Water on the brain

If we can take some solace in our dire hydrologic situation, it’s that Arizona politicians and their constituents seem more aware of our water systems than ever before.

A recent poll from the Center for the Future of Arizona found that, among the 500 likely voters surveyed, more picked long-term water supplies as the state’s top issue than any other option, beating out stalwart electoral issues like immigration and affordability.

Now, as we’ve written in the past, people tend to present a slightly more enlightened version of themselves to pollsters. But the fact remains that between data center fights, cuts to Arizona’s Colorado River supplies, fragile, flagging natural ecosystems and concern over utility bills, everyday people have water on the brain.

Those vying for their attention and votes have taken note as well, particularly in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, where the odds of actually affecting the state’s water position are best. But what exactly can the governor do for our water?

Both incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, and her challenger, Republican Congressman Andy Biggs, have pledged to defend Arizona’s share of Colorado River water.

One Hobbs ad touts that the governor “canceled the Saudi water lease, stood up to her own party and the federal government, making sure Arizona gets our fair share of Colorado River water,” a reference to the controversial Fondomonte alfalfa operation in western Arizona.

Biggs has said water is the issue he hears the most about on the campaign trail.

One might come away from those statements thinking that the two feel basically the same about water — they practically use the same words. Certainly, it’s true that neither sees drought as a reason to stop growth.

And who would be opposed to protecting Arizona’s water? It’s an easy point to make, both in the positive and in the negative — one Turning Point Action campaign sign on Arizona street corners accuses Hobbs of losing “billions of gallons” of the state’s water to federal Colorado River cuts.

But the reality is those cuts, particularly to the Central Arizona Project, were likely coming no matter what governor was in office. (We’ll note that the current director of the state Department of Water Resources, Tom Buschatzke, also served under former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.)

Hobbs has taken some credit for averting the worst-case scenario through Arizona’s shortage-sharing agreement with California and Nevada, though we’ve yet to see that deal take effect. But flatly, the federal government’s interpretation of the Law of the River sucks for Arizona.

Anyhow, the governor’s hydrologic authority mostly pertains to groundwater. What about the water — the Colorado River — that’s at the top of most Arizonans’ minds?

If Arizona’s status as an R+2 swing state wouldn’t get the Trump administration to lend us a hydrologic hand, it’s hard to imagine any one governor convincing the feds to shovel Colorado River cuts off to someone else. What governors can do is direct the state’s response to those cuts.

And while the candidates generally agree on an “all-of-the-above” approach to managing Arizona’s water, they have distinct visions for what to prioritize, visions that reflect partisan divides on other environmental issues. Basically, this means either conserving the state’s water or going out and getting more of it.

But the thing about water is you can’t make more of it. The nature of a hydrologic cycle is that the world’s supply of water is more or less fixed. You can transform water — something as simple as treating it or as sci-fi as injecting silver iodide into clouds to stimulate rain. But you can’t manifest it out of thin air.

The solution is what’s called “water augmentation.” Instead of creating water, this entails adding new water to a system from somewhere else. While there are lots of ways to do this, perhaps the most prominent example is desalination — treating salty seawater to make it safe to consume for people, crops and animals.

This is the strategy favored by Biggs. For example, he’s introduced legislation to facilitate augmentation projects by fast-tracking environmental reviews and other regulatory steps.

Biggs supports desalination deals with Mexico and California. He’s even said he’d like to reopen Arizona’s boondoggle of a desalination facility in Yuma, which was originally built to address the U.S.-Mexico salinity conflict but, owing to the high cost of desalination, almost never used.

In other venues, he’s said that the state doesn’t need more conservation laws — learning to do with less in a river basin that’s been over-tapped (on paper, at least) for 100 years. Instead, the state simply needs more water. For Biggs, this also extends to groundwater, a finite and dwindling resource in the state — though exactly how dwindling is clearly up for debate, based on Hobbs’ legal battles with lawmakers and homebuilders over her “unmet demand” finding and associated rules.

Now, water augmentation isn’t new, and Hobbs isn’t entirely opposed, either. After all, the state’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority is already working to acquire 100,000 to 500,000 acre-feet per year of new water, potentially enough to supply more than 1 million homes.

That said, the Hobbs administration has swept the agency’s budget on multiple occasions to patch holes in the state’s spending plan, stalling potential agreements for a desalination deal with Mexico. But if you ask Hobbs, that deal — initiated under the Ducey administration — put the cart “way before the horse.”

Desalination technology is not science fiction. Some arid countries already rely on it for their water supplies. But it may not be practical or wise for Arizona, either.

For one, it requires cross-boundary coordination — Arizona doesn’t have any oceanfront property, despite the George Strait song. The state would need to enter into an agreement with Mexico or the San Diego County Water Authority to pay for desalination in the Sea of Cortez or Pacific Ocean. In the most ambitious (and politically complicated) vision, we could pipe this desalinated water to the desert. A more realistic plan would involve paying for Mexico or California to use more desalinated water, leaving parts of their Colorado River shares for us.

Either way, even with scientific advancements, it remains technically complicated and very expensive. San Diego pays about $3,500 an acre-foot for water from the Carlsbad desalination plant, about 10 times more than most Arizona users pay for water from the heavily subsidized Central Arizona Project.

This is one reason that Hobbs has generally prioritized conservation.

Hobbs is not a bleeding-heart environmentalist. In her pleas to the federal government to spare Arizona from the worst cuts, she’s invoked semiconductor fabrication and the defense sector, not protection of Arizona’s vulnerable riparian habitats. But as governor, she’s clamped down on groundwater-dependent subdivision development in Phoenix exurbs and vetoed proposals to desalinate brackish groundwater — both moves meant to stabilize what is effectively a one-time reserve of water.

And if you ask most Colorado River experts, they’ll tell you that’s the right mindset to have. Adding more water without addressing the underlying patterns of consumption may not be enough to save the river in the long run, and it certainly won’t be cheap. At this stage, desalination also requires lots of energy — energy mostly generated by burning fossil fuels, part of the reason we’re in this “megadrought” to begin with.

For what it’s worth, voters don’t seem to make the distinction between adding and conserving. In the Center for the Future of Arizona poll, 89% of likely voters said they think “Arizona needs to add to the state’s water supply through strategies like finding other water sources, investing in desalination, and recycling wastewater.”

And despite assurances from leaders from both parties at multiple levels of government — and from academics — that Arizona is not actually at imminent risk of running out of water in a literal sense, voters aren’t entirely convinced. More than 70% said they were not confident “that Arizona’s water systems can reliably support the state’s future growth and extreme heat conditions.”

Stick with the Agenda, where you can learn about the water cycle and the election cycle at the same time!