One evening last summer, Sen. John McCain took the stage for a “Town Hall” in Prescott High School’s auditorium.

Silvia Boyer enjoys a day at Goldwater Lake near Prescott. Surface water is rare here, making us dependent on groundwater. But is there enough?

The what?

Prescott water conservation Q&A session

Can you wash your car in your driveway next summer? The Citizens Water Advocacy Group (CWAG) is hosting a presentation by Prescott Water Conservation Coordinator Shaun Rydell, who will talk about the City’s 2006-7 Water Smart Conservation Program on Saturday, Nov. 11 from 10 am to noon at the Granite Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 882 Sunset in Prescott (two blocks behind the True Value hardware store).

The Water Smart program promotes conservation principles and best management practices among all municipal water users in Prescott's service area. Rydell's presentation includes water consumption information and techniques for reducing indoor and outdoor water use. She’ll also talk about the City’s present outdoor watering ordinance and water conservation incentives, and provide an overview of Water Smart 2007, a program of various educational activities, public events, and opportunities for conservation and partnership development. Following her presentation, she will take questions from the audience.

For more information call 443-5353, email info(at)cwag.org or visit www.cwagaz.org. To learn more about Prescott's conservation efforts and incentives, call 771-1130 or visit www.cityofprescott.net and click on "Water Conservation."

Several listeners that night came primed with fervent statements about amnesty and global warming, and you’ve got to wonder how many understood the water dance playing out before them. McCain diplomatically stressed that “the principle behind the legislation” was to include, “very significantly,” the elected officials, though (also diplomatically) “not to the exclusion of others.” The senator made it clear that he “would expect very significant participation” by “the mayors and county supervisors.” But it isn’t clear what that meant.

McCain spoke for another 15 minutes on less obscure topics, then took questions from the floor. After a few audience screeds on immigration and Iraq, Prescott citizen Jack Wilson unfolded his lanky frame and rose to ask, “Have the three city mayors [of Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Chino Valley] changed their position regarding control of the partnership?” McCain had just met with the mayors, he said; they felt relegated to a minority role in the proposed partnership structure, and they believed they should, as elected representatives of the citizens, play the major role. Up spoke Prescott Mayor Rowle Simmons. He didn’t want to get into a debate about the partnership, he said, but “our problem with it is, it’s overloaded with special interest groups.” The meeting moved on; McCain fielded a question about building a wall on our border with Mexico.

Did the audience catch McCain’s diplomatic pressure on the mayors to join the partnership? Feel the mayors digging in their heels? Sense that Jack Wilson’s question intended to expose this situation through the press? Anyone could be forgiven for thinking, “OK, another water group. That’s, what, 27 of them now? This one’s in the Verde Valley, that’s why the city mayors from the Prescott side don’t like it—that plus the enviros. So what.” Also forgivable is any tendency to keel over in a stupor during a description of why there is a Verde River Basin Partnership—the land exchange, the dealing in the U.S. Senate, the language of the legislation. This Town Hall skirmish from Arizona’s water wars neatly portrays the difficulty of getting the full tableau across to the voting public.

Lord knows it can be daunting. Agencies and acronyms abound. What with negotiations and meetings, new groups and reports and studies, recommendations and more meetings, any progress toward solutions seem merely like mincing steps in some bizarre minuet, sometimes like a sweaty middle-aged game of Twister. Reading water regulations brings to mind Calvinball, the game that cartoon six-year-old Calvin and his tiger companion, Hobbes, would cook up on a slow Saturday afternoon: “New Rule! If you don’t touch the 30-yard base wicket with the flag, you have to hop on one foot!”

But once you plunge in, it becomes as engaging as a soap opera. You too may become a water wonk, holding your breath for the next plot turn! In this series of articles we plan to focus on the players, give voice to all the voices, chart the organizations and their relationships, spell out the regulations. We are living history here, in our latest segment of Will They Get the Water Thing Right? So, first, some background.

It’s a war out there

It seems you can’t ponder the issue without quoting Mark Twain (if that’s really who said it): Whiskey’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’. Some claim there’s water enough here for all human uses; others, that using our fill will abuse important parts of our natural environment. Environmentalists are set against developers, boosters against low-growthers. City dwellers resent folks out in the county who have “exempt” (unregulated) wells, and the resentment is mutual. The “two sides of the mountain” eye each other with suspicion, the Verde Valley towns of Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Jerome and Camp Verde mistrusting the Quad Cities of Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Dewey-Humboldt as the Quads sprawl toward the grasslands overlying the aquifer that feeds the river’s upper reaches.

Anxiety abounds. Homeowners brood, “Is my investment safe?” Environmentalists fret, “Is the river safe?” Some developers and politicians believe we have all the tools and policies in place to manage the water resource into the far future. It’s the pessimistic “Chicken Littles” against the irrationally optimistic “Cornucopians.” So, do we slug it out? What I see is well-meaning people, trying to work it out, work on the science, the policy, the solutions. Collaborate. Commission scientific studies. Argue. Form advocacy groups and technical advisory committees. Hold numberless meetings. Negotiate. Compromise. Try to Do the Right Thing. And, unfortunately, blindly act.

Background: Global

Water scarcity, of course, is not just a local problem. It’s a global, snowballing, train-comin’-down-the-tracks issue. Fresh water reserves are declining worldwide. Last spring, Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry hit bestseller lists with the subtitle Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. A recent transplant to Chino Valley from the Chicago area, conversing at a Lions lunch, noted that Lake Michigan’s water level is down six feet since his childhood. It’s not news, and people have long prophesied technological fixes. In 1978 the California State Senate endorsed the idea of towing icebergs to the U.S. Desalination, cloud seeding, the outlandish futurizing of yesteryear, come to pass.

But it all looks pricey, and global warming’s inscrutable but rapid and scary changes flummox planning. Then you hear these amazing tales of “those who can” rushing to grab their share of what’s left. Like Muammar Qaddafi constructing a vast system of pipes and 1,000 wells to bring 40,000-year-old water from aquifers under Libya’s southern desert to the coastal region, where groundwater pumping has sucked brackish ocean water into the wells. Like the Bush family (yes, that Bush family) purchasing an enormous “water ranch” in Paraguay, over an underground water reserve bigger than Texas and California together, one of South America’s largest. Futurizers now forecast battles over water that will dwarf any projected energy cataclysms.

Background: Regional

But here in Arizona, we’re not surprised. American settlers came into the desert west full of hubris, saw the few rivers and fewer lakes and the dozen inches of average annual rainfall, and dealt with the scarcity through the basic rule of prior appropriation—in playground talk, “first come first served.” This right depended on “beneficial use,” which, of course, meant human-directed consumption. You staked your claim, you dug your ditches. You had to take the water out of the stream to retain the right to it. Leave it in-stream and you’re not using it, so you lose your right.

When states got around to staking their claims to water, prior appropriation meant things got serious fast. One big river, the Colorado,  runs through much of the west, touching seven states through its watershed. Some smaller, hotly contested rivers also flow through more than one state, and court cases around rights to these began to make it clear, early in the 20th century, that negotiating some kind of apportionment for the Colorado would head off a lot of trouble. That was the genesis of the Colorado River Compact, begun in 1922 and argued over ever since.

No, Arizonans are not surprised by struggles over water.                      

A bone of contention for the seven Colorado Basin states to growl over was the uneven growth among them. California boomed, developing a massive thirst for that water it was suppose to share with Arizona and Nevada, its fellow Lower Colorado Basin states, who were not using their share. And that narrative set the background for the water future of Arizona, of the Prescott area and of the Verde River watershed.

The water down below

What do you do when a dry climate gives you scant surface water (rivers, lakes)? You drill. Water is down there, in rock layers or gravel or rubble. It seeped down from somewhere near or far, from snow and rain last winter or 40,000 years ago. This groundwater fills the pore spaces in the rock formations we call aquifers, water-bearers. As Phoenix grew, first with farms and mining, then with people and more people, locals built dams and formed water companies, but surface water wasn’t enough. Phoenix stuck its straws in the aquifers and drank deep. Rainwater and snowmelt weren’t enough to refill, or “recharge,” the aquifers. Like a drying sponge, the rock began to shrink, its drained pores collapsing, dropping the surface by inches here, a few feet there. The subsidence caused  huge cracks in the ground, one of them 12 miles long.

Not surprisingly, the state craved a new water source. But Arizona, disputing the Colorado River Compact’s deal, hadn’t signed it until 1944, becoming the last of the seven to sign. Coveting the great housing market promised by the GIs’ return stateside, and anxious to nail down Arizona’s Colorado River share, in 1946 the state set about forming the Central Arizona Project. This entity was to plan a network of canals from the river, as well as “to educate Arizonans about the need for CAP and to lobby Congress to authorize its construction,” as CAP tells it. Lobby they did. Authorization took one quarter of a century; completion, another. But along the way the Carter Administration, no friend of big water projects, threatened to cut funding until Arizona got a handle on its groundwater use. Surface water law had grown out of the prior appropriation doctrine (first in time, first in right), but there was little groundwater law.

So in 1980 the state created the Department of Water Resources to administer the legislature’s newly enacted Groundwater Management Code. DWR set up five Active Management Areas, AMAs, in the areas the Department deemed most likely to deplete their groundwater. Unlike the human-motivated lines of political jurisdictions, AMA boundaries follow natural contours. And because groundwater is what the AMAs manage, each AMA encompasses groundwater basins. Groundwater, it turns out, works by its own rules, entering aquifers in some areas but not others; flowing, not like river water but constrained by the type of rock it dwells in; lying maybe just below the surface, maybe deep under unwatered layers; leaving the aquifer in springs or streambeds; moving in mysterious ways.

Thirsty Phoenix, booming and eager in the years before CAP came into full delivery, began eyeing groundwater in other basins, under La Paz County, for example. There, cotton farmers pumped the bountiful aquifers. But by the late 1980s the cotton market had crashed. A wrinkle in the 1980 groundwater code did not escape the notice of private water companies,  municipalities and speculators. The code had repealed an old law requiring groundwater to be used where it was pumped. When agents turned up, money in hand,  in cash-strapped agricultural hamlets like Salome, landowners were delighted to sell them the farm—and the rights to the groundwater below. The location was ideal; the CAP canal was right there, the plumbing already in place to ship the water to the booming cities.

Some 60,000 acres changed hands, some farmers got rich quick, but rural leaders around the state yelped in alarm. This practice of “water ranching,” turning a scarce resource into a commodity priced by the highest bidder, threatened to sacrifice rural areas to the megalopolis’s hot-growth needs, much as Los Angeles sucked the Owens Valley dry. And rural interests hold their power in Arizona. In 1991 the mindful legislature passed the Groundwater Transportation Act, forbidding “inter-basin transfers” of water.

With one exception. The Prescott AMA.

Here’s how the Central Arizona Project impacted the fate of the “PrAMA”: The other four AMAs, all much larger and contiguous, encompassing an area predicted to form the Greater-Phoenix-Tucson Megalopolis Corridor in another few decades, sit in the Sonoran Desert at an elevation of 1,000 feet or less; Lake Havasu, where the CAP originates, lies even lower. The CAP canals head toward the four low-lying AMAs; Prescott and the other Quad Cities ride the Central Arizona Highlands, at about 5,000 feet.

Prescott was paying its share of the CAP expense, like other Arizona communities, but it was by now clear that any plans to bring Colorado River water almost a vertical mile into the mountains of the PrAMA were impractically expensive. So Prescott sold Scottsdale its CAP rights, and a persuasive legislator for the area won the PrAMA that exception to the 1991 inter-basin water transfer ban. The Prescott AMA comprises two groundwater basins, the Little Chino and the Upper Agua Fria. With the transfer exception, these small towns, on the cusp of a growth spurt and already gulping more groundwater from their basins than filtered back in, could now drink from a whole new underground trough. DWR permitted the City of Prescott to pump a specified amount of water from the Big Chino groundwater basin, outside the AMA limits, stretching northwest under the broad grass valley of Big Chino Wash.

Overdraft vs. safe yield

Prescott acquired this new groundwater source just in time. DWR, like a fairytale wizard, had set three of the state’s Active Management Areas the task of bringing groundwater pumping into balance with the amount of water that returns to the aquifer. This state of balance would bear the name “safe yield.”

In the early ’90s, the example of Phoenix and its extreme overpumping alarmed DWR’s hydrologists. One term they used for this opposite of safe yield was “groundwater mining,” suggesting taking water as you would take silver or coal, with no intention of replacement. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Another term was “overdraft,” with its connotations of penalty fees and insolvency. In Prescott’s case, the Department believed its aquifers were in overdraft. The political powers in Prescott objected to this designation and the restrictions it would entail. “Prove it,” they said.

At the time, insufficient data made proof impossible. All right, decreed the Director of the Department in 1995, like the fairy queen; we’ll monitor, and if we find declining well levels and increasing water consumption for three consecutive years, we’re declaring you out of safe yield. And sure enough, in August 1998 the hydrologists reported both a steady decline in water levels, and that “existing groundwater pumping greatly exceeded the AMA’s safe-yield goal.” The Director of the Department made a determination in 1999 that PrAMA was in overdraft, not in safe yield. Time to activate Plan B: the pipeline. The towns of Prescott and Prescott Valley, after some snarling and posturing, agreed to partner 54%-46% on this project to pump water from the Big Chino Basin into the Prescott AMA. And this is where the Verde River enters the story.

Sucking the river’s source

The Verde River enters the world at springs just south of Paulden. It twists eastward through low canyons of its own carving, then swings southeast just past the north end of the mountain ridge separating the Quad Cities from the Verde Valley towns. Many in those valley towns, already viewing with alarm the larger upland cities’ rapid growth, have feared the impact of Big Chino pumping on the river. Hydrologists and geologists saw the Upper Verde Springs trickling from rock layers that they knew to underlie the Big Chino, where the City of Prescott was negotiating to buy a water ranch. Their forecasts were dire, predicting that pumping could dry up the upper 24 miles of the river, from the springs to the first major tributary creek, for most of the year, except for storm events. But consulting hydrologists hired by the cities predictably disagreed.

So now concerned citizen groups have proliferated, joining their acronyms, expertise and work to those of the government agencies. Fresh USGS studies confirmed the Big Chino’s importance, estimating it to contribute 80–86% to the Upper Verde’s baseflow levels; again, Prescott hired consultants to review those studies with the intent, of course, to discredit them. Prescott’s pipeline project marches forward while developers draft their own plans to pump in the Big Chino, outside the AMA restrictions.

Two years ago, a private/state land swap opened some Verde Valley land for development, rankling citizens there. To smooth hackles and help the region deal with its water conundrum, Arizona’s two U.S. senators wrote into the exchange’s enabling legislation a second  “title,” authorizing “assistance for a collaborative and science-based water resource planning and management partnership for the Verde River Basin.” The membership, tasked to conduct studies and identify resources and options for long-term water management, would represent “(1) Federal, State, and local agencies; and  (2) economic, environmental, and community water interests in the Verde River Basin.”

People from all these sources have constituted this Verde River Basin Partnership since late 2005. But, as Senator McCain learned, it’s not going completely smoothly. The Quad Cities mayors and the Yavapai County supervisors pulled out of the effort after the first few meetings, arguing that they, as elected officials, best represented the interests of ordinary citizens and should control the organization. The cities also pushed for proportional voting within the partnership, which would give the Prescott side, with the more populous towns, a stronger voice. In the end, the three county supervisors agreed to join for six months, then review their options. At present, the Quad Cities still refuse to send representatives.

So the tale unfolds, with many more storylines. The pipeline; its cost; will Prescott use the water to reach safe yield, or for new growth? Does safe yield, as defined, allow for water flowing to the river? And there’s a lot more.

We’ll keep watching.