In my coverage for the Water Agenda, I spend a lot of time writing about what cuts to the state’s water supply — particularly its allocation of dwindling Colorado River water — would mean to individual consumers, farmers, cities, tribes, irrigation districts and more.
In that reporting, one thought keeps coming to mind. It’s something that Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University, said at a Colorado River governance conference I attended in December. For context: Under proposed federal plans, Arizona may have to shoulder the vast majority of cuts to Colorado River supplies in coming years, cuts which would significantly reduce deliveries through the Central Arizona Project.
“The thing I keep trying to tell people is, in the Colorado River Basin, we are not running out of water,” Larson said. “We are running out of cheap water.”
But (relatively) cheap water is something people have come to expect. And the prospect of water rates rising is a scary thing — especially when people are feeling pinched by high costs of living in other areas. At the same time, cities and water providers say they need to price the state’s grim hydrologic future into their rates in order to bring new sources of water online and maintain infrastructure.
This tension is at the heart of the debate over a pair of proposed bills from a Republican lawmaker that would impose a four-year moratorium on increases to county and city taxes, fees, surcharges and utility rates. The bills’ sponsor, Mesa Rep. Justin Olson, says he’s trying to make it easier for “hardworking Arizonans to deal with the high cost of living” and to drive local governments to find efficiencies in their budgets.
“If a city can’t live within its means with the existing rates, then it needs to find ways to be more efficient with the tax dollars,” Olson said at a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee, which he chairs, last month.
And water rates are increasing in many cities. Take Gilbert, for example, where the town council recently approved the third water rate hike in as many years to finance new wells and treatment infrastructure upgrades.
“This has been a really difficult conversation with the community,” Rebecca Hamel, the city’s water manager, told the council, per ABC 15’s Anne Ryman. “We don’t want to do rate increases. We are doing them because we have to.”
Indeed, representatives from cities across the state told the committee that the bills — HB4030 and HCR2052 — would hamstring local governments that need additional funding to find new sources of water and make other preparations for reduced Colorado River deliveries in the future.
We’re approaching a crisis, Barry Aarons, who represents the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, told the committee during testimony opposing the bills (which both passed on a party-line vote). It’s just that everyday people may not realize it yet, he said. They turn on their faucets in the morning and expect water to come out. But that certainty won’t last forever.
“Any limitation you want to put on a city that is trying to maintain and build its water infrastructure through taxation is something you do not want to do if we’re facing a crisis,” he said.
The legislation takes two forms. HB4030 is a statutory change. But if the GOP-sponsored bill heads to the desk of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, there’s a good chance it gets vetoed.
That’s where HCR2052 comes in.
The legislation would circumvent that possibility and put the question directly to the voters. Both bills passed out of committee on party line votes and await floor action in the House. They are among the dozens of bills this session dealing with state water policy and the Colorado River.
The bills do allow for rate increases if approved by 60% of voters in a given county or municipality. But opponents said the local governments have the right to direct the flow of local tax revenues, and they shouldn’t have to wait for an election cycle to make needed infrastructural improvements.
“In practical terms, a rate freeze does not eliminate costs; it simply prevents utilities from recovering them through the normal rate-setting process,” Bryan Bouchard, a spokesperson for Scottsdale Water, told the Agenda in an email. “That can delay necessary investments in infrastructure and water supply reliability, which ultimately makes long-term challenges more difficult and potentially more expensive to address down the road.”
Both bills are seemingly facing opposition from within the Republican caucus — both have been scheduled for floor debates in the House, but have been skipped over at the last minute.
And in the Republican caucus discussion on the legislation, Republican Rep. Walt Blackman questioned Olson about whether he had bothered to consult mayors in rural areas like the district he represents.
“We did not hold any stakeholder meetings with municipalities,” Olson responded. “We anticipated that there would not be any support from municipalities, given the fact that they can choose to not increase taxes if they so desire without this bill. What this bill does is prevent them from increasing taxes.”
And even some urban Republicans spoke up. Republican Rep. Jeff Weninger noted that Chandler, which he represents in the Legislature (and where he’s running to be mayor), already has very low taxes, and he specifically noted the implications for hamstringing local water utilities.
“I am open to other ideas, looking at other alternatives with regard to the utility fees alone,” Olson said.
But during the Ways and Means hearing, Aarons said it would be difficult to cleanly exempt water utilities from the moratorium because it’s not just water rates that contribute to a region’s water infrastructure. (Just think, for example, what might happen to your power bill if Glen Canyon Dam loses the ability to produce electricity because Lake Powell reaches dead pool).
“Some of the infrastructure and some of the maintenance equipment and so on is going to drift from item to item,” Aarons said. “Some things are going to be indirectly water related.”
The Colorado River accounts for about 35% of the state’s water supply. It’s about the same for many Valley cities.
But Scottsdale gets about 70% of its water from the river, in addition to supplies from the Salt and Verde rivers, underground aquifers and recycling facilities.
“If CAP supplies are significantly reduced, the city would rely more heavily on other available sources and tools such as drought management measures and water reuse,” Bouchard said. “While the goal is always to manage these transitions without sudden impacts, major reductions in Colorado River water can increase costs because replacement supplies, infrastructure, and treatment can be more expensive.”
And Scottsdale is pursuing rate increases to finance this transition.
During committee hearings on the bill, Olson emphasized that his bills wouldn’t take money away from local governments or even prevent increases to the tax base — just increases to rates beyond what’s already in budgets and fee schedules.
But that’s cold comfort to the numerous Arizona cities and counties that are opposing the bills, which could “exacerbate a draconian life altering crisis that we may face,” Aarons said.
“You can call me an alarmist if you want, but I stand by that statement,” he added.
A group of 18 former Department of Justice attorneys are accusing the DOJ in court of lying about why it wants voter rolls from Arizona and 29 other states.
The accusation came in an amicus brief filed last week in the U.S. District Court in Arizona in the DOJ’s lawsuit to get an unredacted copy of the state’s voter roll. The DOJ wants all fields, including partial Social Security numbers, birthdates, and driver’s license numbers of the Arizona’s 4.3 million registered voters.
That fight over Arizona’s voter rolls has been brewing for months, and is now in court as Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said he would rather go to jail than turn over the documents to the federal government, which he believes would be illegal.
The group of former DOJ employees has filed similar amicus briefs in other states that the DOJ has sued.
The former employees come from administrations going back decades, and most of them worked in the Civil Rights Division Voting Section enforcing voting rights laws, according to the brief. Three of those attorneys resigned during a 2025 exodus of about 5,000 attorneys who refused to make the department President Donald Trump’s retribution program and help him expand his power over elections.
The DOJ said in its suit filed in Arizona in January that it wants the voter records to make sure the state is complying with federal voter list maintenance requirements.
The former attorneys said in the amicus brief that the DOJ’s stated purpose “appears to be a stalking horse,” a term from the 1600s that alludes to a hunter hiding behind his horse to move in on his kill.
The true reason is for the government to do its own list maintenance to find “noncitizens or undocumented immigrants” who are registered to vote, the former attorneys said.
“That purpose cannot justify the requests for sensitive data here,” they said.
Federal law puts the development and maintenance of voter rolls in the hands of the states, the former attorneys said.
They said that while Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 allows the federal government a wide scope to conduct "'preliminary investigations of registration practices,’” making determinations on filing voter lawsuits and getting evidence for those suits, the DOJ has not provided any basis to show Arizona might be violating the law.
“DOJ’s sweeping request, made without adequate investigative rationale, is a radical departure from the sorts of targeted, justified requests that amici and others in the Voting Section have previously made under Title III,” the former attorneys said.
The former attorneys said there is plenty of evidence to show the DOJ is not being honest about its intentions. The Trump administration’s public statements and news reports have shown that the government wants the voter data to share with the Department of Homeland Security to uncover undocumented immigrants who are registered to vote.
And then there’s a Confidential Memorandum of Understanding the DOJ offered states to get them to voluntarily turn over their full, unredacted voter rolls. The agreement required states to remove any ineligible voters the federal government flagged, despite states having the duty to run elections.
“Simply put, there is nothing in the Civil Rights Act, the NVRA, or HAVA that authorizes the federal government to use highly sensitive, personal data in state voter rolls to conduct a nationwide search for individual registrants that it suspects may not be eligible to vote,” the former attorneys said.
If there is suspicion that a person on the voter roll is ineligible to vote, then the Criminal Division takes over and uses an assortment of law enforcement tools to investigate, the attorneys said.
Natalie Baldassarre, a DOJ spokeswoman, said the department had no comment on the amicus brief.
Just to clarify: Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes are warning county elections officials not to turn over confidential voter information to the Trump administration, per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. They wrote a letter to county recorders saying there is a lawsuit underway to determine whether the U.S. Department of Justice has a legal right to request unredacted voter information. At the same time, Mayes and Fontes say Trump officials may use subpoenas — like they did with Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen last week — to get information before a judge rules on the lawsuit.
“We reiterate our offices' position here just in case you may be contemplating disclosure,” Mayes and Fontes wrote to county recorders. "We write to inform you that doing so would violate both federal and state law.'’
Another battle begins: While Mayes is fighting the feds, Republican state lawmakers are planning to pull money her office uses to protect consumers against fraud and use it to pay state troopers, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. The Arizona State Troopers Association says troopers need $6.4 million to replace old vehicles and pay for overtime, and the consumer protection fund at the AG’s Office is expected to end the fiscal year with $26 million.
Charlie Kirk is still with us: A former Gila County employee is suing the county for firing him after he wrote “Rot in Hell Charlie Kirk” on his private Facebook account during a bathroom break at a county office, Alexis Bechman reports for the Payson Roundup. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump picked Erika Kirk to fill her late husband’s seat on the U.S. Air Force Academy Board of Visitors, the Republic’s Stephanie Murray reports.
Who is the administrator of (Arizona’s) DOGE?: Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed Amy Edwards Holmes as the director of the new Arizona Capacity and Efficiency Initiative, per the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest. The DOGE-like agency that Hobbs outlined in her State of the State address in January will target “redundant contracts or technology” and launch pilot programs using AI, but it won’t lead to layoffs of state employees, Hobbs says.
The border’s political power: The U.S.-Mexico border would be the perfect pretext to use the U.S. military against civilians, a group of Project 2025 backers decided at a swanky meeting at a Virginia country club in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Beau Hodai reports for the Cochise Regional News and the Phoenix New Times. Hodai obtained documents showing attendees discussing the importance of becoming “experts on the Insurrection Act” and how to make the president’s military and law enforcement powers “unified for border security.”
“Oh, boy.”
Those were the first words KJZZ’s Sam Dingman said as he interviewed a former Gilbert police officer who now runs the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Police Department.
Marianne Robb was telling Dingman about a woman who was going to marry an alien named Lucifer and take her two kids with her.
Robb, after spending years at the Arizona chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, co-founded the UAP PD with former police officer Dave Rich.
Even though Robb deals with the bizarre, she has a grounded view of what people like the woman intent on marrying an alien are going through.
“Well, I knew what she was talking about. Whether I believed in the people that she was talking about, that didn’t matter,” Robb said. “I knew what she was talking about. And she got so comfortable, she held my hand and she literally got up voluntarily, walked up, got into my patrol car, and we took her to go get a psych evaluation.”
It’s all in a day’s work at the UAP PD, which also happens to have a logo cool enough to make us want to join the “department.”
