It’s the Holy Grail, it’s the Maltese Falcon, it’s Nirvana, the state of grace or bliss. Such a simple concept – it’s when the water you pump out of your local aquifer neatly balances the water soaking in. It’s safe yield. It’s where we aren’t, it’s where we’re supposed to be by 2025, eighteen fleeting years hence. How we get there is a question that has lots of people pointing at the other guy. One guy is bulldogging this question, and he’s not going to let anyone beg off.

Howard Mechanic may have encountered disappointment at the polls in his 2005 city council run, when his campaign-sign avatar was a bulldog, but safe yield is different. On this, he doesn’t have to give up. Mechanic has been working and meeting and planning, to get the focus on an equitable way to share our scarce, indispensable resource, groundwater; to get each of the water-providing or -using entities in the AMA to take responsibility for a part of the burden of balance – of safe yield. Mechanic is not alone in this effort, but he is tireless (certain folks would say tiresome). And that’s why he stood up at the July 3 City Council meeting to argue against Prescott architect and developer Rex Mason’s appeal for an extension of his preliminary plat, one of the myriad granted in the Great Plat Rush in the second half of 1998, and…

Prescott plans to import four billion gallons of groundwater a year, pumped from the aquifer that feeds the Verde River. There’ll be some hefty decisions to make along the way. 

“I’m the Decider!” President Bush once declared in his own unique idiom. Prescott has its own Deciders, and clamoring for the City Council’s decisions are critical questions around importing water from the Big Chino aquifer. The pipeline project has been long years in the planning, but as the targeted July, 2009 first pumping date looms, pressure on the Deciders increases.

What they’re dealing with is no small garden hose. The City’s current plan envisions a 30-mile pipeline to carry up to 12,400 acre-feet of groundwater per year, running from the Big Chino Water Ranch through Paulden to the Chino Valley wellfield, Prescott’s current water source. Prescott Valley contracts for 45 percent of that water and shares in the $170 million project cost. Pumping on the projected scale will remove unprecedented volumes of water from the Big Chino aquifer, with uncertain but potentially destructive effects on the Verde River headwaters it feeds.

Council members have to make their best guesses given what they know. On each of the pipeline funding steps along the way, Councilman Bob Luzius has been the lone member voting against the step. Why? It’s no simple story of opposition to importing water from the Big Chino, and in mid-March, at least one of the darkest clouds over the pipeline, from Luzius’s perspective, finally received the attention he has always advocated.

The Prescott area water managers are over a barrel. And the barrel looks to be running dry. 

The folks who keep the water coming out of our taps know that our use of the current supply isn’t sustainable. The Quad-Cities have been sucking up water from under Chino Valley and Prescott Valley, and the water levels there have been dropping since at least 1990. They’re going to have to look somewhere else. For years, water managers and elected officials in these booming cities have been looking to the Big Chino for salvation from the drying of their water barrel—but those aquifers may not to be sustainable for our needs either, and that’s just the beginning of the trouble.

Artwork by CJ Eder

Thirsty towns in Arizona’s Central Highlands are pumping out their aquifers faster than they can refill. To get the water they need, Prescott and Prescott Valley have launched a pipeline project to bring water from another aquifer, the Big Chino. Chino Valley has designs on that same source. Across Mingus Mountain, the Verde Valley towns are not happy about these plans.

For years now, the grownups have held endless rounds of meetings, commissioned reams of reports, collaborated, discussed, disagreed, raised their voices and spoken sharply. Can we provide enough water for the people who live here? For those who will live here? The “two sides of the mountain” face off. In the middle of the tussle, playing the role of the child in a hostile divorce, runs the Verde River.

The argument, (cartoon version) goes like this: The Verde Valley towns growl, “You bad sprawly developing people are going to suck up all the water, and the river is going to run dry.” And the Prescott-side of the mountain towns snap back, “There’s plenty of water, the river isn’t going to run dry, we know what we’re doing -- and who are you to talk about sprawl? Who’s pumping the most out of the river channel, anyway?!”