Arizona gets hit hardest in Colorado River plan

More than half of the 3 million acre-feet in water cuts announced as part of a multi-state conservation deal will come from Arizona, state officials said on May 25.

“We’re probably on target for somewhere close to 1.8 million acre-feet or so coming out of Arizona,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, adding that the state is already going to be subject to annual cuts of around 500,000 acre-feet since the Colorado River is expected to be in a Tier 1 shortage next year.

“We’re going to still do the bulk of the heavy lifting,” he said.

Just who would be responsible for the “lifting” needed to make cutbacks in water use wasn’t entirely clear when Arizona, California, Nevada and federal agencies announced a proposed deal on May 24.

Last month, the Gila River Indian Community, the largest individual water rights-holder in Arizona, announced plans to leave up to 375,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead over three years in exchange for $50 million per year, paid by the federal government. At the same time, the city of Tucson announced plans for up to 110,000 acre-feet in conservation over three years.

On May 24, the federal government revealed new “compensated conservation” deals for water users in the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

The city of Phoenix will relinquish 150,00 acre-feet over three years and mining conglomerate ASARCO will give up 56,000 over the same time period. Other cities including Glendale, Scottsdale and Gilbert announced smaller conservation packages.

In the complicated calculation of water cuts, conservation and compensation, officials said the deal represents a step forward in tackling the problem rather than punting it down the line, but also that it won’t mean forced cutbacks for any individual residents.

“The position we’re in right now is because we haven’t done really thoughtful, long-term planning on this. We’ve kicked the can down the road, and we’re going to stop doing that,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said.

Later, she added: “No Arizonan is going to be forced to cut their water use – I think that’s the bottom line.”

That’s effectively because the cities, tribes and other water users entering into “compensated conservation” agreements have calculated that they can continue to deliver water to end users while giving up some portion of the Colorado River water they typically expect. And some of those water users may tap into long-term reserves that they’ve stored underground but still have rights to use in the future.

They’ll also be paid handsomely for leaving their water in Lake Mead: three-year conservation deals will earn $400 per acre-foot in federal money; shorter deals are paid a slightly lower rate.

(One acre-foot of water is approximately the volume used by three average families in the Phoenix area.)

But the deals that have come out this week only run through 2026, meaning the future of the river and those who depend on its water is still in flux.

Terry Goddard, president of the board of the Central Arizona Project, which pipes Arizona’s Colorado River water to cities through a series of canals, said that the federal spending that’s propping up this round of compensated conservation deals won’t last.

“It’s not sustainable,” Goddard said. The federal government, he said, “may be OK with this as a stopgap, but what they’re looking for now is permanent augmentation proposals that they can fund out of the inflation Reduction Act. But it’s not going to be to pay farmers to fallow their fields – that has a very short shelf life.”

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act contained several billion dollars for water infrastructure projects and for compensated conservation agreements.

Potential augmentation projects that would expand Arizona’s available water supply include expanding the Bartlett Dam, wastewater reuse systems (colloquially known as “toilet-to-tap”) and brackish water desalination. Former Gov. Doug Ducey favored the idea of funding a desalination plant in the Sea of Cortez, in Mexico, but that plan appears to have hit a roadblock in the form of opposition from the Sonora state government.

Arizona’s annual Colorado River allotment, in normal years, comes to about 2.8 million acre-feet. That’s nearly half of the approximately 7 million acre-feet of water the state uses every year. With shortage cutbacks in recent years, Arizona’s allotment had already shrunk to closer to 2.2 million acre-feet per year.

The additional conservation contemplated by this week’s deal means Arizona’s annual water deliveries from the Colorado River will likely shrink to less than 2 million acre-feet.

For Goddard, the long-term answer to the state’s water woes may look more like multiple piecemeal solutions.

“In Arizona, we’ve been spoiled, we’ve had two magic solutions in the past – we had Salt River Project around 1912 and we had CAP in 1968,” he said. “This time, we’ve got to look at multiple buckets to both secure the water supply and make sure that it’s available for the future.”