It isn't news that state agencies know how to expose themselves to criticism. Case in point: The Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) decrees that the Prescott Active Management Area (PrAMA) must reach safe yield by 2025. However, the Department won’t tell the civic entities of PrAMA how to reach safe yield – that balance between water pumped out of our aquifers and water that “recharges” them, as rain, snowmelt, or treated wastewater returned by human activity.

Local water activist Howard Mechanic once joked that ADWR’s policy is like telling a drunk, “You can stay drunk for 20 years. Then you have to be sober.” Karen Fann, mayor of Chino Valley, generates a different analogy. She wants to know how many bags of cookies are on the shelf.

Mayor Fann offered her cookie analogy at one of four meetings ADWR held to collect public opinion as the Department prepares to “clarify” rules about pumping groundwater in the Big Chino. To be fair, ADWR does provide advice, regulations and limits concerning the use of water pumped in the state’s AMAs. They work with the towns on management plans, educate citizens and help develop strict and ingenious conservation measures to maximize available PrAMA groundwater. However, it’s clear to all that, with a standing annual overdraft averaging around 12,000 acre-feet, PrAMA is not about to conserve its way out of its lamentable state of “groundwater mining.”

If you can’t cut demand deeply enough, you’d better boost supply, so the larger PrAMA towns plan on importing water from the Big Chino. But the proposed “clarification” sets wannabe Big Chino pumpers against each other, because the relevant rule concerns the priority of rights to pump there. To get the right to pump, an applicant (town, water company, developer, individual) has to prove that there’s adequate water. According to the clarified rule, the applicant must take into account all other, prior rights to withdraw groundwater when proving adequacy. As the only city with its right to import specifically listed in the Groundwater Transportation Act, Prescott expects confirmation as the first, most prior pumper. After that, it’s the order in which applicants get their “complete and correct” applications for pumping in to ADWR that determines the likelihood that their proposed water source will receive approval as “adequate.”

Tom Slaback, local Sierra Club chair and another water activist, commented at the meeting that this situation could start a “water rush,” with all the hopeful pumpers hustling to get their paperwork in to ADWR first. Musical chairs comes to mind. And cookies: Mayor Fann visualizes a rush on the store, with everybody grabbing up the bags of cookies, because you don’t know how many there are on the shelf and you fear they’ll run out. This is also where ADWR takes flak again. How can we possibly meet our responsibility for a share of safe yield, asks Mayor Fann, if it turns out there’s only enough water for first-in-line Prescott? Fann believes the communities do not have to be pitted against each other as long as there’s enough water for everybody’s goals and intentions. She pleaded for assurance that there are enough cookies on the shelf. ADWR won’t give that assurance.

To be fair to ADWR once more, it’s just not in the Department’s legal purview to say how much Big Chino water is there for the pumping. By law, ADWR cannot look at the big picture and suggest how all parties might equitably parcel out the cookies. The best the Department can do is the equivalent of requiring each applicant to prove that there’s a bag on the shelf that it can get its fist around.

This situation, pitting each against all the others, is directly at odds with the policy virtually everyone at least lip-services as the only way to reach safe yield – regional cooperation. ADWR’s stated policy is to consider the AMA as one corporate entity that has to reach safe yield. So the Department can’t answer the obvious questions occurring to the separate parties responsible for making safe yield happen: What share of the overdraft is it my responsibility to fix? How do we parcel out the water supplies we have? Heck, what are the water supplies we have?

ADWR actually does have something to say about that last question. Retired water engineer and local water activist John Zambrano explains that ADWR releases a report – more or less annually – that quantifies the natural recharge PrAMA aquifers received each year. Though only an estimate, this is a figure Zambrano believes water managers could use to begin, at least, to formulate plans for reaching safe yield. To simplify (grossly), that figure is what you could take out, and share around, without overdrafting.

Zambrano participated in a PrAMA effort that made – OK, suggested – some first tentative, halting steps in that direction. Though ADWR cannot step outside its legal boundaries, it can foster groups that could reach actual policy decisions. The Department sponsors a GUAC in each AMA (Warning – acronym minefield ahead!). The Governor appoints this Groundwater Users Advisory Council “to represent the water users in the AMAs and to provide advice to the ADWR Director.” A GUAC can’t advocate new laws or make policy, but it may inspire other groups.

To do something about safe yield, John Olsen, chair of PrAMA’s five-member GUAC, initiated a SYSC (Safe Yield Subcommittee) tasked, after much discussion, with identifying opportunities and obstacles in getting there. John Zambrano served on the SYSC and sat in on meetings of its TAC (Technical Advisory Committee), which prepared a report spelling out these opportunities and obstacles. This saw publication in December 2006, and you can read it here: http://www.cwagaz.org/reports.html (“Final Report on Safe-Yield…”)

And the SYSC meetings were like – like someone with a really sore tooth trying to eat Crackerjack, like Thanksgiving with all your Republican and Democratic in-laws avoiding discussing the election – like a group of people who don’t see the world the same way but still have to come to agreement. Which is what it was. They postured, they tippy-toed, but they hung in there. They tried hard. Their report, though couched in high-caliber bureaucratese, is not shy about the problem, the over-commitment of AMA groundwater: “A lack of regulations and/or regulations that were based on an inadequate understanding of hydrologic conditions have led to the PrAMA aquifer being overdrafted.”

But in every meeting, voices expressed fear of a reaction against the final report, a fear that people – certain people – might see it as suggesting policies, or even (eek!) advocating them. So the report takes a cautious, sidelong approach to policymaking, emphasizing repeatedly that it “does not define a plan for reaching safe-yield in PrAMA. Instead, the information in this report can form a basis for developing a safe-yield plan by a group comprised of affected stakeholders…”

Still, the sensitive spots glared. The issue of exempt wells, perhaps the sorest tooth in the SYSC meetings, consumed hours of discussion. Chairman Olsen, proprietor of Olsen’s Grain and active in water issues for years, sees this as the most important issue the committee addressed. These household wells that pump 35 gallons per minute or less are exempt from many ADWR regulations, such as paying groundwater withdrawal fees, metering their water and filing annual water use reports. Their number has mushroomed as the area has grown, and they consume a large but unknown quantity of water, estimated at 14 percent of total demand. In outlying areas, where developers have split ranches into residential lots, they’re the only available water source, and the property rights question is acute. The report suggests that “exempt well users [should] attempt to meet safe-yield on a level equal to other water users in the PrAMA.”

The SYSC report does offer next steps. Step A is “Stakeholder Process.” Acknowledging that GUAC is an advisor only, Step A gently hints, “An action team comprised of the affected stakeholders may be required to continue with the required work on the other recommended next steps and opportunities.”

So that was December. It’s August now, the report gathers dust, and the SYSC member entities have taken no action on Step A. In candidate forums, Mayor Rowle Simmons and Councilman Steve Blair have responded to questions about forming a safe yield working group by chanting the false “can’t do a thing till ADWR gives us our number” mantra.

Let’s Coalesce!

Local water bulldog Howard Mechanic, who also worked on the SYSC report, has tried to keep alive the idea of forming a regional safe yield working group. He spoke to the Upper Verde River Watershed Protection Coalition, which formed not long after PrAMA towns and western Yavapai County decided not to join the broader Verde River Basin Partnership but to develop separate, local solutions. The report, Mechanic noted, “called on local stakeholders to take the next steps.” These folks were the stakeholders: “representatives of all the jurisdictions on the Coalition” authored the SYSC report. He proposed that, since they organized to guarantee that PrAMA protects the flow of the upper Verde, why not also work on reaching safe yield?

This would be the first safe yield group with the power to pass and implement new policies – to finally figure out how PrAMA entities could equitably share the costs of getting to the goal. Mechanic challenged the Coalition members: Since we know ADWR won’t tell PrAMA how to reach safe yield, “you need to decide how…[And] wouldn’t you rather decide locally how to manage our water supplies, rather than having the state do it?”

Pointing out that the Big Chino area is poised for hefty development with little legal protection against over-pumping its aquifer, Mechanic urged the Coalition to consider forming a regional water authority, a district of some kind, to provide such protection. This would act both to preserve the flow of the Verde and to protect the rights of the importing towns from uncontrolled private pumping. “Getting approval of the landowners in the Big Chino for a regional water authority will never be as easy as it is now,” Mechanic warned. “After the big ranches get split into a myriad of parcels it will become much more difficult to get a consensus.”

Mechanic listed the benefits of a district, including the ability to set a goal of “safe yield plus” – taking into calculation the natural outflow of streams, which safe yield as currently defined doesn’t do. The cooperative authority could raise funds for finding further sources of water, should that be necessary, and for sharing mitigation of any effect Big Chino pumping might have on the Verde headwaters. It could help coordinate members’ recharge efforts. The needs of exempt well owners, who are at risk when water tables fall, could form the basis for bringing them into the agreement.

Chino’s Mayor Fann, who had also been a SYSC member, chairs the Coalition. She agreed to put Mechanic’s proposal on the August agenda.

Increase supply, or decrease demand. Citizens watching houses sprout all over the landscape voice the obvious concern – growth increases demand. But clearly, suggestions of controlling or even managing growth are the political hot potato of the area. Land-use attorney, academic and developer Grady Gammage, who is both a player in Phoenix-area hot growth and an analyst of it, addressed the water/growth link at a conference about a year ago, warning, “Water managers need to stop being hands-off about growth, or decisions will be taken out of their hands by plebiscite.” Prescott experienced an attempt to do exactly that in 2005.

In a “pre-annexation” agreement that was purportedly very preliminary, the city nevertheless promised a would-be developer a great deal. Way too great, a group of citizens following growth and water issues felt, and also without consideration for the impact of this very large parcel on reaching safe yield. The group drafted the Reasonable Growth Initiative, Proposition 400 on the November 2005 ballot, proposing three simple changes to Prescott’s city charter. The first two addressed procedure: public comment on annexations 250 acres or larger would extend to 60 days, and approval would require a supermajority council vote. The third provision concerned safe yield.

Citizens for Reasonable Growth reasoned that in the high desert, water is a valuable commodity. Therefore developers hankering after a share of Prescott’s water must demonstrate their projects’ advantages to its citizens, and citizens have the right to require that water to contribute toward our goal – safe yield. So no effluent generated by such developments should support further growth; it must stay in the ground. Thus Prop 400 stated that the City of Prescott must recharge that effluent into the aquifer without claiming credit toward pumping new groundwater.

In the end city council backtracked and repudiated the annexation agreement. About the submitted plan, Community Development Director Tom Guice stated delicately, “I don’t think it met the intent.” The developer backed out; the current owner, Prescott contractor Mike Fann, is applying for annexation. His group and the city have been meeting, and also taking input from Citizens for Reasonable Growth and other groups, to ensure a better outcome.

This development will be the first run of the Prop 400 changes, and thus the first action taken by a city to commit some water directly to safe yield. Deep thinker Grady Gammage would prefer to see coordinated regional planning by experts and officials. But voters got tired of waiting.

Safe yield contains some conceptual flaws. Right off the bat, Howard Mechanic asserts, the safe yield balance within the Prescott AMA would mean pumping no more than 6,000 to 8,000 acre-feet a year. But legal rights exist to pump about twice that.

John Olsen echoes Karen Fann: PrAMA can reach safe yield only if we import, and then only if there’s enough imported water for everybody. But there’s a harsher problem implied in that solution itself. Safe yield does not apply in the Big Chino, which is outside the AMA. In achieving safe yield within the AMA by importing, we could pump out the water that now flows to streams with no penalty (except losing the stream). Nobody admits to wanting to do this.

The only way imported Big Chino water helps us reach safe yield is if it replaces the water existing customers currently receive from our overdrawn aquifers inside the AMA. Annual AMA overdrafts average roughly 12,000 acre-feet a year; ADWR says there’s enough Big Chino cookies for Prescott to import 8,717 (Prescott Valley will buy 4,000 of that). Does that take care of those towns’ share of the overdraft? What if there’s not “enough for everybody,” including new development in the Big Chino? And what about the Verde River’s cut? Until the AMA parties sit down to seek answers to these questions, they’ll remain moot.

John Hoffmann is a scientist who worked on a recent USGS report on the Verde aquifer systems. In a presentation to one of the oldest local water groups, he emphasized that safe yield is a legal term, not one that universities teach to budding hydrologists. Some folks, he noted, propose the term “sustainable use,” meaning that people limit their resource use to levels that can be sustained over the long term. But he notes that both terms incorporate the values of the society that uses them. The big question, he proposed, is What does that society consider acceptable?

If musical chairs is the model for everyone trying to grab a share of a limited resource, maybe the AMA entities should look to the three-legged race for the picture of cooperation. It feels weird, awkward. Limiting, even. But regional coordination of steps, not each pulling a different way, will keep us from falling over. That’s how we’ll reach the goal.

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