over 40% full.

More releases to Lake Powell from the reservoir, a recreational hot spot, may be necessary this summer. And because runoff isn’t expected to be that high, Blue Mesa isn’t expected to recover much, if at all this year, officials said.

“Blue Mesa is not expected to fill, and by the end of this year it will be right back to where it is now … it’s not looking good for this area,” said Beverly Richards, a water resources specialist with the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District, which helps shape policy and management strategies for the river.

On the Front Range, some cities, such as Thornton, expect their reservoirs to fill. The South Platte Basin is near normal for its snowpack and streamflow forecasts are healthier than others across the state.

But Swithin Dick, water resources manager for Centennial Water and Sanitation District in Highlands Ranch, said the outlook is worrisome.

“My gut meter is moving from cautious to concerned,” Dick said.

Denver Water, Colorado’s largest city water supplier, derives its supplies from the Upper Colorado River Basin on the West Slope, as well as the South Platte River. Its storage system is at 79% full, while snowpack in its mountain watersheds is measuring 79% to 80% full.

Some relief from the dry, windy weather could come in May if forecasts prove to be off track, Goble said.

“You want some million dollar rains on the Eastern Plains,“ Goble said. “But the deck is stacked against us.”

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Glenwood Springs secures water right for whitewater parks

By

Aspen Journalism

-

April 20, 2022

A view looking up the Colorado River from the pedestrian bridge over the river, just upstream of the river’s confluence with the Roaring Fork River. The location is one of three sites where the City of Glenwood Springs plans to build a whitewater park using a water right for recreation. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

By Heather Sackett

After a lengthy water court battle, the city of Glenwood Springs has secured a conditional water right for three potential whitewater parks on the Colorado River.

The new recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water right is a win for Colorado’s river recreation community, even though the city had to make concessions to future water development to get it.

The new water right is tied to three proposed boating parks: No Name, Horseshoe Bend and Two Rivers. The City plans to build a park at just one of the sites. The whitewater parks would be able to call for higher flows during certain times of year — 1,250 cubic feet per second from April 1 to Sept. 30; 2,500 cfs between June 8 and July 23 and 4,000 cfs for five days between June 30 and July 6.

The different flow rates would allow beginner, intermediate and expert boaters to all enjoy the boating structures, which have yet to be built. The five days of high flow would allow Glenwood to host a competitive event around the Fourth of July holiday.

The decree granted by water court judge James Berkley Boyd on March 23 is the culmination of nine years of work for Glenwood Springs, crafting agreements or otherwise settling with all parties that had filed statements of opposition in the case.

“We know outdoor recreation is a big part of our local culture and local economy so being able to have this opportunity to expand options and enhance options for our river recreation is really exciting,” said Bryana Starbuck, public information officer for the city of Glenwood Springs.

The city will now begin looking at designs for each of the three sites, investigating potential funding options and choosing the one that is the best fit, Starbuck said. The city will have to reapply to water court in six years to show it’s making progress on the parks to maintain the conditional right.

Glenwood Springs joins a handful of other Colorado communities with RICDs for human-made whitewater features, including Steamboat Springs, Pueblo, Fort Collins, Golden, Avon, Breckenridge, Durango, Aspen, Basalt and Carbondale.

Hattie Johnson, Southern Rockies stewardship director for American Whitewater, said in a prepared statement that this is an incredible victory for river recreation.

“The Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon is an iconic stretch of whitewater that attracts residents and visitors from far and wide,” she said. “This was an important case to ensure the Colorado River, the heart of the Glenwood Springs community, will continue to be enjoyed well into the future.”

“The Homestake Partners (Aurora Water and Colorado Springs Utilities) and Glenwood Springs worked very hard over a long period of time to reach the negotiated conclusion embodied within the stipulated Decree entered by the Water Court,” read a prepared statement from Greg Baker, manager of public relations for Aurora Water.

Proposed whitewater parks photo — A map filed by the city of Glenwood Springs showing the locations of three proposed whitewater parks. The city recently secured a recreational in-channel diversion (RICD) water right to build the parks. CREDIT: CITY OF GLENWOOD SPRINGS / WATER COURT FILING

Agreements with opposers

To get its water right, the city had to negotiate agreements with a long list of other water users and entities who opposed it, including the Colorado Water Conservation Board and Front Range water providers like Denver Water and Colorado Springs Utilities.

According to its decree, Glenwood Springs made allowances for future water rights that have not yet been developed.

A RICD water right’s power comes from its ability to place a “call.” In theory, once built, if the whitewater parks were not receiving the full amount of water they are entitled to, the city could “call out” other junior water rights users upstream, who would have to stop diverting water until the parks got their full amount.

But the decree includes a provision called “Yield Protection for New Water Rights,” which lays out restrictions on the city’s ability to call for its water during dry years. It allows 30,000 additional acre-feet of water to be developed over the next 30 years, which would be protected from a call above 1,250 cfs. As long as a new water rights holder could prove with real-time stream gauge monitoring data that they are not getting their full amount because of a call placed by Glenwood Springs for the 2,500 cfs amount, then Glenwood has to cancel the call.

This would kick in only in years when the 50% exceedance probability for streamflow in the Colorado River at Dotsero is less than 1.4 million acre-feet from April through June, according to forecasts from the National Resources Conservation Service. The provision would apply to water rights younger than Dec. 31, 2013, which is the appropriation date for the city’s water right.

Glenwood Springs also cannot use the RICD water right as the basis to oppose any future water development upstream on the Colorado River or its tributaries.

These agreements, which allow for some level of future water development by upstream parties that will not be subject to the restrictions created by a RICD, have been included in other recently completed RICDs, like Pitkin County’s whitewater waves in Basalt.

Colorado River photo — The Colorado River at No Name, above Glenwood Springs, and just off of I-70 near the No Name rest stop. This is one of three sites where the City of Glenwood Springs plans to build a whitewater park with a newly secured water right for recreation. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Water for recreation hard to secure

The backbone of Colorado’s of water law, known as prior appropriation, is the concept that older water rights get first use of the river. But even though RICDs have only been around for about 20 years and are therefore junior to major agricultural and transmountain diversions, RICDs still often end up making concessions to allow future water development.

That is partly because the CWCB is tasked with making sure RICDs, which help keep water in the river channel, don’t prevent the state from developing all the water it legally can under the Colorado River Compact.

“I think in a perfect world you would have a more clear delineation of recreational rights like this one,” said Bart Miller, healthy rivers program director for environmental conservation group Western Resource Advocates. “If they are applying for water, they should be treated the same as any other right, that is, when they come along, they get their place in line and they get water appropriate for that time.”

Securing water for recreation has proved challenging in Colorado, where agriculture and cities have long dictated water policy, even as river recreation represents a growing segment of the state’s economy.

In 2021, after being met with opposition, river recreation proponents scrapped a proposal that would have let natural stream features like a rapid secure a water right for recreation. A second proposal earlier this year that would have allowed municipalities to create a “recreation in-channel values reach” has also been tabled and will not be introduced at the legislature this session.

“That’s something I think we can aspire to, to have rights for recreation and the environment be on an even playing field with all the other rights in the state,” Miller said. “I think it’s really important to the state of Colorado to recognize and support recreational water rights and recreational uses.”

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times and the Glenwood Spring Post-Independent. This story ran in the March 6 edition of The Aspen Times and Glenwood Springs Post-Independent.

Editor’s note: The story has been changed to add that the City of Glenwood plans to build only one of the three potential whitewater parks; which one has yet to be decided.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

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