Forget it, it’s the Capitol

What the Legislature did, and didn’t do, for Arizona’s water resources this session.

In March, the Senate passed legislation to appropriate more than $300,000 to help bring water to the Navajo community of Ganado. But despite overwhelming bipartisan support in the upper chamber, the bill never got a hearing in the House, and the money didn't make it into the budget.

Such is the mercurial nature of the Legislature, especially around water issues, as even ideas with broad bipartisan support get chewed up in the process. Legislators with key committee assignments assert their influence. A Democratic governor liberally exercises her veto authority. Powerful interests negotiate with policymakers behind the scenes. And the legislative solutions to Arizona’s biggest problems live and die accordingly.

This week, with the legislative session now in the rearview mirror, we take a look at water bills big and small and see how they fared.

By the standards of most water legislation at the Capitol, Senate Bill 1579 was narrow in scope and low in cost: $340,000 for an infrastructure project in Ganado, a town of just over 1,000 people, about 30 miles west of the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock.

But for 150 households in Ganado, the legislation would be potentially transformative, Democratic Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, of Coalmine Mesa, told her colleagues on the Senate Natural Resources Committee in February.

“This is 150 households who will have running water for the first time, safe drinking water, and I think that’s something that many of us that live here in the Valley don't recognize or probably can't identify with,” said Hatathlie, who is a member of the Navajo Nation and the sponsor of the bill.

About 30% of families on the Navajo Nation don’t have access to running water, according to the Navajo Water Project.

Lawmakers on the Natural Resources Committee are constantly questioning “where are we going to get that next drop of water, bucket of water,” she said. “Out there, we actually carry water in five-gallon buckets.”

The project was backed by $1.7 million in federal ARPA funds, an expenditure authorized by the Navajo Nation Council and President Buu Nygren in 2023. But there remained an unmet need, Hatathlie said.

That’s where the Legislature comes in. Or at least, where it was supposed to come in. Hatathlie’s bill passed out of the committee with unanimous support, save for one legislator who didn’t vote. In a session of stalled negotiations on some of the state’s bigger water issues, it looked to be a welcome change.

“We gotta get more Democratic bills up there,” said Sen. Priya Sundareshan, D-Tucson, the ranking Democrat on the committee, in a tongue-in-cheek remark to her colleagues after the unanimous vote.

The bill again found success before the full Senate, where it again passed with almost total support. And that was more or less the last time it got mentioned. The bill wasn’t heard in the House. The funding it contained never made it into the budget.

Sundareshan, the Senate Minority leader and one of the key Democrats in legislative water talks, told us she’s not exactly sure what happened to the funding. (Hatathlie couldn’t be reached for comment).

“I still don’t even understand the purpose of appropriations bills entirely,” she said. “The budget seems to be decided somewhat independently.”

And even if a legislator succeeds in fighting for a priority in the budget, Sundareshan said, that means they probably feel they have to actually vote for the budget, warts and all.

To live and die in Arizona

It’s hard, in other words, to pass water legislation in Arizona.

There’s an obvious arithmetic factor: Republicans hold a narrow legislative majority — allowing them to control which bills get committee hearings — and Democrats hold the executive, so vetoes are always likely. Farmers, industrial agriculture, homebuilders, municipalities, tribes, environmentalists and more all jostle for a say in the disposition of a dwindling resource.

And there’s the unique figure of Republican Rep. Gail Griffin of Hereford, a longtime chair of the House Natural Resources Committee and the “gatekeeper” (or “grim reaper”) of water legislation at the Capitol.

She’s repeatedly refused to hear major groundwater regulation bills, including this year. At the same time, Griffin is one of the main reasons Hobbs has blown by the state’s veto record — 17 of her bills have fallen to the governor’s veto stamp, almost all water-related proposals that Hobbs said were inadequate responses to the state’s groundwater reality.

Of course, none of this has stemmed the flow of legislation. Warren Tenney, the executive director of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, said his organization had something like 130 water bills on its radar this session, “which was a record.”

Many of those bills — including perhaps the Legislature’s main accomplishment on the water front — addressed the tension between developers and the state government in Active Management Areas. Others — including perhaps the Legislature’s primary failure — address disappearing groundwater in rural Arizona.

The so-called ag-to-urban bill, championed by some as this year's biggest success on the water front, charts a path for some farmland to be retired and subdivided for residential development, which is generally less intensive on the aquifer. Although, as Tenney noted in an interview with the Agenda, neighborhoods can’t be fallowed. “There is going to be a continual demand for water,” he said.

But those who had hoped the governor’s office would tie passage of the proposal to passage of a rural groundwater management bill would be disappointed.

In fact, despite initial optimism at the beginning of the session, Republicans, Democrats and Hobbs’ office only seemed to drift further apart during negotiations on legislation to regulate groundwater pumping in rural Arizona. Hobbs’ proposal never got a hearing. But the Republican proposal didn’t do enough to limit groundwater pumping for the governor’s office.

“I think it’s important to recognize that Hobbs and legislative leaders achieved an important success with the ag-to-urban groundwater conservation bill,” Kevin Moran, the associate vice president for regional affairs with the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Agenda. “That said, I think it’s also, from our perspective, disappointing, that once again rural Arizona is left behind, and the need for state action has gone unanswered.”

Sundareshan, who voted for the ag-to-urban legislation, was more blunt, saying the bill is ultimately a pressure release valve for single-family home builders frustrated with Arizona’s moratorium on development on the fringes of Phoenix.

“Our work is completely unfinished,” she said. “We managed to get one major water bill negotiated to a compromise and to the finish line — and I’m not sure that was the most urgent or pressing matter.”

Hobbs has said she may call a special session thanks to the Legislature's failure to come up with a comprehensive groundwater management proposal. Or she may further exercise her executive power and designate groundwater management areas herself, as she did when she created an Active Management Area in the Willcox basin last year.

“I just don’t know if there’s anything that can be done, legislatively,” Sundareshan said.

There were far too many water bills at the Capitol this year for us to list here.

But here's a sample of some of the bills we were tracking in Skywolf, our legislation tracking service, and how they fared.

Skywolf helps you track, analyze and stay ahead of the endless onslaught of legislation at the Capitol. Sign up for a demo this summer.

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Senate Bill 1611

Introduced by: Republican Sen. T.J. Shope, Coolidge

Short title: physical availability exemption credit; groundwater

Explanation: This is the ag-to-urban bill

Action: Signed into law

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Senate Bill 1425

Introduced by: Democratic Sen. Priya Sundareshan, Tucson

Short title: rural groundwater management areas; establishment

Explanation: Hobbs’ initial vehicle for expanding rural groundwater management areas

Action: Referred to Senate Natural Resources Committee, never heard

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Senate Bill 1520

Introduced by: Republican Sen. Tim Dunn, Yuma

Short title: rural groundwater; basin management areas

Explanation: The GOP’s rural groundwater management vehicle

Action: Never received a full vote in the House

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House Bill 2089

Introduced by: Republican Rep. Gail Griffin, Hereford

Short title: subsequent AMA; voters; removal

Explanation: After 10 years, residents in a subsequent active management area could file a petition to remove the designation

Action: Vetoed

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House Bill 2274

Introduced by: Republican Rep. Gail Griffin, Hereford

Short title: water improvement district; Willcox basin

Explanation: Allows the Cochise County Board of Supervisors to call a special election in which voters in the Willcox basin would decide whether to establish a domestic water improvement district

Action: Vetoed

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House Bill 2753

Introduced by: Republican Rep. Theresa Martinez, Casa Grande

Short title: groundwater replenishment; Pinal AMA

Explanation: The Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District must replenish water in the Pinal Active Management Area within three years of incurring the replenishment obligation

Action: Signed into law

A caveat in the compromise: Supporters of the ag-to-urban bill have labeled it the biggest groundwater legislation in the state since the 1980 Groundwater Management Act. But there’s a major question mark, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports, as the law will significantly increase the amount of water that must be recharged into aquifers to make up for the groundwater that new developments will pump. And it’s not clear where that water will come from, putting a potentially unsustainable replenishment obligation on the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District.

“(The law) relies heavily on a groundwater accounting system that I believe is already fully subscribed, if not oversubscribed, and, thus, easily structurally compromised,” Democratic Rep. Chris Mathis of Tucson said.

Mine-to-urban: Barring a successful appeal, the federal government is set to transfer public land at Oak Flat to Resolution Copper in August. Not only does the project threaten land sacred to the San Carlos Apache tribe — it may also lead to a conflict with residential development in the area, writes historian Joel Helfrich in an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic.

Shady grove: Water consumption is down in Clark County, Nevada — which includes Las Vegas — thanks to higher use fees on the largest residential water users. But the policy has generated pushback from some residential landowners who say the fees are forcing them to let old trees die. NIMBYism? Probably. But a healthy tree canopy is an important factor in mitigating urban heat, as KJZZ’s Mark Brody reports in a conversation with Nevada Current reporter Jeniffer Solis.

“It really is a catch-22,” Solis told Brody. “In other neighborhoods, Las Vegas is focusing on planting more drought resistant trees, and more drought resistant landscaping that still does some things to lower the air temperature, but not the same as these larger water intensive oak trees and lawns, right? So, there is a real balance here between maintaining canopy and turf, and doing everything we can to conserve water because we are a city that depends largely on the Colorado River, which is dwindling because of overall drought in the West.”

Arizona is also suffering a drought of water reporters. But you can help solve that with one simple click!

Fish bake: High temperatures and low precipitation have led to a dozen “fish kills” at lakes across the state this year, per KJZZ’s Greg Hahne. As many as 30 fish died at Becker Lake near Springerville, where “chronically high” pH levels resembled those of baking soda.

"The last several winters we've had pretty low snow melt. And then that coupled with the dismal monsoon seasons that we've had, those water bodies are just, they're shallower. So they warm up a lot faster, there's less fresh water flowing in," Jade Dickens with the Arizona Game and Fish Department told Hahne.

Last week’s meeting of the Pima County Board of Supervisors gave us a few more droplets of information about Project Blue, the controversial data center project planned in the Tucson area, according to our man in Pima County, the Tucson Agenda’s Joe Ferguson.

Among other tidbits: the eventual user of the data center is known to certain economic developers and chamber of commerce types but has said they would pull out of the deal if their name is made public before it’s finalized.

”They do not want their name in the public domain,” Fletcher McCusker, treasurer of the newly formed Chamber of Southern Arizona, told the supes. “They've made it crystal clear to us that ‘if our name gets out there, we're done, we walk.’ So it's an all or nothing proposition.”

Some policymakers at both the city and county level — not to mention most members of the public who have chimed in — have chafed at the secrecy surrounding the deal. Especially when there seems to be a certain pressure to approve Project Blue with limited information.

As we reported in our last edition, cities and counties don’t want to be seen as closed to private investment, especially ones such as this that promise not only millions of dollars in economic benefit but also to open the door to similar tech sector projects in the Tucson area. This is especially true in a city like Tucson, historically seen as less development-friendly than, say, Phoenix, and where there is living memory of economic development deals gone awry.

Something McCusker said reminded me of this dynamic: “Tucson is going to be on everybody's radar in the world.”

The supervisors took preliminary party-line votes to instruct the county to require environmental impact reviews for projects such as these and to review the county’s use of non-disclosure agreements. But that ship seems to have sailed for Project Blue.

In the meantime, the fact that revealing just the name of the data center’s end user would be so grave as to scuttle the whole project does not engender good feelings about the economic development process or the potential use of the facility.

And if any of you in-the-know insiders really wanted to scuttle the project, you can leak the name to us! (Or maybe the identity is already right under our noses.)