Rep. Tom O’Halleran, R-1, is regarded as one of the Legislature’s top authorities on water, especially the role it plays in the rural parts of the state. Currently the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, he also was appointed by Governor Napolitano last July to represent Arizona on the Western States Water Council. He is also the vice-chair of the Council of State Governments Water and Environment Committee.

So far this session, Mr. O’Halleran has introduced several water-related bills that he says will give the state a forward-looking vision and allow better water management in the future. He sat down to speak with Arizona Capitol Times about his legislation and other state water issues on Feb. 1.

Arizona Capitol Times: How many pieces of water legislation have you filed≠

Mr. O’Halleran:About three for rural Arizona areas, specifically deal-ing with water planning and drought management conservation and land approval, connecting it with water. There’s a couple of bills dealing with fund-ing issues: a fee bill to make sure that ADWR [Arizona Department of Water Resources] can retain their fees in the shared water supply program and the adequate water supply program, so they don’t get swept by the state. And another one dealing with rural water studies.

On the larger scale, I’ll be dropping a bill on the multi-species conservation plan on the Colorado River that’s important to Maricopa County and Pima County, and most of the agriculture interests and economy interests that use the Colorado River water.

Senator [Jake] Flake dropped a bill on the CAGRD [Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District], and the Speaker [Jim Weiers] will be dropping a bill on the Gila River settlement, and we’ve been working with him on that issue.

What is the state of water in Arizona≠

I think Arizona has done a wonderful job in getting us where we’re at today, whether it’s the groundwater code of 1980, the CAP canal, Arizona water banking, the Groundwater Replenishment District, things like that – mechanisms to make sure our economy can continue to grow and takes water into account. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do a much better job in the future. There are pressures on the system, whether they’re pressures brought about by federal rules and regulations on endangered species or pressures brought on by population growth on the Colorado River or the needs of rural Arizona. All those put together are going to put great pressure on the system in the coming years.

I think if you look back at the history of Arizona, to the CAP canal and to SRP – big projects like that – I think the big project days are probably gone, for the most part. But, we need to have the vision that those people had at that point in time. They looked into the future and said: how are we going to deal with the water supply for the citizens that are going to move into the state and their needs≠ I don’t think we’ve done enough of that, from a larger perspective, particularly for rural Arizona, and we need to be much more proactive in that process.

What will it take for the state to be more proactive instead of reactionary, when it comes to water management≠

I think part of the emphasis will have, hopefully, been the drought and the implications that the drought brought to the forefront of water management. But, I think, more important than anything, it’s going to be continued growth and pressure on the resource.

Educating the public on this issue is a very difficult process – water comes out of the tap, everything must be fine. And, yet, our job is to create public policy that does have that view of where we’re going to be in 50 or 100 years. We’re the one with the information that comes across our desk day in and day out that identifies clearly that population is not going to slow down, growth is not going to slow down, whether it’s in the urbanized areas of Arizona or in the rural areas.

Rural areas have some particular issues. We have issues dealing with the fact that most of these water supplies are groundwater, that our tax base is such that infrastructure to move water around is very expensive in comparison to what we’re able to pay for. So, today’s water is something that we have to use in a very fiscally prudent way so that we are able to continue that supply.

But then you include issues like the Endangered Species Act, the stream adjudication process, the issues with Native American water rights settlements, federal reserve rights and the growth that we’re having. That process, when you put it all together, requires a much more broad-based regional perspective on where we need to be with water in rural Arizona.

Then there’s the additional pressures and concerns about the Groundwater Transportation Act that protects rural Arizona’s aquifers. People are always concerned with that act opening up again and being taken advantage of.

What is the Groundwater Transportation Act≠

In the early- or mid-90s, it identified groundwater basins where water could be transferred out into urban areas, to active management areas. It was to protect other basins in the state from the water farms that were popping up. There’s going to be pressure on it in the coming years, probably. There’s always a worry in the back of people’s minds that [other] people are going to look for that source of water. I think there’s going to be a need to move water around Arizona. It’s a management philosophy that people are going to recognize as groundwater in certain areas gets scarcer and scarcer. But, to open up the act for municipal areas to take water out of rural Arizona is not something that I can foresee as being something that’s going to happen.

One of the things I didn’t mention about rural Arizona is we are not connected to the CAP canal and that renewable resource, so we need to be able to adapt at a much higher level in the future to the changing environment the West, and particularly the Southwest, is facing.

Overall, what is the outlook on the state’s water future≠

I think, with the type of planning we’re looking at now, it’s good for most of the state. There are areas of concern that we must address, and most of those concerns are not a crisis today, but they’re at the level that we need to address them today so that they’re not a crisis tomorrow. Many of those are based on the stresses in rural Arizona, and down here, we need to fine tune the ongoing process and we need to deal with the priorities on the Colorado River for urban areas, the fact that, when you look out into the future and you overlay an additional, say, 10 million people, on the Lower Colorado River Basin, you just start to say, what’s the next drought going to look like≠ If we had the impact we did on the lakes this time around…

We’re not out of this drought yet. We’re going through a wet cycle. All droughts have wet cycles associated with them, so nobody’s going to know when we’re out of the drought until we’ve had some consistency.

In the Prescott Valley area, there have been some concerns about whether or not there is a 100-year supply of water. Is that indicative of what’s going on in a lot of rural Arizona≠

I think Prescott will have 100 years of water – the problem is the next 100 years after that. Those homes aren’t going to go away, so that’s why they’re looking at developing water supplies up in the Big Chino aquifer, which they’re entitled to do, except that that’s another groundwater aquifer. It’s a finite water source. So, whether it’s through transporting water from outside the active management area…o
r developing a much higher specification on the reuse of water through our waste systems and so forth or conservation – whatever it’s going to be, it needs to be a plan that takes into account all the tools that we’re going to have to put towards the process.

One piece of the equation is not going to do it for any area of the state. But, we can do it. There’s no doubt in my mind that, given proper planning and forward thinking that allows us to say, if our goal is to get to X level of economic viability or a certain size of a city or town, then we need to plan today on how we’re going to get there, not just say, I hope we get there. That is not good management.

Has the state gotten better in dealing with water issues since you moved here in 1993≠

I think we’re moving in that direction. I think there was a period of time when the groundwater code was looked upon as, well, we’ve done what we had to do, other than water banking. Things always need to be revisited and reanalyzed. We just need, on a consistent basis, to review where we’re at, review our assumptions, make sure our assumptions are correct, review where our infrastructure is at, understand where our infrastructure is, the complexity of it, and continue to be aggressive in protecting our water rights. And that’s going to be a big issue in the future.

The pressures on Nevada and California and Arizona and the entire West are going to continue to be at a high level from population growth. We can never again use the excuse that we didn’t think we’d be this big. We are this big and we’re going to be much bigger and, in all likelihood, that’s going to put a tremendous strain on our resources, but I think we can do it. We just have to do it right. Business plans for the future – we need to plan for the future.

You mentioned dealing with California and Nevada – both of which also receive water from the Colorado. What’s the key to making sure all of the states are able to get the water they need≠

Cooperation. Recognition of the issues. Eventually, that cooperation is probably going to have to be not just on the Colorado River, but looking out into the resources of the ocean and desalinization and issues like that.

There’s a cost associated with all this. The better planning we can do, the less cost implications there will be. The more we can work together, the less cost it’s going to be. The more we can identify what the core issues are. It’s a forward-looking, 50-year vision of how we’re going to be able to transfer water off the river. That’s the type of critical planning that we need.

You mentioned desalinization. What about other options, like increased use of effluent≠

Florida has 20-some desalinization plants. It’s nothing new. Use of effluent is going to be cheaper than desalinization. The more we can use of our own product here in Arizona, the less transportation cost we’re going to have.

Is there a way of wheeling this water around so we can take water off the Colorado≠ That’s going to be a complex issue, because the cost of desalinization is a lot higher than Colorado River water.

The answer is not to hope for the future. The answer is to plan for the future. Hoping that we’ll be able to do something economically feasible is a whole lot different than planning in a rational way based on what we know today and what we have a decent chance of obtaining tomorrow. Not just pie-in-the-sky.

When I first moved to Arizona, I heard people talk about icebergs from Alaska, water from the Columbia River, water from the Mississippi. The cost of transportation of water is where the cost is at.

The more planning you can do up front, the better off you are. Just think of what it would mean if we had to build the CAP today or build Roosevelt Dam today. Putting those infrastructure keys in place from day one is the key to where we’re at today as a state. And that’s the only way we’re going to do it – by having that vision always looking forward.

Do any of the pieces of legislation stand out as important to accomplish immediately≠

I think all the pieces dealing with rural Arizona are important. One deals with regional planning, another one attaches land-use planning and water availability, and the other one is the beginnings of drought management and a statewide look at conservation. We need to get there sooner than later.

The multi-species conservation plan is something we need to do. It’s a mandatory element for our water future.

The CAGRD [Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District] – today there’s 150,000 homes on that system. There’s going to be 300,000 homes on that system in the future. We need to make sure they have a reliable source of water. They do today, we just have to have the surety that it’s out into the future.

This is a big year for water in the state of Arizona.

What kind of a drought plan do you think the state will have≠

The first plan is to get all of our municipal and private providers identifying what their plans are, how they’re going to deal with it, what type of rate structures they’re going to have, and to get that data into a central database so we know what’s out there. Then, the state’s going to have to go out to do an increased monitoring of our snow pack and streams, so that we know more about our resource.

The data collection is going to be very important. As population growth puts more and more demand on the system, this data resource piece is going to become critical to proper management, especially in times of drought. And the impact of droughts in the future is going to be more severe because of the impact of population growth.

This is the eighth or ninth year of a drought – what happens if it’s a 20-year drought or a 30-year drought≠ We know historically that those types of droughts have occurred. We have a responsibility to the citizens of our state to make sure that we plan so that we have the least amount of impact on them as possible. —