Interior Secretary James Burgum has just ordered a drastic and punitive reduction in Arizona’s share of the Colorado River. We must now respond both by preparing for possible litigation, and by accelerating our efforts to develop new in-state water supplies.

High on the list of potential supplies is an obscure, little known groundwater transfer basin in western Arizona called Butler Valley. The Valley is 150 square miles of empty, unoccupied land. This makes it the perfect, conflict-free place to develop the next water transfer to the metro Phoenix area (formally, the Phoenix Active Management Area or AMA). 

That the Butler Valley has remained vacant, and available for groundwater transfers, goes back to a prescient recommendation that Wes Steiner, the renowned state water engineer, made to us  when we were in office in 1982 — that we set aside and reserve the entire Butler Valley groundwater basin for future water transfers.

We acted on Steiner’s recommendation by instructing the State Land Department to designate the Valley as a groundwater reserve. We then implemented land exchanges that placed 99% of the land in the Valley in state ownership. 

As a result, the Butler Valley groundwater reserve remains in public ownership, awaiting transfer action.  

How much water is there? The Department of Water Resources estimates that the groundwater basin holds some six and a half million acre feet of accessible water, enough to supply a city the size of Tempe for a hundred years. 

Typically, water transfers run into practical obstacles because moving water over any distance requires costly infrastructure. But, as luck would have it, the Butler Valley is located only about a mile from the Central Arizona Project canal that brings water from the Colorado River into the Phoenix AMA. The cost of infrastructure to connect the two will be minimal compared to other groundwater basins in the region.

To activate a transfer process will require close cooperation and planning between two state agencies that have very little history of working together. It is time for the State Land Department, which holds title to Butler Valley, and the Central Arizona Project, which owns the canal, to wake up and prepare a joint transfer program. And it is up to Governor Hobbs and the Central Arizona Project Board of Directors to make certain that they do so.

Bruce Babbitt served as governor of Arizona from 1978-1987. He then served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior from 1993-2001. Robert Lane served as Arizona Land Commissioner from 1983-1987.