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…

The plot thickens

OK, as noted at the top: safe yield is a simple concept. Water in, water out – Balance! But, alas, in human affairs, complexity ensnares us. We craft soap operas. Plots twist, characters proliferate, someone gets amnesia… So let’s back up for some history of this “safe yield” notion.

It’s not, of course, a law of nature. It’s not a law at all; it’s a “statutory goal,” a “groundwater management goal” proclaimed by the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR). The state legislature created this outfit in 1980, hoping to get a handle on rapacious groundwater overuse already well underway in the state’s urban areas. It outlined five Active Management Areas (AMAs), defining the groundwater basins under the greatest threat for being pumped to the point of collapse. The ADWR website, azwater.gov, has a map, a description, and the goal of the Prescott AMA (PrAMA, the “r” distinguishing it from the Phoenix and Pinal AMAs). PrAMA’s goal is “to achieve and thereafter maintain a long-term balance between the amount of groundwater withdrawn in [the] active management area and the annual amount of natural and artificial recharge in the active management area.” Deadline: 2025.

The ADWR website also outlines a PrAMA history. Before telling the AMA to hit the trail toward safe yield, the Department had to make the case that Prescott was not currently in that blessed state. So, what is the opposite of safe yield? That would be the perilous practice of “groundwater mining,” where you’re just extracting the resource with no expectation that it will always be there, as though groundwater were no different from copper or bauxite. Another ADWR concept is “overdraft,” with its whiff of bankruptcy and penalty fees.

The Wizard, the Prince, and the Powerful Sorceress

And if ADWR determined the PrAMA was in a state of groundwater mining, accruing regular annual overdrafts, that would allow the Department to cap the amount of groundwater it permits water providers in the AMA to pump. Several experts believed groundwater mining was going on, citing data from at least back to 1990 – some said 1950. But, through the early 1990s, while working on its Assured Water rules, ADWR couldn’t prove that the PrAMA was mining groundwater.

This takes us up to 1995, which is when the story lurches into fairytale mode. Because that’s when the Great Wizard, Adwir, says to Prince Ama, “You are not in safe yield. You are mining your groundwater, with an overdraft every year. You will have to pay the Terrible Penalty.” “You lie!” cries the prince, challenging the Great Wizard to prove this burdensome calumny. “Very well,” Adwir begrudges; “I will test monitor your wells. But if I find the groundwater declining for three consecutive years, I will make a Definite Determination of Groundwater Mining.”

And so Adwir monitors the wells. As the results come in, it’s clear the news will not be good for Prince Ama – who turns to his ally, the Powerful [state senator] Sorceress, Carol of Springer. He pleads for her help. The Terrible Penalty, he shudders – no more groundwater to distribute for the future growth of my princedom! Calm yourself, says the Powerful Sorceress, I’ll do what I can. She casts her spell, and the Great Wizard, Adwir, can only achieve a Preliminary Determination. The GW is in this state of semi-paralysis for half a year.

And that, beloved listeners, is how we got to the Great Plat Rush of 1998. What would you do if you owned property, and you knew that filing a plat today would for-sure allow you to develop your property guaranteeing your homebuyers access to groundwater – while filing six months later you’d have to compete with other developers for a share of a sharply restricted bucket of water each year? Right, that’s what I’d do too, and so, for six months, plats for the development of 32,000 homes flew in to planning and zoning commissions around the AMA, legend has it, on napkins and the backs of golf scorecards, 6,900 homes worth of them in the City of Prescott. Then, on January 12, 1999, ADWR made its final determination.

Jabberwocky

Many of those 1998 plats now constitute the newer neighborhoods around Prescott. Of the 1,600 or so remaining potential homesites, most lie in the Yavapai Hills development. Rex Mason has his 14 lots on a square parcel with access to Rosser Street (Howard Mechanic told him he was one of those who “got lucky”). Mason says the Wizard of Wizards, ADWR head Herb Guenther, assured him he’d have that water right in perpetuity. It’s true, the water right does stay with the property… with this plot twist: a city resolution states that an owner must develop such a plat within one year, unless City Council grants an extension. At Mason’s first request in 1999, they did grant it – all the way to 2007. That’s why Rex Mason went before City Council on July 3, and he “got lucky” again, winning another eight-year extension.

Mason asserts this is “old” water, “extra” water, not being subject to the ADWR cap on groundwater, so that “the available quantity of water for Prescott at ultimate build-out is just that much bigger” than if he didn’t get the extension, because it doesn’t come out of the small bucket. But Mechanic points out that the legal water right is one thing, the land privileges another. Nowhere is it written that City Council has to grant these extensions. And the water accounting categories, says Mechanic, are one thing, but real water is another.

“The question that isn’t being asked,” Mechanic told Council, “is, How does [Mason’s extension] affect our reaching safe yield?” His answer: approval will allow additional overdraft, lowering the total pool of real water, when no one has yet earmarked any water to achieving the safe yield balance. If City Council didn’t extend the preliminary plat, Mason’s right to that water would go away; anyone who wanted to develop the land after that would have compete for a portion of the small bucket, the conservatively managed amount that ADWR allocates since January 1999. This is what the city calls “alternative water,” and it’s part of the Alice-in- Wonderland world of “water portfolios” and “water budgets” that shoves the whole question of how we balance our water use way out beyond the grasp of the regular citizen.

It makes your head swim. There’s the real water, soaking the cracks and pore spaces of rock and gravel and sand underground; and then there’s “paper water” – legal rights, accounting categories. Mason refers to “his” water as “old” water, because he got it before ADWR put the lid on Prescott’s right to promise groundwater to developers. ADWR’s label for the water the AMA can pump and stay in balance with recharge is “AMA groundwater.” Alternative water is anything else a water provider can get credit for and add to its portfolio. This includes retired HIA water, from agricultural “historically [but not currently] irrigated acres” the provider owns. It also includes credit for treated wastewater that the provider recharges back into the aquifer. In ADWR’s scheme, such water may now be underground, but it is not “groundwater.”

Reaching Nirvana

It is, though, the source of credit that ADWR grants to the recharging water providers, credit that allows them to pump the water out again. As Mechanic and others see it, this recharge can only help us reach safe yield in the sense that it can reduce existing demand for “AMA groundwater,” by being served to current customers. If it goes to new growth, and if existing demand doesn’t change, then neither does our overdraft problem. And to make the equation finally balance, in this view of things, at some point there will have to be “permanent recharge” – a quantity of used, treated water that’s put back in the aquifer, with no credit issued for further pumping. That’s the solution mandated by the Reasonable Growth Initiative, promoted by a group of citizens (including Mechanic) and passed as Prop 400 by 57% of voters in 2005. The new resolution this action put into the city charter applies to any new annexations of 250 acres or larger, so this permanent recharge provision will have its first application in the development of the former Granite Dells Ranch by Mike Fann.

The Department of Water Resources recognizes only two strategies to keep us from going dry for the indefinite future: make the best use of the water we have (conserve), and find more (augment). Its plan for reaching safe yield is to work with the AMA water providers, periodically producing Management Plans (No. 4 is in the hopper now). ADWR promotes a range of programs as the plans lay out increasingly stringent conservation requirements. Examples of energetic local responses: Chino Valley announces strict rules for new developments, agreeing to provide them water for indoor use only; developers will have to find their own source for any landscaping. Prescott offers home conservation kits and imposes “tiered” water rates, charging less for the first, basic amount of water, progressively more for each block over that. ADWR is confident that such measures will bring the AMA to safe yield by 2025.

Not One Drop!

Prescott, Prescott Valley and Chino Valley also have an augmentation strategy: import water. Back in fairytale time, the Powerful Sorceress secured this right for Prince Ama – uh, the PrAMA. Carol Springer, currently a Yavapai County Supervisor, was in 1991 beginning her service as a state senator. Some of the other AMAs had begun solving their overdraft problems by snapping up land outside their boundaries – say, cotton farms facing hard times around Salome – so they could acquire the farmers’ water rights and import their groundwater. Rural interests around the state squawked at the prospect of “water ranching.” Would they see their countryside sacrificed to urban growth, the way the Owens Valley had been dried to dust by L.A.’s thirst, thus wrecking their own dreams of eventual development?

Arizona’s legislators, ever sensitive to powerful rural land interests, responded with the Groundwater Transportation Act of 1991 forbidding such importation. But Springer helped wangle an exception for the PrAMA, arguing it would never be able to use its Central Arizona Project share, and ADWR granted Prescott, as the AMA’s only “large municipal water supplier,” the right to import (to begin with) 8,717 acre-feet annually. The sole permitted import source is the Big Chino aquifer; hence the city’s purchase of a ranch there, and Prescott Valley’s agreement to share in the cost of a pipeline and the imported water. Serving Prescott’s customers this water can permit a reduction of pumping within the AMA, helping reach the safe yield balance. (In the past months Chino Valley has revealed a similar plan, acquiring their Big Chino water right by purchasing a formerly irrigated garlic farm and retiring its irrigation allowance.)

Prescott’s importation plan doesn’t impress Howard Mechanic as a safe yield measure. He likes to say, “Not one drop! Not one drop is dedicated to safe yield!” He sees nothing to keep the cities from using all the Big Chino water for new growth. ADWR has no discretion or authority over the use of this water, since it comes from outside the AMA, so the providers can use it in any legal way they please. Jim Holt, director of Prescott’s pipeline project, has agreed in principle with Mechanic’s line of reasoning. As a talk-show guest on local radio last summer, he told a listener that for imported water to help reach safe yield, there would have to be “policymaking” – because if all that water and associated effluent go for new growth, Holt said, “you’re correct, it won’t do any good.” By policymaking, Holt means (ugh, shudder) regulations. Rules. Restrictions.

Balance water, balance rights

Once you cut through the complexities, the Mason–Mechanic disagreement is just the latest illumination of the age-old tension in a democracy – balancing the right of each against the rights of all – and that balance is the core of the safe yield water balancing trick. The 1998 Plat Rush pits private property rights against the community right to a continuing water resource, as the July 3 Council discussion made clear. Mechanic’s statement, “I think it’s in the community’s interest to protect our groundwater,” brought a vigorous retort from Councilman Bob Roecker: “We’ve got real property rights here… and I say we shouldn’t be taking people’s economic well-being away from them.” Councilman Steve Blair added, “It’s just wrong to put somebody who followed the rules at a disadvantage.”

But the Mason extension vote was not unanimous. Councilman Bob Luzius advocated two, not eight, years’ extension. His reasoning: “This can’t go on in perpetuity because…you’re increasing the value of that person’s property at the expense of the taxpayer. We’re going to have to bring that water in at some time, and it’s going to cost us more…For every plat that’s approved, whether it’s pre-’98 or after ’98, you’re taking so many acre-feet of water out of the aquifer.” Two years would allow time for deciding new policies – though Luzius also expresses doubt about the commitment of fellow council members and other powers in the city to reserving some specific portion of the imported water for safe yield, not giving it to new growth. And he observes, “For all the talk about safe yield – they have not established a safe yield plan yet.”

Plans are in the wind, though. ADWR believes their management plans will do the trick. But if “How do we reach safe yield?” is only the first question, the one crowding right after it is, “Who decides what’s a fair way to share a limited resource that belongs to everyone?” Our story next month will contemplate a “multi-stakeholder group” that met throughout 2006 to deliberate on this question, and the report it produced. Two of the stakeholders in that effort were pipeline manager Jim Holt and citizen-bulldog Howard Mechanic. We’ll also take another look at Prop 400, and other safe yield issues – like whether “safe yield” is the balance we need to be seeking.

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