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The challenge we’ve had is to pump groundwater and then replace it after the fact with surface water and Colorado Riv- er water. But to do that you have to show that the groundwater under the ground exists for 100 years out into the future.
From November to April of every year, almost 90 percent of all the green, leafy vegetables in North America come from Arizona, in the southwest part of our state, using Colorado River water to grow those crops. So if you eat lettuce today, you’re eating the Colorado River.
As we’re trying to manage groundwater, lots of people are not really enthusiastic about being regulated in ways they have not been regulated before. So that will be a challenge as we move forward in our state to manage groundwater and build consensus for the updating of our groundwater management laws.
Statewide, we force folks to register their wells. We have something called “Ad- equate Water Supply,” a requirement to show my department that you have 100 years of water. But in the nonregulated areas, if you can’t show that to me, as long as you put information in your real estate packet that an adequate water supply does not exist, you can still sell your home in your subdivision. That’s
pretty weak consumer protection.
Community water systems that provide fifteen or more hookups have to report their use to us. Agriculture in non-regulated areas and other users do not have to report their water use to the state. It’s hard to manage what you can’t mea- sure. We have been trying since 2017 to get that changed.
Many communities are facing the depletion of their aquifers and they have very limited access to new renewable water supplies. No surface water, no Col- oradoRiverwater;verychallenging.
But that’s not the only problem. When you pump the groundwater out of these alluvial aquifers, think about the sand at a beach or the dirt in a riverbed. These alluvial aquifers hold water and much like when you take water out of a sponge and you squeeze it, that sponge shrinks, right? The same thing happens when you pump water out of the ground. That ground compacts.
Unfortunately, once it compacts, it is not like a sponge. It doesn’t rebound if you put water back in the ground. So you’re losing the capacity to store water. So if it does rain you have less capacity to store that water under the ground than you did because of these land subsidence features.
We’ve been using that method for thirty years but all that groundwater is allocated to either existing users or users who are getting ready to build homes. So we have hit a wall and need some new tools. So we’re trying to cre- ate new tools for the consumer protection of that program.
We have had an issue with something called “Wildcat Developments.” You may have seen in the national news an entity called Rio
Verde Foothills. It was a wildcat develop- ment. The city of Scottsdale, adjacent to that wildcat development, was serving water out of a standpipe. Folks were filling up water tanks outside their homes with trucks that were hauling water. Because of drought and shortages, Scottsdale shut off the standpipe. Big crisis.
What were we going to do? These people had no water or they had to haul water very long distances at a very high price. The legislature stepped in, a water company stepped in, and we resolved the problem. But it shows the val- ue of building a home under the subdivision Assured Water Supply Program versus off the grid in these wildcat subdivisions. But fixing this is also very divisive in terms of folks want- ing to live off the grid in that pioneer spirit.
On rural groundwater, we are looking to create a brand new, more flexible framework called Rural Groundwater Management Ar- eas. It allows more local input than King Bus- chatzke dictating outcomes to the people in rural areas. You can tailor the management to the resources that are there. Again, in most cases, the use of groundwater is their only source of water. It is the only source of water supporting their economy. So it is a very dif- ficult thing to manage to make sure you don’t hurt them and destroy their economy while still managing the groundwater aquifers.
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