Water and the West

Some 40 million people in the American West rely on water from the Colorado River. But the river’s flow has diminished, and those decreases will likely continue. What does this mean for the American West in general and California and Arizona in particular? Will booming metro areas—Maricopa County, for example—have to halt their growth? Will vast expanses of agriculture disappear? Or is there reason to be optimistic about the West’s water future? Grady Gammage Jr. and Sarah Porter of Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy discuss the issue.

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Transcript

Liam Julian:

Welcome to an O'Connor Institute issues and answers discussion on water and the West. I'm Liam Julian with the O'Connor Institute. Sarah Porter is the inaugural director of the Kyle Center for Water Policy. She is also an attorney, having graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree and obtaining her JD from Arizona State University, ranking third in her class. She clerked for federal appellate judge William Canby and was a litigator for Brown and Bain, Coppersmith, Gordon, Schermer, Owens, and Nelson, PLC, and Osborne, Malladon, PA. She left her law career in 2006 because she wanted to contribute to a collaborative effort to address Arizona's natural resource challenges. She now dedicates that focus to the Kyle Center.

Grady Gammage Jr. is one of the founders of Gammage and Burnham and has had a varied and diverse 40-year career in law and public policy in Arizona. His practice has focused on the political aspects of real estate development and public policy. In the early 1980s, he was the primary private sector representative in working on the Innovative Urban Lands Act, which made state trust land available for commercial and residential development. Gammage served on the Central Arizona Project Board of Directors for 12 years and was president during a period of turbulence when the CAP was suing the federal government over the multibillion-dollar cost of the canal. The litigation was successfully resolved through a dramatic restructuring of the federal-state relationship. This led to Gammage becoming one of the best respected water experts in the state. Thank you both for joining us. Director Porter, maybe you could set the stage for us, very high level. What is the current situation with water in Arizona, with water in the West, and how did we arrive here?

Sarah Porter:

At the very high level, one of the important water supplies for the Southwest and more, the Colorado River is a very stressed water supply. It has been experiencing declining flows, and for other reasons, we are seeing declines in the levels of the reservoirs that hold the water for California, Arizona, Southern Nevada, and Mexico. That's the big thing. The big most immediate thing is how to fix the Colorado River so we're not in crisis mode all the time. Arizona benefits from more than one water supply, thank God, we have more than just the Colorado River, but what happens is when there is stress on one supply, that translates into concerns for other supplies. That other major supply, it's not the only other supply, but the other major supply where we have the most concerns is groundwater. Groundwater is water in the aquifers, it's water in the porous spaces, in the materials that are deep underground, and in a nutshell, we're really good at pumping groundwater out faster than nature replenishes it in an arid place like Arizona, Southern, you know, states. And so, Arizona has been struggling to manage our groundwater resources sustainably in our most populous areas, particularly in the Phoenix area and Tucson area. Other states have been dealing with a very similar struggle, triggered by different events at different times. But we're at a point in our journey in Arizona of managing groundwater in our most populous areas where our regulatory agency, the Department of Water Resources, has determined in two significant places, including greater Phoenix, and then Pinal County, which is the area between Phoenix and Tucson, that the groundwater is fully allocated, essentially, so it is no longer a supply for growth.

So, you know, there's a big, broad overview, but I would say that the biggest challenge right now is water for growth, particularly in central Arizona. We have very long planning timelines, we're not at all, by any stretch of the imagination, looking at a crisis in water supply for people already here, but we're really at a crossroads where we have to shift away from looking at groundwater as a water supply for growth. We've known for some years that the Colorado River supplies that are allocated to central Arizona would not continue to be a water supply for growth, and we're struggling with that. There's also a concern by municipalities and others who rely on Colorado River water to backfill and be ready with some other supply in the event of bigger shortages.

Liam Julian:

Right. And I want to talk all about that groundwater and this sort of growth, but maybe we could start with the Colorado River.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Can I just go back on the big picture that Sarah was talking about?

Liam Julian:

I'm sorry, go ahead.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

I think part of what we need to realize is the West was settled by a policy of using water to get people to move here and grow crops. And we are now at a point where that initial policy to settle the West by encouraging agriculture is bumping up against the population growth of the West, which for a long time happened in a kind of organic way, displacing agriculture. But now those uses are in conflict. So, the big picture of what's going on now is we have to recognize we are in a time of a declining finite resource and we have to decide what it is we want to use that resource for, as Sarah points out, do we want to use it for growth? Do we want to use it to sustain agriculture? Do we want to use it to protect the existing lifestyle that has come to exist in the arid West, which uses a lot of water just for the landscape we have created? These things are all bumping up against, we can't do them all anymore. So, we have to start making choices. And those choices have to be made in the context of entrenched, embedded interests that people have made. They've invested to develop water supplies and in the context of the need for a functioning democratic system to make those choices. And that's why we're having so much trouble right now is we haven't figured out how to grapple with all of that. 

Liam Julian:

And so, part of the issue is that seven states rely on the Colorado River, something 40 million people and 30 tribal nations. There is an elaborate system of rights for who gets priority to the river water. Mr. Gamish, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how those rights developed.

I think we're talking at least 100 years ago, right, as the beginning of this system of determining who gets what water.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Yeah, you know, California started using water in the lower basin before Arizona did Colorado River water. So, what happened was initially farmers would just divert water out of the river and use it to irrigate crops. And the oldest, most senior of those rights are the Imperial Irrigation District in California, which all on its own has the right to more water than the entire state of Arizona does out of the river. So, there was a kind of free for all period in the late 19th, early 20th century, where people were just taking and using water out of the river. And it began to become an issue as we decided that the Bureau of Reclamation needed to build some big dams and the states had to bargain with each other. 

So, there is a decree and a compact and a series of things we call the law of the river that deal with the priority amongst the states. It splits the Colorado into the upper basin and the lower basin. Lower basin being California, Arizona, and Nevada. Upper basin being New Mexico and the Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, sort of genuine up there kind of places. Split it in half, fairly arbitrary decision, 7.5 million to the upper, 7.5 million acre feet to the lower, based on an assumption as to how much water there was in the river. The assumption was wrong. I mean, it was just wrong. It was made based on a series of very wet years that are not over the long term accurate. So, we allocated 15 million to the basin states and another million and a half to Mexico. And against that 16 and a half million, the reality is probably more like 12, you know. We're not sure over the long term, but there's clearly not enough. Then within each state, there are a series of priorities. And these are usually based on this kind of first in time, first in right notion. And so, the oldest, highest priority rights along the river that were originally recognized were farmers adjacent to the river. Well, we came around to recognizing that, well, wait a minute, there were Native American tribes in Central Arizona using water out of the salt, which ultimately flows into the Colorado. What about those? What about the Indians along the river? Those are actually older rights, but they weren't adjudicated that way because that wasn't how we were doing things in the early 20th century. So it is a complex system. And the extent to which those rights can be transferred is currently very much under discussion.

Liam Julian:

Yeah. Some of our viewers may remember earlier this year, there was news headlines where essentially the federal government had determined to your point, Mr. Gamage, that there's not enough water. The paper rights exceed what's actually available. The lower basin states need to figure this out. And they did sort of come to some kind of tentative agreement on this. Is that correct? 

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Go ahead, Sarah.

Sarah Porter:

I think the jury's out on what really changed is that we had a very good winter. That provided some relief from the urgency. We were really at a point where we were within a year or two of not being able to produce hydropower and potentially getting to Deadpool on one or both of the two big reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. So, there was a great deal of urgency. The federal government issued an ultimatum. The ultimatum was really to all seven states, but the upper basin states don't use their seven and a half million acre feet. So, they have sort of fallen back on that. We're already using much less, so it's up to the lower basin states, which use all the you know, they're the ones who are using so much water to figure out a way to cut. So, it's unusual to have two really good years of snow in a row, but we are all trying to get to 2026 when the seven basin states need to achieve consensus on new guidelines for operating the Colorado system. And hopefully, you know, we've bought enough time with one good year and a proposal for mostly compensated reductions, bought enough time to provide the breathing room for negotiating our way to 2026.

Liam Julian:

Right. And in 2026, I suppose the idea here is we need to have a more, a clearer view of actually how much physical water is available. Mr. Gammage was talking about paper rights or 16 million, were you saying, thereabouts acre feet, whereas you're saying that the actual physical water is somewhere in the 12 million range. So, there will be cuts, no doubt. Who's going to feel those cuts?

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Well, so back to the history of how this was all divided up, Arizona had to agree that the central Arizona project, which is the way Colorado River water gets to Phoenix and Tucson would be the lowest priority. So, if you simply recognize there isn't enough water and you start enforcing the cuts, theoretically the CAP canal has to go completely dry before you start making cuts in California or cuts to agriculture. I think everyone has already recognized that that's an unrealistic result. And part of these interim guidelines and other things that have been put in place have been an attempt to spread the pain by saying that the CAP doesn't have to take the whole cut. It still probably has to take the biggest cut, but others should also participate in those cuts. And so that's where we were, as Sarah said, before we sort of got the relief of a decent snowfall in the Rockies.

Liam Julian:

And the CAP is, so the Colorado River naturally sort of flows kind of down the Western portion of Arizona. So the central Arizona project is essentially a canal, correct, that takes Colorado River water, diverts it into central Arizona to Phoenix and Tucson.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Yeah. And bear in mind, takes it and diverts it uphill. It isn't a gravity flow mechanism by any event. The pumps at the Havasu pumping plant are among, were at the time they were installed the largest pumps ever built, because you have to push it ultimately to get it to Tucson, you have to push it a couple thousand feet uphill.

Liam Julian:

Right. So, in 2026, if, when this negotiation is happening, if people start to say, okay, this is how much water we can expect in the Colorado River now, but I'm assuming there will also be projections in the future, especially given the rise in temperature and things like this, that the river flow may continue to diminish. What does that mean for development in central Arizona? This is one of the most sort of booming places in the entire nation. So, people in central Arizona might wonder if they're sort of first in line for cuts, even if the central Arizona project won't go completely dry. What does that look like for people in central Arizona 10, 20, 30 years?

Grady Gammage Jr.:

So, it's very difficult and somewhat dangerous to lump everybody in central Arizona together. When you think about the impact of this kind of thing on central Arizona, you have to think about the multitude of jurisdictions that exist. Many cities over what's called central Arizona, the three-county urban spine, Tucson to Phoenix, the sun corridor sometimes referred to. And then you have to look at the water portfolio that those cities have. So, a city like Phoenix, for example, Phoenix has a very robust water portfolio. They have CAP water. They have SRP water over most of the jurisdiction of the city of Phoenix. Part of it's not in the SRP system, and they have groundwater, which currently the city of Phoenix itself is not using groundwater in their system. 

Liam Julian:

And SRP water, SRP water is? 

Grady Gammage Jr.:

SRP water is the salt and Verde rivers, which would flow into the Gila, which would flow into the Colorado, but under Arizona versus California, the big win for Arizona in that case is that the waters of the Gila, which are the salt and the Verde, are not counted against our share of the main stem of the Colorado. That is enormously consequential, and it wasn't necessarily going to be that way. So anyway, back to the point. And then as to groundwater, some cities are what is called a designated provider, which means that the recent declaration that we cannot grow anymore in groundwater mining doesn't affect cities that are designated providers. So, if you're in the city of Phoenix, you don't need to worry very much. Things will be fine. Water will get more expensive. You will be encouraged to change the nature of your landscape and to save water in other ways. But there's no immediate impact to any of this.

Sarah Porter:

Even on growth.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Yeah, on either existing residents or even on future residents, the ability to grow within the limits of the city of Phoenix or the limits of the city of Scottsdale or Tempe or Mesa. The immediate impact of all of this is on growth on the periphery, either in undesignated cities, the fast-growing undesignated cities are Buckeye on the west and Queen Creek on the east, or in unincorporated areas of Maricopa County or Pinal County. In those areas, we have been developing, based on certificates of availability of water supply for a subdivision at a time, that has been halted.

Liam Julian:

Yeah. Yep. And so that was earlier this year, correct, where the Department of Water Resources released a new model, Director Porter, that sort of showed that in some of these outlying areas, there was not going to be enough groundwater available to meet demand in a hundred years. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Sarah Porter:

Right. So, in central Arizona, we have these designated areas called active management areas. And these are the areas where the state is busy managing groundwater. And in most of these areas, working on managing groundwater so that we use it sustainably, meaning we, over the long run, don't use more than is being replenished. And as part of that management responsibility, the Department of Water Resources models the water, the basin, the aquifer, or the active management area, to show over a hundred-year time span, given the modeling replenishment as well as demand, do we have enough? So that's what the department did. The model for the Phoenix active management area was released in June, and it concluded that we have about a 4% shortage. If all of the demand that they've modeled in occurred, then there would be about a 4% shortage. Of course, you can't really have, I mean, there's no such thing as demand that's not met in a way. It works in a model in real life. 

People don't pump, you know, it's a model, I guess is what I'm trying to say. It doesn't mean that the greater Phoenix area will come up short. It means that some of the planned demand can't be met. The model takes into account all of the current groundwater pumping, as well as the pumping that is permitted according to the system that Grady was just talking about, where a developer goes to the department and gets a permit, essentially, to build a new subdivision using water demand with groundwater. So more than half of the demand in that model, in the Phoenix AMA model, is agricultural demand. A great deal of that demand probably will go away, because agriculture has been giving away to urbanization, and some of that demand is for future permits that developers expected to receive that now will not be issued. So, there's a lot about the model that makes this story even more complicated. And there is criticism of the model, and there are people who want to engage with the department in changing the model. If this model finds that any well comes up dry, in other words, experiences unmet demand, then the department essentially stops issuing permits for new groundwater demand for new subdivisions. So, it's a very rigorous regulatory model. The implication is that if you want to have a new subdivision within the Phoenix active management area, you need to go find another water supply. And that's extremely challenging. And that's really what the discussions are about these days.

Kind of a critique of the model, different creative strategies for transitioning to new water supplies, but allowing some development to continue to happen, and then a bigger conversation about, you know, what types of new water supplies are needed. We actually don't even have a supply and demand assessment for the greater Phoenix area. That's something that Kyle Center is working on, because we're really kind of in a vacuum. But yes, that's a hard answer to what is that model all about?

Grady Gammage Jr.:

If I might just add a couple of things. The model projects a 4% shortfall over 100 years. That's a relatively minor problem compared to Social Security, for example. But it is a problem. And I think it is a testament to the rigorous way Arizona thinks about water issues, that we're now spending a lot of time debating and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do about this 4% shortfall over 100-year horizon? Anything projected over 100-year horizon is going to be wrong. But you have to make public policy based on something. And so, this is a wake-up call at a very early point in time, making us rethink the rules. And that's a good thing if you have, this goes to the point of the O'Connor Institute, if you have a functioning polity that can make complicated, complex decisions. So, there's going to be a series of proposals come out of the Governor's Commission about how to deal with this. Some of them may be quite sweeping. And the question becomes, will any of them get through the legislature? And I don't have a high degree of confidence that the legislature will be able to deal with this.

Sarah Porter:

If I can add, you know, for good reasons, water in Arizona and the American West is a complex subject. It requires technocrats, essentially. It requires water lawyers, hydrologists, urban planners, a slew of people with very technical understanding to inform different policy options, to help explain and lay bare and model and do all that work. And even where we are now, to me, is looking like a disjunction between the technocratic work and other sectors. The technocrats have been saying for some time that we were going to get to this place where groundwater was fully allocated. And there's been a kind of, I don't know, consternation in the development and growth community that we got to this point. And to me, it's not only an issue, a political issue, as Grady says, because eventually we are, you know, Arizona probably will need some political decision-making. But it's also, can the technocratic community align with the other sectors to be sure to come up with recommendations that will work? If you left it up to just a handful of water geeks, you probably would not come up with solutions that would actually be practicable.

Liam Julian:

Right. And Mr. Gammage, you referenced, you know, some things that you thought probably wouldn't get through the legislature. What are the solutions that you see that you would like to see happen?

Grady Gammage Jr.:

The biggest thing I think that needs to begin to happen is that we need to decide how we're going to decide, and I think the right answer to that, for me, is to allow more of a market-based operation of water allocation. That's going to take a long time to get there, but the early pieces of that will be compensating farmers to refrain from using their allocations or transferring their allocations. This is controversial. There have been efforts in the legislature to shut down farmers from transferring their allocations, and it's an issue that creates regional factionalism in Arizona. The farmers and the citizens who live along the Colorado River are threatened by Phoenix buying up their water and moving it to central Arizona to use for growth. And so, you have to decide, how are you going to deal with that? I think, personally, the better way to deal with that is to allow a market function to operate to some degree.

I don't think it can ever be purely a market allocation system with regard to water because it's too complicated a commodity and too necessary a commodity, but there should be more of a market operation going on. That isn't something the legislature can just decide or not decide, but how reallocations of water moves through this complicated priority mechanism is beginning to break loose about pricing. And the important thing, I think, is to not unduly interfere with that.

In terms of specific proposals that'll be before the legislature, many of them are really not proposals to fix and make development easier. They are proposals to kind of spread the pain. Our existing groundwater system cobbles groundwater management onto what was a consumer protection statute about subdividing lots for sale. And it was about trying to protect people from moving into subdivisions that didn't have an assured water supply. So, it is about creating major subdivisions without that kind of assurance. Well, that left out a whole host of water demand developments, industrial developments, commercial developments. It doesn't affect rental housing, either single-family rental, what we call build-to-rent now, or multifamily residential. So, there will be a lot of proposals before the legislature to bring those within some kind of coverage. That's going to be really hard to do because they were exempted because they didn't need the consumer protection that single-family homeowners needed. So, the whole scheme doesn't really hold together very well.

Beyond that, I think there should be consideration given to allowing some amount of development to proceed on groundwater. But only if, and what goes in the if column could be if the groundwater that is used is replaced somehow, it's sort of borrowed from the aquifer and it is replaced in short order. The if could be, but only if the new development has much tighter standards on what its per capita water consumption looks like. The if could be, but only if money is paid to some kind of entity that is charged with developing alternative water supplies. We don't know what the proposal is going to be yet, but that's a complicated equation. And that's what I am not sure I can see the legislature coping with in even, certainly probably not in one session, maybe not in a couple of sessions.

Liam Julian:

Interesting. Yeah.

Sarah Porter:

Not to debate that loan from the aquifer is probably one of the most robust topics of discussion in the current groundwater solution discussion, and we shouldn't ignore that that involves risks, and the risks primarily fall to neighboring community water systems or cities that are counting on that borrowed groundwater as their own supplies. And so there may be ways to fix it or to make it, you know, to mitigate the risk, but it's not a risk-free proposition.

Liam Julian:

Right. That's why it's different. Mr. Gamage, you had mentioned per capita use. Probably worth mentioning that Phoenix, Tucson, these metro areas have actually over the past decades done a very good job, correct, of reducing their per capita use, of reducing demand. So, it's not necessarily the case, as is often maybe reported, that sort of these booming areas are the reason for the sort of water shortages. 

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Well, those are sort of two different thoughts you've made there. So, to the first thought, yeah, we've done a very good job. And we've done it without imposing draconian measures, like you can't wash your car in your driveway, or you can no longer plant certain kinds of materials. We've tried to do it with encouraging, with water rates, with education, and frankly, a lot of the more efficient use of water is because new developments are built at higher densities than used to be most Phoenix development. The typical quarter-acre lot uses a lot of water, less over time, but we've done about everything we can do inside the house. At this point, in terms of development, it's an issue of landscape and what happens there. Las Vegas has had to make this adjustment much more quickly, and so it's been much more regulatory in character, and they've spent a lot of money getting people to tear up turf, for example, whereas we've just kind of encouraged that. I'm sitting as I say that, looking out at my artificial turf-backed lawn. Sarah and I used to talk about the fact that we both are typical Phoenicians who really kind of like our green landscapes. I now have favorites. Sarah has flood irrigation, which is a fascinating anachronism in American life. I thought I should just rat her out a little bit. So yeah, we've done a very good job. But the second part of your question really raises a different issue, which is, to what extent is continued growth the problem? And it is a problem.

But it's a problem in the context I made earlier, which is, we have to make choices about how we want to use water. We can use water to continue growing, but it will mean curtailing agriculture. More than 70% of the water in the state still goes to agriculture. And for the metro areas to continue growing, it will have implications for the rural areas. And the nature and the way in which we continue growing may have to change. So, it isn't as though there's no relationship, but growth does put a strain on things.

Sarah Porter:

Okay. And I'd like to refine that a little bit. And that's to say that there's very little agriculture that uses surface water apart from... Pinal County still has a little bit of Colorado River water, though. They're the first to experience cuts in Colorado River deliveries to central Arizona. But there isn't, in that 72% of consumptive demand of water that agriculture represents, the surface water is the 1.2 million acre feet of Colorado River water that's being used along the main stem. Throughout the state where there's agriculture, it is using groundwater. Certainly, in central Arizona, it's increasingly that agriculture is using groundwater.

And while converting that land use from agriculture to urban is better for groundwater sustainability, that is not a supply for growing cities, because that's a non-neutering supply. So just to be clear, there are other alternatives for developing new supplies. And I think something we haven't grappled with as a state is when will it make sense to invest billions of dollars in a big new water supply without having considered potential market solutions related to the water that's delivered to the main stem. I think we're in for kind of a disruptive time when we reckon with whether or not agricultural users along in our Western Arizona communities would be willing to work with cities to do some kind of program of sending some of their water to central Arizona for the kinds of money that we're talking about when we talk about, for example, bringing in desalinated ocean water. You know, at that point, the price point may make some of those communities more interested. In the meantime, go ahead, Grady.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

I completely agree with all of that. I think Sarah is right. I think the likeliest medium term solution to all of this will be bargaining with agriculture. But I do want to say one other thing, and that is, there are a lot of ironies built into this complicated preference system, but one of the ironies, because agriculture is highly preferenced, highly favored in the Western water schemes, including in our groundwater management act. So, one of the ironies is you now cannot develop new subdivisions on farmland in Pinal County, but we can keep on irrigating and growing alfalfa and other crops on that farmland. Developing a subdivision would take the water use down by three quarters. 

Now, Sarah is right. The difference is that when you've developed a subdivision, it's a permanent use. You're not going to cut it off. So, you have to think carefully about the trade-offs here. But what we are doing currently is discouraging more efficient and higher value water uses because of this archaic system that so heavily preferences agriculture. And I don't want to come off as an anti-agriculture, we should get rid of it all. But we have a lot more of it than makes sense in today's world.

Sarah Porter:

It's important to recognize that the reason we have it is that it was our national policy. We had a national policy of settling the West through agriculture. We wanted food security. We wanted people to be living in the lands that were part of the United States. And so, we encouraged it. And there are still policies that continue to encourage the perpetuation of agriculture. But that's all to say, you know, it's easy to make it an us-them. I live in a city, you know, most of us, the vast majority of Arizonans live in a city. But the reason we got here is for historic reasons, largely, and probably good reasons for their time. So, I'm sure it seemed like the best choice at the time.

Liam Julian:

Yeah. Right. Although the agriculture has changed now, correct, in the sense that, I mean, the New York Times, Washington Post, they've been all over this about just sort of what they've called unregulated, really, groundwater pumping to sort of...

Sarah Porter:

And that's outside of the active management areas. And one of the difficulties is that they don't want to be terribly clear about that distinction. So, you know, Arizona has something like 51 sub-basins, which you can think of as kind of a lumpy, leaky bathtub. And outside of the active management areas, we have places in these rural areas where, in particular, industrial-scale agriculture has moved in, drilled deep wells, and either aroused concerns or actually people have experienced, you know, rapidly declining groundwater tables, and there are some parts of the state where people's wells are going dry. That is not where 85 or 95 percent of people in Arizona live. It doesn't mean it's not, you know, extremely difficult for people when it happens, but it is not a problem within our most populated parts of the state.

Liam Julian:

Right. Yeah. Yep. Good to know that. They've been especially sort of critical of the Saudi Arabian companies growing alfalfa to feed cows in Saudi Arabia where they do not practice this kind of agriculture. So, but I guess that's a whole other topic and unrelated, necessarily, to the... 

Sarah Porter:

We have to also mention the Minnesota dairy in southeastern Arizona that's doing the same thing. So, we focus a lot on the provenance of the agricultural operation. Personally, I think if my well went dry, I wouldn't care very much about that. What I would care about is the water demand that caused my well to go dry.

Liam Julian:

Right. Right. And to the point that you were making earlier, you know, Israel, 75 percent of its water comes from the Mediterranean. Not suggesting we get water from the Mediterranean, but the...At what point...

Grady Gammage Jr.:

It'd be a really expensive place.

Liam Julian:

Yeah.It'd be kind of expensive. You know, get a few planes. At what point does the growth and the trade-offs that we've discussed, combined with the diminishment of the river flows from the Colorado, make a desalinization from the Sea of Cortez, as would be coming up? At what point does that become financially feasible? Is that something that, in 50 years, Arizona... It seems a likely solution to some of the demand, to create more supply in that way? 

Sarah Porter:

My take is that that is the...I would never say never, but cities are getting better and better at prospering on less and less water. And there are a number of interim solutions before desalination pencils out. So, my expectation is these interim solutions, including what we've talked about, potentially, at least the state needs to start figuring out a way to have the conversation about whether there are types of agreements between cities and Western Arizona agriculture that would work well for both sides. In addition, there's a proposal to enlarge one of the reservoirs on the Verde River, which would result in a substantial water supply. When the Groundwater Management Act was passed in 1980, the state set aside three sub-basins for that water to be imported to cities. The Colorado River Indian tribe on the Colorado River, on the main stem, just received federal authorization to be allowed to lease some of their water, and they can just put it right in the CAP canal. And in the meantime, cities are figuring out ways of doing more on less water. There might be a role for desalinated ocean water somewhere in the future, but these other things need to be worked out first. 

Grady Gammage Jr.:

I think we ought to start planning how desal would work and what it might cost. I don't think we need it for the next 40 or 50 years. I think the kind of thing Sarah's talking about can get us there. But at the same time, we started planning the CAP canal 70 years before it delivered water. And there is such a willingness for people to look at Arizona as a place that's going to run out of water, we shouldn't move there, or don't take your business there. But I think we always need to have several layers of planning in the works to sort of reassure people that if you're thinking of coming here and building a big chip manufacturing plant, 30, 40 years may not be enough reassurance for you. So, I think we need to be able to point to a solution farther out than that. We may never need it. But we sort of need to know what it is, where it is, what does it cost, how would it get done, how would the agreements, because we don't have oceanfront, so you got to get an agreement with somebody, how would those work?

Sarah Porter:

Grady chaired the CAP board during the time when Arizona and the federal government was grappling with the fact that we built this giant project and the main users of the water can't afford the water. So, what do we do? And it was years. Thank goodness for Grady's being involved at that point I hope that we could learn from that experience and not develop a project that represents far more water than we need at an expense that is far beyond what our expected users can afford.

Liam Julian:

Final thoughts, I'll ask both of you just generally, are you optimistic? Where do you see us in 50 years? We'll start with you, Director Porter.

Sarah Porter:

Yeah, I'm super optimistic. Arizona really has a proud record of grappling with water challenges, and most of the trends are going in the right direction. The trend of urbanization, the trend of declining per capita demand, efficiency in every sector, and then we do have, you know, cities don't need very much water compared with historic demand and compared with agriculture. Cities can get by on modest amounts of water. So, to the extent that we have a problem of going out and getting more water, it's a very solvable problem.

Grady Gammage Jr.:

Yeah, I agree. I'm optimistic. As I said earlier, I think these are soluble problems. My small degree of pessimism is American democracy is not currently very good at solving problems. And so that worries me. It isn't water that worries me. It's politics that worries me. And we have been very good at water in the past. One can make the argument that we're the best in the United States at dealing with these things. I hope that continues.

Liam Julian:

Yeah. Well, thank you, Sarah Porter and Grady Gammage Jr. Thanks for your time. And also, just a quick plug. You know, the amount of information that's available at the Keil Center and so easy to use and understand and interactive, it's really wonderful. Last night I spent, I literally spent hours just going through. I read your report, Mr. Gammage, Water in the Corridor, I think. But just all the interactive graphs, I would really encourage our audience to go to the Keil Center and check out some of this stuff. It's fantastic. It's so well done. So, thank you for your time.

Sarah Porter:

Our flagship is the Arizona Water Blueprint. If you Google that, you'll get to an amazing hub of information about Arizona water resources. I really appreciate the encouragement.

Liam Julian:

Yeah, it's great. OK, well, thank you so much.