[From conservation to importing water from the Pacific, Democrats
say they have all the answers to historic drought. The one thing no
one wants to talk about: stopping the sprawl.]
[[link removed]]

THE WATER WARS DECIDING THE FUTURE OF THE WEST  
[[link removed]]


 

Kyle Paoletta
October 30, 2023
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ From conservation to importing water from the Pacific, Democrats
say they have all the answers to historic drought. The one thing no
one wants to talk about: stopping the sprawl. _

Residential swimming pools use groundwater in the Sonoran Desert in
Buckeye, Arizona., Rebecca Noble for the New Republic

 

On the eastern flank of metropolitan Las Vegas, out past a water park
advertising “the world’s largest man-made wave” and a nascent
development called Cadence, a red-dirt parking lot teases public
access to the system that enabled the past three decades of growth in
southern Nevada. Called the Las Vegas Wash, it amounts to a channel
that funnels the area’s recycled water back to its aquatic
lifeline: Lake Mead
[[link removed]].

Bushwhacking through the cottonwoods that line the wash and past a
massive desert tobacco plant’s spray of flutelike flowers reveals
the riverbank. Whatever sense of the pastoral I was enjoying in the
bright December sun was immediately disrupted by the water itself,
which gave off a distinctive odor—not definitively chemical, but
certainly treated
[[link removed].].
Overhead, three pelicans with black-tipped wings swooped into view,
wheeling into an updraft while, in the elbow of one of the concrete
weirs that control the wash’s 12-mile run through the Las Vegas
Valley, a few cans of Monster energy drink bobbled in the foam.

Every day, 200 million gallons of water are returned to Lake
Mead—the nation’s largest
[[link removed]] reservoir—through
the wash, enough to virtually replace all of the water that’s used
indoors by the 2.3 million residents of Clark County. The ultimate
source is the Colorado River and the contentious ledger
[[link removed]] that governs the
waterway’s use throughout its 1,450-mile run between the Rocky
Mountains and the Sea of Cortez, which separates Baja California from
the rest of Mexico. While Las Vegas is now widely recognized as
a national leader
[[link removed]] in
water efficiency, the situation was completely different in the late
1980s, when the city was gulping down its meager allocation of the
Colorado so quickly that some believed
[[link removed]] the
burgeoning metropolis would go completely dry by 1995. Early in her
two-decade tenure as Las Vegas’ top water official, Patricia Mulroy,
who has lingered in the regional imagination as a sort of water
wizard, was forced
[[link removed]] to
call a moratorium on new development. Back then, Las Vegas was less
than a third the size it is today.

A few weeks after my visit to the Las Vegas Wash, Katie Hobbs,
the newly elected
[[link removed]] governor
of Arizona, released a report
[[link removed]] showing
that the rapidly expanding far West Valley of Phoenix was pumping
groundwater at an unsustainable rate. “We have to act now, or this
will only be the first new area that faces this kind of shortage,”
the Democrat said in her debut address upon taking office. She
followed up that promise in June by issuing her own moratorium
[[link removed]] on
any new development in metropolitan Phoenix that is entirely reliant
on groundwater. Regulators had found
[[link removed]] that
many of the outlying communities in Maricopa County were out of
compliance with a state law requiring all new residential construction
to have a guaranteed supply for 100 years.

Hobbs prevailed
[[link removed]] over
the far-right former news anchor Kari Lake by just 17,000 votes last
year, in a contest that seemed to demonstrate the electoral limits of
the Republican Party’s total embrace of MAGA-style extremism.
The only
[[link removed]] gubernatorial
race with a narrower raw vote margin in 2022 was in Nevada, where the
more establishment-oriented—if not exactly moderate—Republican Joe
Lombardo squeaked ahead of the incumbent, Steve Sisolak, by a mere
15,000 votes. Those races were indicative of the Southwest’s drift
from the sort of place that birthed Republican icons like Barry
Goldwater, Paul Laxalt, and John McCain into one of the most
competitive regions in the country. While Hillary Clinton’s narrow
2016 loss
[[link removed]] there
hinted at what was coming, Arizona, especially, seemed to flip from
ruby red to periwinkle blue almost overnight, with Republicans
managing to lose both U.S. Senate seats
[[link removed]],
the governorship, and the state’s Electoral College votes
[[link removed]] in
just four years.

Democrats across the country hope the Southwest’s largest state will
be the next Colorado: a longtime libertarian stronghold reborn as
progressive haven
[[link removed]] thanks
to rapidly growing Democratic cities and moderate suburbs. Meanwhile,
Arizona’s conservatives have seized on water restrictions as fuel
for the fire of cultural grievance they have traditionally used to
seek power. When I spoke to him this summer, far-right Representative
Paul Gosar called Hobbs’s development moratorium “an impulsive
scare tactic.” “It’s not your way or the highway,” said Gosar,
who is a close ally of Lake, traveling with her to a Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in Hungary earlier this year.
“It scared people, it really did,” he said, adding, “We
have _plenty_ of fresh water. It’s just the distribution that’s
the problem.”

An aerial view shows homes under varying stages of construction in the
Copper Falls subdivision, farm fields and older housing developments
in Buckeye, Arizona

Distribution is certainly _part_ of the problem. Over the course of
the twentieth century, tens of billions of federal dollars were used
to move water across the vast Colorado River Basin
[[link removed]],
which encompasses Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New
Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado itself. The transformation of the basin
began in the 1930s with the construction of the Hoover Dam, which
created Lake Mead, and ended in 1993 with the completion of
the Central Arizona Project
[[link removed]],
the 336-mile aqueduct system that conveys water from the Colorado to
Phoenix and Tucson. All that infrastructure has made it possible for
the river system to theoretically supply water
[[link removed]] to
more than 40 million people and five million acres of farmland. But
the basin’s stability depends less on dams and reservoirs than on
rainfall and snowpack, and it has been shaken by a
so-called megadrought
[[link removed]] that
set in just over two decades ago. Climate scientists now believe the
dry conditions are reflective of a trend toward more permanent
aridification. Their research also shows that water scarcity is only
made worse by the region’s triple-digit summers—especially brutal
[[link removed]] this
year—given the link between high temperatures and groundwater
depletion. (Gosar has falsely claimed that “the science is not
settled” on climate change and suggested
[[link removed]] plants
will take care of all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere through the
magic of photosynthesis.)

Over the past 20 years, public officials in the Southwest responded to
aridification by shifting their emphasis from corralling and diverting
water to making better use
[[link removed]] of
what’s already available, allowing the region’s cities to explode
in size merely by reducing their per capita water use. But with
aquifers already overtaxed across the Southwest, the region is also
coping with the first-ever limitations
[[link removed]] on
how much water can be diverted from the Colorado, which went into
effect after Lake Mead dropped below 35 percent full in 2021. Arizona
has borne the brunt of the cuts: This year, its allocation of Colorado
River water was cut
[[link removed]] by
592,000 acre-feet, with each acre-foot representing enough water
to supply [[link removed]] around
three households annually. Though above-average snowfall
[[link removed]] in
the winter of 2022–23 helped to temporarily stabilize the reservoir,
its water level has only recovered to around the same elevation as
when mandatory cuts first went into effect. Next year, Arizona will
still have to make do with only 82 percent
[[link removed]] of its typical
allocation.

In response to the sense of crisis that has descended over the
Southwest, momentum is building for a return to the era of massive
federal investment in waterworks. Already, the region’s
congressional delegation succeeded in securing
[[link removed]] $4
billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for drought mitigation, as well
as over $10 billion [[link removed]] in the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law for the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that
manages the West’s dams and aqueducts. The next logical step would
be augmenting the region’s water supply, namely by importing water
from elsewhere. Of all the region’s legislators, Senator Mark Kelly
of Arizona seems most ready to go back to the future by betting big on
new infrastructure. “We need to start looking long-term: What do we
want the Southwest to look like 15, 20, 30 years from now?” he asked
me this summer. “The Bureau of Reclamation has done a bunch of
studies about moving water from another watershed [as well as]
desalination. These things are possible to do, but we’ve got to plan
ahead and start having those conversations.”

Kelly’s public embrace of augmentation comes after Hobbs’s
predecessor, Doug Ducey, sought $1 billion for a proposed
desalination plant
[[link removed]] in
the Sea of Cortez, which would ferry water to Phoenix via a 200-mile
pipeline. When the Republican-led legislature approved that plan, a
poll found that 74 percent
[[link removed]] of
likely voters in Arizona were in support of purging the salt from
ocean water to propel them into the future. When respondents were
informed the full build-out could cost upward of $10 billion, support
only barely softened, to 63 percent. Whatever the cost, this sort of
augmentation project is viewed by many as practical, even inevitable.
John Graham, one of Arizona’s most prominent real estate developers,
typically donates to Republicans but endorsed
[[link removed]] Hobbs
in 2022 because he feared the “toxic” environment that Kari Lake
might have created. When I asked him about investing in augmentation
infrastructure, he replied simply, “We have to.”

Stephen Roe Lewis (left), governor of the Gila River Indian Community,
with Senator Mark Kelly in February 2022 at a worksite for water
infrastructure. The Office of Senator Mark Kelly

Not everyone in the Southwest is quite so certain. Beyond the
environmental toll desalination plants take on the bodies of water
where they’re located and the immense amount of energy pumping water
over long distances requires, critics charge that augmentation’s
only real purpose would be to facilitate the local tradition of
shortsighted sprawl. “The Southwest, for a long time, has been based
on economic growth, which is getting as many people here as possible,
as many microchip factories, as many golf courses,” Brian Petersen,
an environmental scholar at Northern Arizona University, told me.

Petersen pointed out that, some years after first mapping the Colorado
River in 1869, the nineteenth-century explorer John Wesley
Powell gave a speech
[[link removed]] in
which he told an audience of aspiring farmers and land speculators,
“There is not enough water to supply the land.” After well over a
century of ignoring that warning, the Southwest seems poised to keep
forging ahead, clawing at whatever new water resources it can in
desperate hopes of further staving off the inevitable moment when its
people are forced to accept the inherent limitations of the desert.
Even as Democrats lead the national charge toward tackling climate
change, they are continuing to preach at the altar of growth. That may
solidify their electoral gains in the Southwest, but it also risks a
different sort of environmental chaos.

For many residents of Cochise County, in the far southeastern corner
of Arizona, the first sign of trouble was the dust. Starting around
2019, the wind that gusts through the Sulphur Springs Valley would
pick up loose grit from the thousands of acres of arid land that were
being cleared to grow alfalfa. So much dirt became airborne that even
the Chiricahua Mountains, towering 6,000 feet above the sunbaked
valley, would sometimes disappear. “The dust was so dark, thick, and
high that you could not see the mountains,” remembered Beau Hodai, a
journalist who lives in the valley. “I looked up a number of times
and thought the town was on fire because there were just huge plumes
of black smoke rising.”

The company clearing all that land was Riverview Dairy
[[link removed]],
which first arrived in Cochise County in 2014, two years after local
officials made it easier to obtain agricultural permits there. It was
an appealing spot for the Minnesota-based producer: The aquifer could
be pumped easily because of its low salt content, and the mild winters
meant it was possible to grow alfalfa year-round. But as
Riverview sank
[[link removed]] 60
wells to water the 20,000 acres it had amassed, the water table
dropped, endangering small farmers who couldn’t afford to extend
their wells deeper into the ground. An activist group called Arizona
Water Defenders formed in response
[[link removed]],
gradually coalescing around a plan to pass a ballot referendum that
would establish a regulatory apparatus known as an Active Management
Area, or AMA, over groundwater in the Sulphur Springs Valley. Under
that designation, all current use would continue under the supervision
of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, but the sinking of new
wells would be significantly curtailed.

Over the course of the campaign for the new regulation, water
management—the once staid domain of utilities and
engineers—transformed into yet another front in Arizona’s culture
war. Two months before the referendum, the Water Defenders invited
Kristine Uhlman, a retired hydrologist from the University of Arizona,
to give a presentation at the YMCA in the border town of Douglas.
Uhlman focused on the simple idea that, in the Sonoran Desert,
groundwater is not a renewable resource. “All of these aquifers are
savings accounts, meaning water went in, and it’s been sitting there
for thousands of years,” she recalled explaining. “In one location
south of Phoenix, we have water that’s 23,000 years old. In Cochise
County, it’s 10,000 years old. You are relying on a savings account.
So how do you manage the water you use, knowing that once you use it
up, it’s gone?”

“We assiduously avoided any whiff of partisanship,” added MaryAnn
Capehart, one of the event’s organizers. “Really carefully, at all
times. We did not want to be identified with a party. We even avoided
using the word ‘environmental’; apparently that triggers
people.” Those efforts to steer clear of partisanship were vital in
a county where Donald Trump crushed
[[link removed]] Joe Biden
by 20 points. Still, Capehart was struck by the libertarian fatalism
with which some members of the Douglas audience greeted Uhlman’s
presentation. “I’ve got a well; when it dries up, it dries up.
I’ll just move to town,” Capehart remembered one attendee saying;
another: “My water’s going to go down, who cares? We just don’t
want government in here.”

Ann Waters, a leather worker who lives in McNeal, rejects the very
idea that the region’s groundwater is endangered. “They’re lying
about the aquifer drying up,” she told me. “My neighbors down the
road, their water level has risen…. All these people who said their
wells went dry, they just had to replace an ancient pump.” To her
mind, the campaign for new regulation amounted to “a communist
takeover. It’s against the Fifth Amendment to seize private
property, and that’s what the AMA does.”

Elsewhere in rural Arizona, the priority system that governs the use
of Colorado River water has meant that the cuts to how much water the
state can divert through the Central Arizona Project—which went
into effect
[[link removed]] last
year—have fallen almost entirely on farmers in Pinal County, which
sits between Phoenix and Tucson. As a result, those farmers have been
pumping groundwater to make up the difference, even as the state is
projecting an eight million-acre-foot shortfall
[[link removed]] in the
amount of groundwater available to residential users in Pinal over the
next century. Patrick Bray, an executive at the Arizona Farm and Ranch
Group, sees the situations in Cochise and Pinal as evidence of the
profound strain the current regulatory regime—modest though it may
be—is taking on rural areas. “The course of action is, OK, how can
we regulate a user, how can we shut somebody down, how can we cap
their wells, meter them—what regulatory rules can we throw at this
thing to quote unquote save water,” he said. “We need to be
focused on a grander future. How are we going to continue to be
sustainable? How are we going to get those new sources of water?”

“If we could simply get the farm sector to reduce their consumption
from 80 percent to 75 percent ... that solves the cities’
problem—5 percent!” —Robert Glennon

Part of the reason rural areas feel so threatened by scrutiny of their
water consumption is that farms and ranches use 80 percent
[[link removed]] of
the water in the Southwest, so urban utilities often talk about
drawing down agricultural use as an obvious way to free up more for
development. The University of Arizona’s Robert Glennon, an expert
in Western water law, believes many farmers could save a tremendous
amount of water simply by switching from flood irrigation to using
pivoting sprinklers or drip lines—expensive reforms, but ones that
the federal money already designated for drought mitigation is
partially intended to pay for. “If we could simply get the farm
sector to reduce their consumption from 80 percent to 75 percent ...
that solves the cities’ problem—5 percent!” he said. In
response, Bray remarked that, though the ag sector is indeed focused
on efficiency, “You can only squeeze so much water out of a
turnip.”

An irrigation ditch filled with groundwater in an agricultural area of
Buckeye, Arizona

In the end, Cochise County instituted the new regulatory system
[[link removed]] in
the southern end of the Sulphur Springs Valley, the first time that
Arizona voters have ever imposed limits
[[link removed]] on
their own ability to pump groundwater. Shortly after that vote, the
state Department of Water Resources established new limits
[[link removed]] in
Mohave County, too, where massive farms overusing groundwater created
similar issues. Rather than an unwelcome imposition of regulation on a
conservative area, that order came after officials in Mohave—where
the entire
[[link removed]] Board of
Supervisors is Republican—made three
[[link removed]] requests
for regulation over the course of six years.

As rural Arizona reckons with water scarcity, it remains to be seen
just how much the crisis might be serving to upend traditional
skepticism of government. After the Active Management Area in Cochise
County went into effect, Ann Waters learned that all current well
owners were required to file a new application with the state, which
could include an initial fee of up to $1,000. Outraged, she organized
her own petition to repeal the regulations. During their initial
campaign, it took the Arizona Water Defenders the better part of a
year to gather the signatures necessary to get their measure on the
ballot. Though the repeal effort has since run into legal snags,
Waters managed the feat in just two months.

A few miles northwest of the Strip, the headquarters of the Southern
Nevada Water Authority is a long, low complex of gray buildings
fronted by an immaculately xeriscaped planter showcasing a towering
prickly pear cactus. Inside, the agency’s general manager, John
Entsminger, told me that when he began working at the utility in 1999,
the Colorado River Basin was coming off one of the wettest periods in
recorded history. Its two massive reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake
Powell, were nearly full, and the seven states that share the river
were negotiating how to allocate the surplus.

Entsminger is broad-shouldered and avuncular, a lawyer with a crew cut
who radiates a certain sense of masculine whimsy, decorating his
corner office with a fire hydrant painted with the colors of Las
Vegas’ NHL team, the Golden Knights, and a sculpture of a dripping
kitchen tap. “Our use in 2002 was 325,000 acre-feet, so 25,000
acre-feet above our apportionment,” Entsminger said. At the time,
his boss was the pugnacious Pat Mulroy, beloved in Clark County for
her advocacy on behalf of metro Las Vegas but resented elsewhere in
the Southwest, where she has accrued nicknames like the “water
empress” [[link removed]] and “the prophet
of growth.”
[[link removed]]

After being appointed to lead Las Vegas’ water authority in 1989,
Mulroy had launched an audit of the not yet built subdivisions and
resorts where water diversions had already been approved. “What it
showed was that we were way overcommitted,” she remembered. She
ordered the moratorium on new development
[[link removed]] in
1991, which spooked her peers in the suburbs of North Las Vegas and
Henderson into taking a look at their own books, where they found
similar shortfalls. “It became pretty obvious that there was only
one way out, and that was for us to combine forces,” she said.

All the previously competing interests were corralled into the
Southern Nevada Water Authority, or SNWA, a singular utility that
could both manage the region’s existing resources and seek to
supplement them. Mulroy explained, “Once we were working together,
we could enter into a contract with the federal government to access
return flow credits”—the mechanism that allows southern Nevada to
effectively use much more water than it’s officially entitled to.
“For every gallon of wastewater that we treat, put in the Las Vegas
Wash, and return to Lake Mead, we can take a like amount out.”
Since 40 percent
[[link removed].] of
water in Las Vegas is used indoors and then recycled, the city only
consumes 60 percent of what it draws from Lake Mead, effectively
boosting Nevada’s annual entitlement of the Colorado River from
300,000 acre-feet to 420,000 acre-feet. In 1992, Mulroy lifted her
moratorium, and Las Vegas’ growth was fully unleashed, helped along
by the decade’s abnormally wet conditions.

All of this technocratic jockeying required the consent of the federal
government, and Mulroy had a powerful ally in Democratic U.S. Senator
Harry Reid. Jon Ralston, the longtime Las Vegas journalist who is at
work on a biography
[[link removed]] of
the late Senate majority leader, told me, “Pat Mulroy was so trusted
by Harry Reid that if she said, ‘I need this,’ he would almost be
willing to accept it at face value.” In 1998, when Reid was pushing
a bill that opened up 68,000 acres
[[link removed]] of
public land in southern Nevada to private development, Mulroy
persuaded him to include a provision that diverted 10 percent of every
sale to her new agency. “This community understood that without a
robust water supply, it wouldn’t exist,” Mulroy said. “There
wouldn’t be any development without SNWA.”

Those extra funds would prove vital when drought seized the Southwest
at the turn of the twenty-first century. Suddenly, the Colorado only
carried a quarter of its previous average flow. By the end of 2002,
Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which had nearly reached capacity just two
years earlier, were now only 64 percent full. “After the drought in
2002, our next 17 years of water supply was gone”—Entsminger
snapped his finger as he spoke—“in a month.” The SNWA began an
aggressive conservation push, which included paying homeowners
[[link removed]] $2
for every square foot of turf that was removed from their lawns and
upgrading water reclamation facilities—initiatives subsidized
[[link removed]],
in part, by the $285 million the agency garnered in the first decade
after Reid’s land bill went into effect.

Much of the SNWA’s windfall also went to buying up land in rural
areas north of Clark County, where Mulroy planned
[[link removed]] to
pump groundwater and funnel it to Las Vegas. But that plan was
challenged in court by a broad array of rural ranchers,
environmentalists, American Indian tribes, and local
governments—even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
joined in, and a state judge rejected the plan twice, in 2013 and then
again in 2020. Though the SNWA declined to appeal
[[link removed]] the
most recent ruling, the utility still operates alfalfa farms across
an enormous swath of rural Nevada, lest it lose its right to the water
that Mulroy once characterized as a “safety net if the river really
goes south.”

So far, Entsminger, who succeeded Mulroy in 2014, has been focused on
conservation. The SNWA has kept its annual consumption below
[[link removed].] 275,000
acre-feet, the limit that was imposed for 2023 because of
[[link removed]] the
expanding bathtub ring of white stone left behind by the dwindling
waters of Lake Mead. Now, Entsminger said, the agency is aiming to get
per capita use even lower, to 86 gallons per person per day
[[link removed].] by
2035. Imposing greater efficiency on southern Nevada is an urgent
matter, since the region is about to embark on its next major growth
spurt. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has been pursuing
[[link removed]] a
new lands bill, modeled on Reid’s 1998 legislation, that would open
up
[[link removed]] some
25,000 acres south of Las Vegas to private development. In June,
she introduced
[[link removed]] another
bill that would allow the SNWA to build a pipeline, dubbed the Horizon
Lateral, connecting that area to Lake Mead. Entsminger insists that
the pipeline is meant to create “redundancy in our water
system”—right now, 40 percent
[[link removed]] of
the metropolitan area is reliant on a single, aging pipe for drinking
water—but it’s clear that it would also ease the development of
what is currently federal land, allowing metropolitan Las Vegas to
grow according to the same logic it has used for the past three
decades.

“As much as I passionately believe in conservation being a
foundational part of any solution, it is not a silver bullet.
Conservation cannot solve the problem in its entirety. You have to add
water to the supply.” —Pat Mulroy

Cortez Masto told me that her bills would facilitate the
“sustainable expansion” of southern Nevada. “There is no new
building that’s going to go up in Las Vegas without a comprehensive
plan for how we use our limited water resources.” Environmental
activists focused on conservation are skeptical. “The endgame is to
sprawl south of the Las Vegas Valley,” Kyle Roerink, who heads the
Great Basin Water Network—an organization that was initially formed
to fight Mulroy’s designs on rural Nevada—told me. “It
underscores how rapidly Las Vegas is growing at a very precarious
time.”

In a perfect world, Las Vegas’ per capita water use would drop
enough that it could keep growing for decades without surpassing its
current entitlement of Colorado River water, or even resorting to
converting its alfalfa farms to pumping stations. Mulroy, at least,
seems loath to take that bet. “As much as I passionately believe in
conservation being a foundational part of any solution,” she said,
“it is not a silver bullet. Conservation cannot solve the problem in
its entirety. You have to add water to the supply.”

The city of Buckeye sits on the far western edge of greater Phoenix,
separated from the rest of the metropolis of nearly five million
people by the White Tank Mountains. Buckeye was founded as an
agricultural colony in the late nineteenth century, and the portion of
the city nearest the Gila River is still dominated by feedlots and
cotton farms. But on the north side of Interstate 10, there’s no
farmland, just a vast desert plain interrupted only by a development
called Tartesso. Once fully built out, Tartesso will include
[[link removed]] 41,000
homes, the community’s green landscaping and Spanish-tile roofs
lining the curving streets and cul-de-sacs that radiate away from
roundabouts studded with palm trees.

I had Tartesso’s community park to myself when I visited on an
afternoon with an air temperature of 104 degrees. A volleyball net had
been stretched over a rectangle of beach sand, and I stood and watched
as sprinklers mounted to the top of each pole sprayed water, keeping
the sand cool for the people who weren’t there. Over in the
playground, a collection of colorful apparatuses ran on an automatic
cycle: jetting water from the ground, shooting water in a geyser out
of the top of a purple column, dumping water from a trio of swiveling
red buckets. On the other side of the wall of masonry that divided the
park from the undeveloped desert beyond, deep-bellied power lines hung
from massive steel towers, extending out toward the distant blue peak
of Belmont Mountain.

The Tartesso Community Park and playground in Buckeye, the westernmost
suburb of Phoenix

The population of Buckeye has surged
[[link removed]] from 6,500 people
in 2000 to over 114,000 today. And its expansion has only just begun:
The city has annexed so much land that its limits now encompass
[[link removed]] almost
400 square miles, more area than is occupied by San Diego. When fully
built out, local leaders have promised
[[link removed]],
Buckeye will hold some 1.5 million people, which would put it in
competition with Phoenix as Arizona’s largest city.

This part of central Arizona is known as the far West Valley. Thirty
miles from downtown Phoenix, it represents the new frontier of
development beyond established West Valley enclaves like Glendale and
Peoria. According to the groundwater report
[[link removed]] that
Governor Hobbs released last January, once all the developments
planned for the far West Valley are built, the Hassayampa aquifer that
supplies them could be overdrawn by as much as 84,000 acre-feet per
year—twice as much groundwater as the entire city of Albuquerque
uses every year. Still more alarming, the report suggested that even
some of the homes that had already been built could run out of water
well before the 2100s.

Hobbs paired the report’s release with an accusation that Governor
Ducey had ignored the very same findings. “I don’t understand, and
do not in any way agree with, my predecessor choosing to keep this
report from the public and from members of this legislature,”
Hobbs said [[link removed]], the
directness of the attack masked by her imperturbable style, perhaps a
remnant of her career as a social worker. “However, my decision to
release this report signals how I plan to tackle our water issues
openly and directly.”

Given the bifurcation of Arizona’s electorate, it was less
surprising that Hobbs would throw an elbow at the outgoing Republican
governor than that she would do so in the process of lunging toward
the third rail of politics in the Southwest: growth. Robert Glennon,
the water policy and law professor at the University of Arizona,
explained that, throughout the twentieth century, “water was a
unifying theme across party boundaries. Whether it was Barry Goldwater
from the right or Mo Udall from the left, they believed that it was
critically important for Arizona to grow, that they find more water
for Arizona.”

With partisan tensions over groundwater already heightened in the
rural reaches of the state, Hobbs was now suggesting that the
long-term, bipartisan assumption that more water could always be found
to fuel the growth machine was wrong. Nicole DeMont, who runs the
governor’s political operation, told me Hobbs was simply following
through on the promises she had made in her campaign against Lake.
“We talked a lot about focusing on real problems in the
campaign—i.e., not conspiracy theories,” DeMont said. “I think
that message really resonated with everyday Arizonans, who are
concerned that one day water won’t come out of their taps.” She
shared an exit poll from the 2022 election that showed just 14 percent
of voters were “very confident” Arizona would have enough water in
the next decade. (Hobbs was not made available for an interview for
this story.)

Many Democrats applauded Hobbs’s transparency, including Mark Kelly.
“The governor is making smart decisions,” he said. “She’s not
just looking to next month or even her term in office, she’s looking
decades into the future.” But on the local level, Buckeye’s mayor,
Eric Orsborn—whose office is nonpartisan, though Republicans far
outnumber Democrats in the city’s voter rolls—was less than
enthusiastic about Hobbs’s decision to publicize the report, which
effectively put a stop to any new residential development in his city
unless it could secure rights to water outside the Hassayama aquifer.
In response, he issued a video
[[link removed]] assuring residents and
potential investors, “Buckeye’s water future is secure, and it is
not in danger.” Before entering politics, Orsborn worked in the
construction business—in fact, he still owns a construction
firm—and in May he hosted
[[link removed]] a
“community partners meeting” where he reiterated to a crowd of
real estate professionals and local farmers that current residents of
the city were not in imminent danger of running out of water.

Days after that event, Hobbs held the second news conference where she
announced that the state’s Department of Water Resources had
analyzed groundwater for the entire Phoenix region and found
a potential 4 percent
[[link removed]] shortfall
in supply over the next century. Combined with the report about the
Hassayampa aquifer that applied only to communities like Buckeye, it
was a one-two punch that sent heads spinning across the state,
particularly among developers who had never previously thought of
securing water rights as anything aside from a bureaucratic hurdle.
“We have to close this gap and find efficiencies for our water use,
manage our aquifers wisely, and increase our utilization of renewable
supplies,” Hobbs said. She went on to announce
[[link removed]] that, because so much
of the metropolis had been revealed to be out of compliance with
existing law, “we will pause approvals of new assured water supply
determinations that rely on pumping groundwater, ensuring that we
don’t add to any future deficit.” In other words, the moratorium
on new development that relied on groundwater would be extended from
just the far West Valley to the entirety of the Phoenix metropolitan
area and affect every outlying town without access to water from the
Colorado or one of Arizona’s smaller rivers.

For now, voters seem to be reserving judgment on the new governor.
Though a July Morning Consult poll pegged
[[link removed]] Hobbs’s
approval rating at only 47 percent, one in 10 voters were still making
up their minds about her. Arizona’s donor class appears to be less
hesitant about the state’s new political regime: While the state
Democratic Party raised
[[link removed]] close
to double what the local GOP did in the first nine months of 2019,
that margin ballooned to a factor of 10 in the first half of this
year—$1.25 million compared to $132,980. Francis Najafi, an investor
and minority owner of the Phoenix Suns, has donated
[[link removed]] more
than $500,000 to Republicans over the years, but became a firm
supporter of Arizona Democrats in the past few election cycles, and
has donated at least $12,000 to progressive candidates in 2023, after
writing a $10,000 check to a political action committee associated
with Mark Kelly last year. Likewise, Robert Bertrand, the CEO of a
loan servicing company who was once a major donor to John McCain and
former Senator Jeff Flake and started supporting
[[link removed]] Democratic
politicians after Donald Trump’s first presidential nomination, has
ponied up to the state Democratic Party this year. Even the car dealer
Jim Click, who has been a central figure
[[link removed]] in
Arizona Republican politics for decades, said
[[link removed]] this
year that he is now supporting individual candidates rather than
giving to a state party that he believes has become too radical.
Big-time donors like these may not be focused on water issues. But it
is also true that, in spite of Hobbs’s frankness when it comes to
water scarcity, very little has changed about real estate development
or the broader economy on the ground—and Democrats represent
stability, which in Arizona means even more growth. Buckeye, for
instance, has already issued 23,000 certificates of an assured
100-year water supply for proposed homes. Those will not be affected
by the current moratorium, nor will the other 60,000 certificates in
metro Phoenix, even though many of those approvals were clearly issued
in error; otherwise, there would be no shortfall.

“We’re in a new era where water is now openly discussed,” said
David Damore, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. “You have the federal government getting involved; states
trying to figure out what they want their future to be, because it’s
not going to be unlimited. At the same time, doing this in a highly
polarized political environment within swing states.…” He chuckled
at the imposing scale of the problem, which is only exacerbated by the
expectation that water scarcity be addressed at the same time the
economy keeps expanding. While 30 years ago it may have been possible
to thread that needle solely through the technocratic maneuvering of a
politically connected utility, as in Las Vegas, many influential
voices in Arizona are now focused on the seemingly straightforward
solution of adding more water to the pot. “The alarm bell went off,
OK, take it seriously, fix the issues and let’s move on,” Graham,
the CEO of a real estate developer called Sunbelt Holdings, told me.
“Where we are now, I think everyone recognizes—especially with the
drought—it’s stuff you can’t ignore, but you can manage around
it. In our case, it’s: What do we do around conservation and
augmentation?”

On the final morning of the Colorado River Water Users Association’s
annual conference last December, Mark Kelly took the stage in one of
the ballrooms at Caesars Palace. Standing at a rostrum two elevators
up from the gaming floor, he opened his set
[[link removed]] with a joke. It was
perfectly tailored to the audience of water lawyers and engineers from
the Bureau of Reclamation: a riff about God telling Moses he needed to
“do the NEPA process”—referring to the National Environmental
Policy Act—before he could part the Red Sea. It won a generous
laugh.

From there, Kelly took credit for helping to broker the recent
infusion of federal money into the Western water system before telling
the ballroom he wanted to think even bigger. “Now is the time to
take a serious look at augmentation,” he said. “Augmentation
projects that were once dismissed as too ambitious, like large-scale
desalinization plants and importing water from other basins. Now,
these are ambitious ideas—I get that. But they’re no more
ambitious than the Hoover Dam or the Glen Canyon Dam when they were
conceived.”

Following his speech, I asked Kelly if promoting augmentation might
detract focus from the conservation measures that have formed the
backbone of the Colorado River Basin’s response to the last two
decades of drought. After all, Governor Hobbs would later tell
[[link removed]] the _Arizona
Capitol Times_ that “a desal plant in Mexico is not an immediate
solution at all,” and that she was focused on “a number of
conservation projects that we could fund instead that would do more to
protect water than waiting 10 years to tap desalinated water.”

While Kelly acknowledged that augmentation “doesn’t help us solve
the immediate crisis,” he reaffirmed, “I think it’s smart to
think long-term.” When we spoke again this summer, he seemed
particularly excited about a proposal
[[link removed]] from the Israeli company IDE Technologies
to build a desalination plant on the Sea of Cortez, his usual,
pragmatic affect giving way to the geeky enthusiasm of a trained
engineer. “I’ve spoken to them about what this thing could look
like. In theory, they could build a plant that produces about 400,000
acre-feet of water a year. Pipe it up into Phoenix, put it in the
Central Arizona Project. They feel like they could scale that up,
maybe upwards of a million acre-feet of water”—four times the
amount metropolitan Las Vegas consumes every year. “Now we’re
talking about a really significant amount of water.”

While Kelly’s and Hobbs’s divergent attitudes about augmentation
reveal something of a split approach between the state’s two most
influential Democrats when it comes to addressing the water crisis,
it’s more a question of emphasis, perhaps necessitated by their
roles. Governors are responsible for the day-to-day management of a
state, while senators are empowered to think big-picture. In the end,
they are aligned. In Las Vegas, Kelly told me, “We have 40 million
people that rely on this river—I’d like to see that number go
up.” At Hobbs’s June press conference, she emphasized
[[link removed]] the limited nature of
her moratorium, making clear it would not hinder the construction of
any new industrial projects, like the $40 billion microchip factory
[[link removed]] that
President Joe Biden visited Phoenix to tout last year. “This pause
will not affect growth within any of our major cities where robust
water portfolios have been proven to cover current and future
demands,” Hobbs said. “I cannot emphasize that enough.”

Robert Glennon served
[[link removed]] on
a recent commission that studied using a desalination plant in the Sea
of Cortez to replenish California’s rapidly evaporating
[[link removed]] Salton
Sea. He said they found three major issues: energy, cost, and
environmental impact. Because desalination plants operate 24/7,
“that takes renewables off the table, because renewables—wind and
solar—run intermittently,” and batteries large enough to store
sufficient power overnight do not yet exist. Meanwhile, the cost for a
plant capable of treating even 100,000 acre-feet of water annually
would be mind-bogglingly expensive—over $70 billion. And then
there’s the discharge. Currently, America’s largest desalination
plant is in Carlsbad, California. Every year, it releases
[[link removed]] around
50,000 acre-feet of brine into the Pacific Ocean for every 50,000
acre-feet of fresh water that’s created. The Sea of Cortez, Glennon
said, is “a very shallow ocean. There are endangered species there,
including the vaquita porpoise, and there are internationally
protected wetlands. You start taking immense quantities of briny water
and dumping it, you’re just going to wreak havoc.”

Kelly’s office declined to address any specific concerns around
desalination or other augmentation projects, instead emphasizing that
the senator thought they merited discussion as a way to complement the
priority that is already being put on conservation projects around the
region. Water scarcity, Kelly told me, “shouldn’t in any way
prevent our growth.... If we act early enough and make smart
decisions, appropriate the right funds to come up with programs … we
can manage this in a really positive way.”

Like Glennon, Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, believes that augmentation would be irresponsible
to pursue, given the Southwest is far from exhausting the
possibilities of conservation. She pointed out that, over the past 20
years, “population and economic growth have decoupled from water
use,” with cities across the region growing rapidly while using much
less water than they did in the 1990s, even as they’re still far
less efficient than they could be. “In San Francisco, I know we’re
a dense urban area, but our water use is only 40 gallons per person
per day.” That’s a third
[[link removed]] of
the current use in Phoenix, and half of the goal that John Entsminger
has set
[[link removed]] for
southern Nevada.

But if you talk to enough environmental scholars, you can’t help
getting the feeling that overhauling water policy—and even leaning
into conservation—wouldn’t be enough to secure the region’s
future. Instead, it might be better for the Southwest to divorce
itself from the ideal of perpetual growth and fully reorient itself
around sustainability. Naturally, the governor’s camp sees things
differently, and is hungry to become associated with a sort of
sensible center. “People don’t want extremes on either side,”
said Nicole DeMont, the Hobbs political strategist. “In Arizona,
they just want a steady hand that’s focused on the future.…
There’s a lot of big issues right now that, if we don’t solve,
it’s a real threat to middle-class growth, economic growth,
companies moving here—all of that.”

In the Southwest, growth is more than just something municipalities,
irrigation districts, and businesspeople strive to achieve—it’s
tantamount to the purpose of government. “I remember growing up, all
the discussions about the Central Arizona Project,” said Buckeye
Mayor Orsborn. “We have all this growth headed our way; how do we
water everybody?” But that aqueduct didn’t really add new capacity
to the system; it simply allowed the state to shift from pumping its
groundwater to using the Colorado River. “The Central Arizona
Project wasn’t built so much with the idea of, ‘Now we can really
grow,’” said Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for
Water Policy at Arizona State University. “It really was about the
existential situation that Arizona was facing, which was that it was a
good place to develop a city by so many different standards, and yet
it was using up a finite water supply in the process.” Put another
way: The massive infrastructure projects of the past that so many
policymakers are now looking to as inspiration for the future did not
create the conditions for more growth, but simply met the voracious
demand that had already been established.

A view of the Central Arizona Project canal in Arcadia, a neighborhood
of Phoenix. The canal snakes through Arizona, starting at Lake Havasu
and ending 336 miles away, southwest of Tucson.

However popular the idea of tunneling in new water may be among the
voters and vested interests of the Southwest, far more radical change
may be necessary. On that score, Hobbs’s willingness to put the
brakes on some residential development—if only temporarily—is a
breath of fresh air, simply because it represents an attempt to
contend with the reality of the situation. But unlike southern Nevada,
where there is really only one water source and one water
customer—the Colorado River and metropolitan Las Vegas—the
enormous complexity of Arizona means that a quick pivot to
conservation, much less halting growth, is unlikely. If Democrats are
to secure their newfound hold on Arizona, it will be by convincing
voters they can be trusted to keep the state growing, no matter the
environmental cost. And then there’s the raw electoral math: If it
took Phoenix—in crucial Maricopa County—becoming the fifth-largest
city in the country to turn Arizona blue, why would a Democrat stand
in the way of continued expansion?

As Petersen, the environmental scholar, put it, “If you start
saying, all of a sudden, ‘We’re no longer giving out building
permits, we’re no longer allowing multinational companies to build a
facility here, we’re shutting down golf courses’—you would have
people in the streets rioting.”

_KYLE PAOLETTA grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His reporting and criticism have appeared
in Harper’s, The Nation, and The Baffler._

_THE NEW REPUBLIC was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

* water
[[link removed]]
* agriculture
[[link removed]]
* growth
[[link removed]]
* conservation
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* Arizona
[[link removed]]
* Nevada
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]