The Daily Agenda: It's a dry state

Acknowledging the problem is the first step ... Hobbs takes on abortion ... And Kari's alleged dreams are weird.

After decades of policies encouraging growth and farming at all costs, there are signs that Arizona may finally be coming to grips with its status as a dry state.  

Gov. Katie Hobbs’ recent decision to limit certain new developments that don’t have assured groundwater — while light on short-term practical effects — is one sign that the state is finally taking a serious look at its growth-first policies. Many cities are simply shifting the sources of their water by buying out farmland and the associated water rights — but even that is a net benefit, as farms consume a lot more water than people consume. And it seems like every week, we spot a new story about a city that is rethinking its water needs and voluntarily cutting back usage (as long as there’s some federal money involved).  

But if Arizona is going to address our water crisis seriously, we’ll have to re-evaluate agriculture, which accounts for an astounding 74% of Arizona’s water use, and do more to ensure that what little water we do have is protected from pumping and dumping pollutants.

Farms have done a lot to increase efficiency over the years, and there’s some encouraging research and new projects that could dramatically reduce water usage on farms without sacrificing soil quality. 

The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, for example, has about $45 million in “water irrigation efficiency” grant money that it’s using to incentivize farmers to adopt drip irrigation systems, which it says can boost water efficiency by a minimum of 20%. When all that money is allocated, it expects to save around 165,000 acre-feet of water per year. That’s about the same amount of water that the City of Tucson pulls from the Central Arizona Project, former lawmaker Ethan Orr, who is leading the project for UA, told us recently. 

Still, for every reason to be optimistic about Arizona’s water future, there’s an equally valid reason to be terrified. 

Last month’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on what qualifies as a “wetland” is a huge blow to environmentalists who have used the Clean Water Act to protect Arizona’s ephemeral rivers and thus our water supply. If applied to Arizona’s ephemeral streams, as seems likely, it will mean the end of federal authority to withhold permits for new developments alongside such streams and to regulate discharged pollutants into the streams, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports.

The ruling is likely a big win for a copper mine and a large housing development in southern Arizona, Davis writes. The Copper World mine project in the Santa Rita Mountains and a proposed 28,000-home development called Villages of Vigneto near the San Pedro River will be more likely to happen under the new interpretation of the law since both have been held up by the Clean Water Act. 

But the long-term effects of the ruling will go far beyond those two projects, effectively leaving regulation up to the state. 

“For all practical purposes, Arizona is out of the Clean Water Act,” Patrick Parenteau, a water law expert, told Davis. “Your streams are mostly ephemeral. It’s incredibly serious.”

It’s nice to see policymakers slowly, cautiously, acknowledging that Arizona is in a crisis and throwing some money at the problem. But if we’re going to navigate our way through the thirsty future, the state will have to think a lot bigger about how we protect what water we have and how we use that limited supply of water wisely. 

When the Legislature isn’t an option: Gov. Katie Hobbs issued an executive order on Friday attempting to give Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes sole authority to investigate and charge any abortion-related criminal cases in Arizona, rather than leaving it to local prosecutors to interpret the current law. The order tells state agencies not to hand over material for any other state’s investigations into abortion organizations, and it creates a commission tasked with coming up with ways to expand access to family planning and reproductive health resources. Meanwhile, a planned 2024 citizens initiative to protect reproductive rights still has a lot of details to be filled in and will need a lot of money, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda writes.

Electric vehicles on roads to nowhere: Hobbs wants drivers of electric vehicles to pay more for using roads since they don’t pay gasoline taxes that support road maintenance, but she doesn’t have a specific proposal in mind, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Lawmakers have been kicking around various proposals on the topic for years. Meanwhile, Scottsdale is pushing ahead with a controversial extension of Miller Road, which critics call “a road to nowhere,” thanks to $14 million from the Maricopa Association of Governments, Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon writes. Project backers say it’ll alleviate traffic congestion, but critics suspect ulterior motives. 

“The real prize is a path to the riches represented by undeveloped land north of where Miller Road ends,” Scanlon writes. 

Now that’s dedication: A pair of UA researchers kept a saguaro study going for 40 years, watching saguaros grow from a few inches to around 20 feet tall, the Daily Star’s Henry Brean writes. The long-term data they’ve collected shows “population declines triggered by drought and changes to the landscape and the climate, much of it wrought by people.”

$200 million well spent: Arizona is selling off those 2,000 shipping containers that former Gov. Doug Ducey put along the border, and Bisbee is buying a handful of them, the Herald-Review’s Shar Porier reports. Hobbs had previously floated the idea of using those containers as housing for the homeless, but Bisbee plans to use them for storage. Meanwhile, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism has a deep dive into the many problems with the shipping-container-as-border-wall project, including that the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs didn’t know how to manage the project. 

“I can tell you how to repair a bridge, not lay a southern border wall and make it stay,” Darlene Quihuis, the department’s assistant director, told the governor’s council on human trafficking in an email last September. 

For the cost of one of those border wall shipping containers, we could have funded this newsletter for a full year, which is a pretty depressing thought. Anyway, subscribe!

Tough as nails: The Casa Grande City Council renamed a local park after the late Frank Pratt, a longtime “old-school” lawmaker from the area who followed the “cowboy code of ethics,” Pinal Central’s Jodie Newell reports. 

Tough to nail down: By refusing to disclose who’s paying for its nascent presidential campaign, the “No Labels Party” is walking right up to the line of what’s legal, Politico writes. They’ve been flirting with presidential candidates they’d like to back, including U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, but until one is officially announced, the party can probably get away with hiding the major sources of its money. But Sinema told the Associated Press that she’s “not running for president” as she took credit for helping broker legislation that would target executives of failed banks.

Good God, people: Peoria Unified School District Governing Board member Heather Rooks keeps quoting the Bible, even as the district faces a potential lawsuit from a secular group over her repeated use of Bible verses at public meetings, KJZZ’s Matthew Casey reports. And the Daily Independent’s Philip Haldiman dives into whether that’s actually a violation of the separation of church and state (probably not). 

It’s literally all theater: The raft of sure-to-be-vetoed controversial bills that Republican lawmakers approved this year didn’t accomplish much, but served as a political win-win for GOP lawmakers who proposed them and Hobbs when she vetoes them, the Daily Star’s Tim Steller opines. 

“Nothing much gets done, but each side can say they’ve done something,” Steller writes. 

Opinions are hot, in our opinion: Republic columnist Phil Boas continues his long-running streak of questionable takes with “Stephen Richer should drop this silly lawsuit against Kari Lake and run for Senate,” in which he argues Richer likes all the attention Lake directs at him; the Republic’s editorial board throws its weight behind “serious journalist” Amy Silverman’s public records lawsuit; and some ASU bigwigs say the Wall Street Journal op-ed we mentioned last week about free speech on campus gets several points wrong, including who’s the real threat to the First Amendment. (It’s Charlie Kirk and friends, not liberal professors, they say.) 

Advanced copies of Kari Lake’s new book are landing in mailboxes, and based on the first few pages — in which she recounts a dream she allegedly had of being kidnapped by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Supervisor Bill Gates — it’s definitely going on our book review list.