Massive cuts to Arizona’s share of Colorado River water could forge new bonds of cooperation among the communities fed by the Central Arizona Project.
Imagine that instead of courtroom water wars — and hopefully they stay in the courtroom — we bail each other out in the midst of basin-wide aridification.
This is the promise of the “Secure Water Arizona Program,” or — aptly — SWAP.
Under the program, which Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and city water staff presented in a meeting last week, participating cities, tribes and other users and providers would bank water in an emergency pool that they can access in times of acute shortage.
And they could voluntarily trade water between each other, connecting buyers and sellers in a mutually beneficial “coalition of the willing,” Max Wilson, a water manager with the city, told the council last week.
The council voted unanimously to authorize transfer and storage negotiations with other cities as part of the program. Phoenix and Tucson have already agreed to put a small amount of water into emergency storage by next year.
“The Colorado River is facing significant challenges, and the entire region must work together to adapt,” Wilson said. “Phoenix has taken proactive steps to prepare, but continued collaboration, both regionally and within our community, will be essential to maintaining water reliability for our residents and economy.”
These “significant challenges” will be familiar to many of our readers, but to rehash: Two unfortunate things are happening at about the same time, and their convergence means bad news for central Arizona.
One, regional hydrology is about as bad as it’s been in 1,000 years. Colorado River flows have dropped by 20% since 2000. Systemwide reservoir storage sits at about 36% full — and important dams like Glen Canyon are at risk of near-term infrastructure damage. Some scientists attribute this not only to cyclic drought but also to regional aridification — not an acute event but a long-term drying up of a place made worse by climate change.
Two, the current batch of interstate agreements governing the river are set to expire at the end of the year, and the seven states of the basin — plus 30 indigenous nations and untold other users — have little to show for three years of negotiations.
Absent a seven-state consent agreement, which looks increasingly unlikely, the Bureau of Reclamation is laying the groundwork for making unilateral cuts of its own in order to stabilize the river system.
We don’t know exactly what these will look like, but Reclamation planning documents suggest one likely scenario is an approximately 1.2 million acre foot reduction in Arizona’s annual allocation.
That volume of cuts would come close to wiping out the Central Arizona Project, which, for somewhat complicated legal and political reasons, suffers from low-priority rights relative to other users in the Lower Basin.
In a newly released agreement, the three Lower Basin states pledged to reduce Colorado River consumption by up to 3.2 million acre feet through 2028, among other provisions — but in a way that would presumably be less painful for Arizona than Reclamation’s plans. But it’s not clear what kind of buy-in this proposal has from the Upper Basin or the federal government.
Anyway, back to the city.
Phoenix’s annual Colorado River allocation works out to about 200,000 acre feet a year. The city tries to keep demand under that level and thus uses about 160,000 acre feet of Colorado water a year. Just a 25% cut to the CAP would bring the city’s Colorado River supply below that demand level.
But Phoenix has a diverse water portfolio. It gets more water from the Salt and Verde rivers — about 58% of its total supply — than it does from the Colorado (about 40%). It has stored about 400,000 acre feet in the Phoenix area and an additional 275,000 acre feet near Tucson.
And there’s the groundwater underneath the city, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency resource that could be used in an emergency. But only once. Regional infrastructure projects — SRP’s planned expansion of Bartlett Dam, Phoenix’s development of regional advanced water purification facilities (a.k.a “toilet to tap”) — can buttress these supplies.
“Phoenix is not running out of water. We have planned for drought for decades, and we continue to invest in the infrastructure, conservation programs and water supplies needed to serve our community today and into the future,” Phoenix Water Services Director Brandy Kelso said in a statement. “As conditions evolve, maintaining that reliability will continue to be a shared effort between the City and our customers.”
And more conservation efforts are possible.
More than a quarter of the city’s water deliveries, for example, go to backyards and other residential outdoor uses. Under Phoenix’s drought program, supply dropping below demand will trigger voluntary reduction programs, audits, rebates and surcharges. Additional restrictions come with even worse drought levels.
However, the city has already conserved a significant amount of water — using less than it did in the 1980s, despite an exploding population since then — and demand is beginning to harden, Wilson said.
“The total amount of additional demand reduction that we could see through water conservation is not limitless and not at the scale (of the past),” he said.
Anyhow, in a scenario where Arizona loses all of its Colorado River water, the sum of these additional supplies won’t be enough to meet demand.
Other scenarios with smaller Colorado reductions are survivable, at least in the short term, but nevertheless challenging.
Still, other cities are in a much tighter spot. Scottsdale gets 70% of its water from the Colorado. Cave Creek is almost entirely reliant on that American Nile.
Hence, the SWAP program.
SWAP has three main components. First, there’s an emergency storage pool accessible by members in times of emergency with the anticipation that it would be refilled when possible.
Second, the reduction offset program, which is designed to “develop additional water resources that could reduce the volume of cuts faced by Priority 4 users in Arizona, including CAP,” Wilson said.
These developments could include infrastructure improvements to reduce structural water losses, partnerships with irrigation districts to implement conservation measures and more. However, the cost of these improvements would be paid by the beneficiary, making this water potentially expensive.
Finally, SWAP includes a “water sharing sandbox” that will allow participating members to enter into short-term, experimental agreements to share and store water.
“We anticipate that projects like these will not be for everyone, sometimes not even for Phoenix,” Wilson said. “Agreements will be negotiated on a user-to-user basis.”
Phoenix sees itself as an important regional player in water conservation, a model and partner for other cities in the region.
“We take seriously our role in water security not just for ourselves but for our region, from supporting forest restoration that protects the critical health of watersheds to leading in the development of regional advanced water purification facilities that will serve cities across the metro area near the turn of the decade,” Gallego said.
But there’s a little more than altruism at play here.
When Rio Verde Foothills sees taps turn off or when builders can no longer develop subdivisions in far-flung exurbs because of dwindling water supplies, the national press — looking for a story that can testify to central Arizona’s hubris — tends to circle like vultures.
Headlines about Arizona running out of water are bad for any community looking to entice investment and development.
As Wilson told KJZZ’s Alex Hager, “water insecurity on even the smallest communities in Arizona can have an enormous impact on public perception and economic development for all of Arizona.”
Voting wrongs: Besides the threat of a lawsuit against Arizona’s political maps from Senate President Warren Petersen, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will have longterm implications for Arizona’s map-making entity, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, Sasha Hupka writes for Votebeat. The decision makes it much harder to challenge maps as racially discriminatory, meaning Arizona’s “majority-minority” districts, like Southern Arizona’s CD7 and Phoenix’s CD3, represented by Democrats Adelita Grijalva and Yassamin Ansari, respectively, may not exist after the next round of redistricting in 2030. Same goes for legislative districts that give minority groups the opportunity to elect “representatives of their own choice.”
“At the end of the day, this is going to be a really big story for Arizona in 2031,” Democratic consultant and redistricting nerd DJ Quinlan explained.
A reduction in harm reduction: After Republicans in the state Legislature and former Gov. Doug Ducey decided needle exchange programs are a good idea and legalized them, the Phoenix City Council is looking to crack down on needle exchanges, not to mention making it harder to feed the unhoused at city parks, the Republic’s Shawn Raymundo reports. The Council will vote on Tuesday on a new rule to require groups that do needle exchanges and food handouts to first receive a city permit, which will be limited.
Michael Crow is still a spook: ASU will start offering a new masters degree program specializing in war and strategy after winning a Department of Defense contract propping up the new program, per 12News’ Kevin Reagan. Not for nothing but ASU President Michael Crow claims he’s not a CIA agent, despite definitely running in those crowds.
We preferred The Grill: As Arizona Republican lawmakers attempt to scrap Tucson’s Rio Nuevo taxing district as part of their proposed state budget, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller defends the “crony capitalist” enterprise, which has helped transform downtown Tucson into a walkable booze and coffee drinker’s paradise.
“For people like me, who love a downtown with street life, that’s what makes our little exercise in crony capitalism worthwhile. I frequently benefit by sitting at the long counter in Caffe Luce on Congress downtown, part of a broader mixed-use development originally supported by Rio Nuevo,” Steller writes.
Unfortunately, there’s no crony capitalistic taxing district to prop up local news. Local independent journalism relies on readers like you.
Rio de caca: The feds completed a feasibility study over a potentially $2 billion upgrade to the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales to potentially move it and turn it into a “megaport” after years of lobbying from local officials, per the Nogales International’s Alessandra De Zubeldia. Local advocates note that the port is right on the international boundary, which means armed customs officers sometimes have to cross into Mexico just to move traffic cones, and it’s at the lowest point in the city, meaning, when monsoons hit, it floods. It’s still a long way from a done deal — the next step is an environmental impact study, which will take at least a year.
“There are times during monsoon season where the CBP officers are literally standing in raw sewage and [they] have to shut down the port of entry,” Joshua Rubin, the head of the local Port Authority said. “You should not be standing in raw sewage to do your job.”
Step inside one of President Donald Trump’s so-called “Freedom Trucks” that are roaming the country ahead of America’s 250th birthday, as Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington did in Phoenix recently, and you’ll find some pretty weird stuff!
It opens with an AI George Washington — and closes with a message from Trump himself. As Pilkington puts it:
“At least Trump had the humility to order it that way round, which was not a given.”
The doublewide 18-wheeled trucks are just one of the many mechanisms the president has drummed up to celebrate America’s semiquincentennial. Other noteworthy exhibits in the anniversary bonanza include “a UFC cage fight outside the White House, an IndyCar race around the capital, and the erection of a 250ft-tall ’Arc de Trump’ beside the Potomac River,” Pilkington notes.