Why Arizona is going to dry up and blow away

Even outside the desert parts of the state, water is getting scarcer and scarcer.

Take Prescott, where my sister lives. In 40 years, its greater area could be 540,000, compared to about 100,000 today. Yet already today, people in the area on individual wells are having to have them redrilled as much as 300 feet deeper at a cost of as much as $12,000.

And, Arizona apparently doesn’t have a state engineer or other “water czar,” at least not one with a lot of power, unlike most western states. The fact that a lot of diversion ditches off the Verde River have no state regulation shows that. And, as I detail beneath a few quotes from the High Country News story, that river is about to be sucked dry, if the city of Prescott and some “growth for growth’s sake” wingnuts have their way.

Here’s how bad the current water situation is:

In the Prescott area, water levels have dropped at least half a foot each year going all the way back to 1982, and more quickly since 1994 — anywhere from 1.5 to 4 feet a year. Today, the area is pumping its groundwater supplies almost twice as fast as they’re being replenished.

Throw in global warming and drought, and the Prescott area is ripe to blow away well before it gets to 540,000 people.

And that’s even with the efforts of wingnuts like former state legislator and current county supervisor (commissioner) Carol Springer, who could definitely stand a few Ed Abbey quotes, specifically about “growth for growth’s sake being the theology of the cancer cell.”

But in 1992, she pushed a bill through the Legislature authorizing the Prescott pipeline, which now stands to cost sponsoring cities $192 million — not counting interest. Her bill authorized Prescott to tap water from the Big Chino sub-basin, which lies north of the Little Chino sub-basin where the city has historically sunk its wells. Twelve years later, Prescott paid $23 million to buy a ranch in the Big Chino to obtain its water rights.

Springer’s bill created the only exception anywhere in Arizona to a previously approved ban on inter-basin water transfers — a law aimed at preventing one region from stripping another of its water resources, Chinatown-style. Her explanation for the need for the transfer is that a community must “grow or die.”

“If we can’t grow at all in the future, because we lose our right to pump groundwater, we will cease to exist,” Springer said. “There is no such thing as a static kind of a situation in terms of a community. You can’t not grow at all and survive. We have to have some element of growth.”

The Big Chino transfer bill wasn’t Springer’s only political effort relating to water supplies in the Verde Basin. Just last year, she chaired the group behind a successful statewide “takings” initiative that requires compensation of any landowner who can prove a new regulation reduces his property value. Some say the initiative could make it harder for the state to regulate development in rural areas with inadequate water supplies.

Unfortunately, she’ll likely be dead long before the catastrophic shit of her actions hits the fan.

The biggest crapola? Prescott’s plan to drill new wells into the Big Chino Basin, estimated to be 86 percent of the water source of the upper Verde River. The Verde flows south through central Arizona, basically from along the western edge of the Mogollon Rim down to mid-altitude desert before hitting the Salt River. Still undammed, it’s home to a great variety of birds and other wildlife, including bald eagles.

And, because it eventually flows into the Salt River Project, administrators of that project, and the Phoenix economic interests behind them, are also concerned. (Of course, there’s probably already too damned many people in Phoenix, but that’s another story.) Since about 40 percent of the SRP’s water comes from the Verde, this is a high-stakes issue. Of course, the SRP isn’t much more forward-thinking than the Prescott folks a lot of times, anyway.

Note: This post has been corrected to reflect that the 86 percent stat is for the upper Verde only. Also, the blogger's sister lives in Prescott; he knows first-hand about some of the issues.