Reporter Tony Davis' Fave Five

Ex-federal official: 'I got rolled' by Trump administration to ease way for Vigneto housing development

This story blew the lid off how the federal government put politics over the law and science in reviewing a 28,000-home development near a highly imperiled desert river. It has sparked a still-ongoing congressional investigation on whether a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official was pressured by higherups to reverse a decision that could have stopped or modified the development.

─ Tony Davis

A now-retired federal official said he bowed to political pressure from a higher-up in the Trump administration when he reversed a key decision he had made on a 28,000-home Benson development near the San Pedro River.

“I got rolled,” said Steve Spangle, who was a top U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official in Phoenix.

A “high-level politico” at the Interior Department pressured him through an attorney in its Solicitor’s Office, Spangle told the Arizona Daily Star in a recent interview.

Spangle’s resulting reversal on the Villages at Vigneto development, in a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in October 2017, smoothed the project’s path to get its federal Clean Water Act permit.

His earlier 2016 decision would have required a detailed biological analysis of the proposed development’s impacts on endangered species. Rescinding it allowed the Corps to issue the permit without the lengthy analysis.

By “rolled,” Spangle said he meant: “I made a decision that was in my purview to make. I was overruled by somebody who didn’t have my kind of experience. I used that phrase to distinguish it from making a policy call based on fact, as opposed to making a policy call based on politics. I had a strong feeling this was a political decision on their part.”

Interior spokesman denies allegations

In response to Spangle’s allegation, the Interior Department issued a statement Friday explaining and defending the wildlife service’s policy switch on Vigneto.

Asked if the department’s Solicitor’s Office put pressure on Spangle to reverse his stance, a spokesman issued a one-word denial: “No.”

The reversal occurred simply because the service got additional information about the project from the Corps and the developer, the Interior spokesman said.

Concerns about San PeDro impacts

At issue is a 12,324-acre project whose homes, golf course, resort and commercial and office development would flank both sides of Arizona 90, 2 miles south of Interstate 10 and 4 miles southwest of downtown Benson.

The project’s Phoenix-based developer, El Dorado Holdings Inc., has said Vigneto is inspired by the Tuscany hill country of Italy in its “impressive array of cultural, social and recreational amenities and natural landscape.”

El Dorado has promoted Vigneto as a self-sufficient development, with schools, a large trail network, bars, restaurants, shops, banks, day care centers and the like, as well as homes.

Environmentalists have fought the project for four years, mainly out of concern that its groundwater pumping will dry up parts of the San Pedro River, including the nearby St. David Cienega.

The cienega is the only marshland left in the river’s federally protected conservation area, running 40 miles south from Benson. The river lies 4 miles east of the Vigneto site.

Spangle himself has long expressed concerns about the project’s impacts on the San Pedro. He shared the concerns in letters to the Corps dating back to 2004.

But in his decision reversal in 2017, he tempered that view, saying, “Our concerns remain, but the legal situation required us to retract that position” that Vigneto’s impacts must be thoroughly analyzed before the permit was granted.

The Corps issued the Vigneto permit in November 2018. In February, however, it suspended the permit for additional review, less than two weeks after a second lawsuit was filed against the Corps over its permitting for the project.

By then, Spangle was retired, having taken a buyout from the wildlife service on March 31, 2018.

First such pressure in his career

Spangle’s recent comments to the Star amount to a rare public complaint by a federal official of political intervention into an endangered species case.

He said he wasn’t ordered to reverse his decision. But he was told “a couple weeks” before writing his October 2017 letter, by the Solicitor’s Office, that if he knew what was good for him politically at his job, he would do it, he said.

“I was told by an attorney there that a high-level politico in the Department of Interior had told the attorney to call me and said that, ‘Spangle is out to lunch and needs to rescind the call,’” Spangle said.

“I received a call from Washington that that’s the wrong call,” Spangle added, referring to his earlier decision on Vigneto.

He said he didn’t know or ask who the high-level Interior figure was, and that he would not release the name of the Solicitor’s Office attorney who called him to get the decision reversed.

“She is a friend” and Spangle doesn’t want to get her in political hot water, he told the Star.

“She was strongly encouraged to call me and point out the error of my ways,” Spangle said of the attorney. “My job is that I work for the administration. The administration’s position takes precedence over mine.”

But the pressure he got to reverse his decision was the first he ever experienced in 34 years with the federal government, Spangle said. That included 29 years with the wildlife service under five presidents going back to President George H.W. Bush.

In his last 15 years with the service, Spangle was field supervisor of its Arizona Ecological Services office, based in Phoenix. There, he had decision-making authority over most endangered species issues handled by the service in this state.

The pressure exerted about Vigneto contributed to Spangle’s decision to retire, he said.

“I know how the system works. I wasn’t used to this particular political atmosphere that struck me as fairly foreboding if I was to stay on the job,” said Spangle, who turned 65 last November. “So when the buyout offer came, all signs were pointing to the decision to retire.”

Spangle cited risks to imperiled species

Spangle’s comments have their roots in a tangled case of controversy and litigation dating back more than a decade.

The Corps had granted the project, then under a different owner and called Whetstone Ranch, a Clean Water Act permit in 2006 to build on about 8,000 of the 12,324 acres now planned for the development. But the project stalled for most of the next decade due to the Southwest’s real estate crash.

El Dorado Holdings resurrected the project in 2015 after buying the land from the previous owner, and named it Villages at Vigneto.

Before construction could begin, the Corps suspended the permit in July 2016 after being sued by environmentalists over its failure to consult with the wildlife service on the project’s impacts on endangered species.

In October 2016, Spangle wrote to the Corps that the service didn’t agree with the Corps’ conclusion that the massive project wouldn’t harm the Western yellow-billed cuckoo and the Northern Mexican garter snake, both threatened species, or their proposed critical habitat.

Discussing the entire, 12,324-acre site, Spangle wrote that “direct and indirect effects to threatened and endangered species, including proposed and final critical habitat, are reasonably certain to occur.”

For example, it’s likely that pumping of “an appreciable volume of groundwater” for the development will reduce flow in sections of the San Pedro River that already are designated as critical habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher and are proposed critical habitat for the garter snake and cuckoo, Spangle wrote.

Plus, because Vigneto’s size is much larger than what the Corps permitted in 2006.

“We are concerned that the (project) will be implemented in a piecemeal manner that does not include analyses of its full environmental impact,” Spangle told the Corps.

Before the wildlife service could begin its own review of the project, it needed the Corps to do a full-scale biological assessment of the development and its mitigation efforts, he said.

That letter was his third in 13 years to the Corps raising concerns about the project.

In July 2004, Spangle wrote that service officials “are particularly concerned about potential effects to the ecosystems of the San Pedro River, which support a diverse array of fish and wildlife resources, including threatened and endangered species.”

In July 2015, Spangle laid out detailed concerns about Vigneto’s potential impacts to the cuckoo and the garter snake, and asked the Corps to re-evaluate its 2006 permit decision. He also urged the Corps to start a formal review of the endangered species impacts.

Again, he cited potential threats to the river, in areas downstream of Benson, due to groundwater pumping for the project lowering the water table directly connected to the river.

Interior says broad analysis wasn’t needed

But in his October 2017 reversal letter, Spangle wrote that the Corps now could substantially limit its scope of analysis.

It would only have to examine the impacts of the project’s discharge of fill material into 51 acres of washes on site, and the preservation of more than 1,600 acres on and off site to compensate for the discharge work.

Spangle was told to make the switch based on statements by the developer and the Corps that the project could be built whether the permit was issued or not, he told the Star in the recent interview.

Just a month before Spangle wrote his letter, developer El Dorado Partners had told the Corps that it was technically feasible to develop the site without a permit, and that it intended to do that if necessary.

A May 2017 Corps report had reached the same conclusion, Spangle wrote in his October letter.

That meant a full-scale review of the entire project wasn’t legally needed, Spangle wrote. He wrote that he now also agreed with the Corps that Vigneto’s activities, authorized by the permit, weren’t likely to harm the cuckoo, garter snake or the flycatcher, or damage their critical habitat.

In the Interior Department’s statement Friday to the Star, a spokesman repeated the details of the September 2017 letter from El Dorado.

The spokesman noted that originally, the Corps had only sought the wildlife service’s comments on the impacts of the project’s mitigation efforts. But the service’s position was that the mitigation work was directly related to the entire development.

Because the permit wasn’t needed for the development itself, the development could no longer be considered related to the mitigation work. That removed the need for analyzing the entire project, the Interior spokesman said.

Why pursue “unnecessary” permit?

At the time, environmentalists with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and other groups were outraged at Spangle’s reversal.

They asked: If the Clean Water Act permit wasn’t needed for Vigneto to be built, why was El Dorado Holdings applying for it?

El Dorado spokesman Mike Reinbold didn’t respond to questions from the Star back then about why it was pursuing the permit if it wasn’t required for Vigneto to move forward.

“Let me ask you a question: What does it matter?” Reinbold said in a fall 2017 interview.

In Spangle’s recent interview, he told the Star the critics’ question about why El Dorado bothered to apply for the permit if it didn’t need it “is exactly the question I have. If it’s just as feasible to build without a permit, why did they even subject themselves to the process?”

“Anti-environment administration”

Spangle’s reversal under pressure on Vigneto was one of many things he didn’t like about the direction the Interior Department was taking in the Trump administration, which was nine months old at the time, he said.

“I saw policies in place or on the way that would be detrimental to national parks, the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Spangle said.

“The Trump Administration is different from past Republican administrations — much more anti-regulatory and much more anti-environment … plain and simple, anti-environment.

“I miss the days of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and every other president,” he said.

He cited the Trump administration’s size reductions of national monuments declared under Obama, and its loosening of restrictions on oil drilling on public lands, as decisions he particularly didn’t like.

He also cited the administration’s reversal of a longstanding policy to prosecute oil and mining companies and others under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for inadvertent killings of birds that land in their pits and die.

Said Spangle: “The whole direction the Department of Interior was going in was absolutely the opposite direction of where I thought it should be.”

Forest supervisor says her boss ignored critical questions about Rosemont Mine

This story exposed how a former U.S. Forest Service supervisor felt she was blocked by her boss nine years ago from raising key questions about the proposed Rosemont Mine, on the same issues that led a federal judge to stop work on the project this year.

─ Tony Davis

A former Coronado National Forest chief says her boss forced her a decade ago to stop questioning the legality of the proposed Rosemont Mine. The issues she was trying to raise match those a federal judge just used to bar construction of the mine.

Former Coronado Forest supervisor Jeanine Derby told the Arizona Daily Star last week that she and a top aide were flown from Tucson to the service’s Albuquerque regional office for “counseling” to bring her staff in line.

She and her staff had been raising many questions in conversations with higher-ups about whether the mining company could legally dump waste rock and tailings on public land, Derby said.

The upshot of that meeting was that Derby and her staff stopped raising questions internally about key Rosemont issues, she said.

Now long since retired, Derby contacted the Star last week to disclose this incident, shortly after a federal judge overturned the Forest Service’s approval of the mine.

“I feel vindicated,” Derby said.

Her boss at the time, former Southwestern regional forester Corbin Newman, confirmed last week that he arranged the Albuquerque meeting.

He said he wanted Derby’s staff to get moving on a formal environmental impact statement on the mine, rather than being bogged down. He said their concerns conflicted with national Forest Service policy that the agency can’t say “no” to a mine except under extreme circumstances and that in most cases, mine waste rock and tailings could be disposed of on public land.

“They had to get on with the analysis. Let it play out. Let’s get on with the work,” Newman said.

He denied ever telling Derby and her aide to stop talking about mine issues.

But Derby said he told her “he needed us to get on board and make sure our employees got on board. He didn’t want any more internal debate and he didn’t appreciate the fact that my employees were asking questions and that I was allowing it.”

Derby’s revelations represent the first public sign of internal disagreement within the Forest Service about the $1.9 billion Rosemont project since a Canadian mining company proposed it back in 2006.

The disagreement centered on whether the Forest Service was going too far in holding to its longstanding position that the 1872 Mining Law and later laws and regulations forbade the agency from saying “no” to a mine.

Until that meeting, Derby and her staff had been raising legal and environmental issues, particularly about the mine’s potential impacts on water supplies and whether some of the mining company’s formal claims on public land for its project were valid.

Their concern was that, because the company hadn’t proven those claims were valid, it couldn’t use that land for dumping waste rock and tailings.

But for many years, the Forest Service has taken the public position that it doesn’t have to analyze claims’ validity and that this position was backed up by later laws, regulations and court precedents.

U.S. District Judge James Soto ruled in Tucson on July 31 that the agency was wrong, calling its approval of Rosemont “arbitrary and capricious.”

His ruling came a day before the mine was to start construction. It would directly create about 500 high-paying jobs and many more jobs indirectly, while disturbing about 5,430 acres of federal, state and private land in the Santa Rita Mountains, about 30 miles southeast of Tucson.

Hudbay Minerals Inc,. which would build the mine, has said it will appeal Soto’s ruling. The federal government hasn’t said anything about that yet.

Derby, now 80 and living in the Tucson Mountains foothills, contacted the Star by email on Aug. 11, the day the paper reported that Soto’s ruling, if upheld in higher courts, had national implications that could make it much harder for the U.S. government to approve new mines on federal land.

She felt vindicated because “there are other people in the world who are willing to look at this from the basic questions that should have been asked from the very first: Is this (mine) appropriate in terms of use of land, and have all the questions been answered?” she said.

She decided to speak out now, she said, because Soto’s ruling triggered memories about how she tried, without success, to guide the Forest Service into looking at the “difficult” questions she was raising.

“Until someone starts asking questions, the powerful people won’t change,” she said.

Since retiring from the Forest Service in 2010, she kept her views on Rosemont under wraps until now because she had walked away from her job, wasn’t carrying a grudge and “didn’t want to get into a conflict,” she said.

Newman, now 65, also retired, and living in Oracle, said he brought Derby and then-Deputy Coronado Forest Supervisor Reta Laford in for the meeting because he wanted more progress on the complex work involving the Forest Service’s environmental analysis of Rosemont. He disputed that it was a formal counseling session.

The service started work on the analysis in summer 2008. After publishing a draft and a final Rosemont environmental impact statement, it made a final decision in June 2017.

Neither Derby nor Newman could recall precisely when their discussion took place. It happened sometime between Newman’s arrival as regional forester in late 2007 and Derby’s retirement. Newman retired in 2013.

No authority to change policy

Newman said he thought Derby and Laford’s concerns were valid, and that they had legitimate questions. He said he supported Derby raising these questions as high as the service's Washington, D.C. office. But ultimately, he concluded that their views were colliding with established national Forest Service policy, said Newman, who like Derby worked well over three decades for the Forest Service.

“I had them come in so we had a clear understanding that neither they or we had authority to change national policy, no matter how much they would like to or we would like to,” Newman said.

His job was to make sure that “line officers” such as Derby and Laford didn’t stray outside national policy made by the Forest Service.

“I felt that we’ve just gotta come to an understanding about your authority and my authority,” he added.

Asked if Derby is right to feel vindicated by Soto’s ruling, Newman said, “One court opinion doesn’t establish law. It makes an interpretation that’s subject to challenge. I don’t know how it’s going to work out. It sort of depends on how other judges view the law.”

Laford, who today is supervisor of Olympia National Forest in Washington state, didn’t return an email from the Star seeking comment about this incident.

Derby said she felt Newman’s action had a chilling effect on the Coronado forest’s ability to raise critical questions about the mine.

From then on, she knew she’d be walking on a “very fine wire” on Rosemont.

“Red lights were flashing in me. I had conflicting thoughts. I needed to be true to myself and also supportive of people working for me. I also needed to perform my job in a manner that was acceptable to the agency.

“I was disappointed at not being trusted, and that I was expected to bring down the hammer on employees who had legitimate questions and deserved a place to speak their truth internally and have better answers than we were getting.”

Derby said she stayed silent because “I’m the sole earner for the family. I had a disabled husband. I needed my job.

“I was well aware particularly after that counseling session that for any misstep, they could start proceedings for insubordination or whatever it would take, to get me out of the way. I toed the line. I didn’t give them any opportunity.”

As for her employees, “I also observed that they were somewhat afraid to make waves and wondered, ‘Would questioning things about Rosemont be considered making waves?’”

Besides no longer raising the mining claim issue, her staff also didn’t push hard for the agency to seriously consider an alternative for Rosemont that would have meant no mine, she said.

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, agencies must analyze and consider what’s known as a “no action” alternative for major projects proposed on federal land that would have significant impacts.

But Derby said that while the environmental impact statement did look at such an alternative, the Forest Service’s position that it can’t say no “negates any analysis” of it.

Back in the 2000s, the mining claim validity issue had surfaced publicly some time before Derby and Newman held their Albuquerque meeting.

In December 2006, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry wrote Derby asking the service to review the validity of Rosemont's mining claims, which he said would require showing that the underlying minerals could be extracted, removed and marketed at a profit, Huckelberry wrote.

Derby replied two months later that for various reasons, there was no basis for the service to examine claim validity. Under federal regulations, the placement of waste rock and mill tailings on national forests are considered activities connected to mining and mineral processing, and are thereby authorized even on land without mining claims, she wrote.

But eventually, Derby and her staff began to raise very similar concerns to Huckelberry's privately with her higherups, she told the Star last week.

In a conference call in the late 2000s with the service's Office of General Counsel in Albuquerque, her employees "with the Rosemont team were quite vocal and challenging regarding these relevant questions. I encouraged this, believing that we owed it to our public," she told the Star.

But in that call, "The Office of General Counsel really just shut it down, my employees became rather frustrated with it all," she said.

A call from Newman summoning her and Laford to Albuquerque came the next day, she said.

At that meeting, "My boss was telling me how disappointed he was that I could not control my employees. My response was that I think it’s healthy to give people a voice throughout the agency," Derby said.

Mine as poster child

From the Albuquerque meeting on, for some time, Derby was required to call Newman every Friday to report on her activities during the week, she said — an act she felt was micromanaging.

Newman, however, said that his office was only asking for weekly updates on where the Coronado National Forest staff was on the Rosemont issue, since the agency was getting regularly questioned on how much money it was spending on it.

Weariness over Rosemont was one factor leading Derby to retire at 72, she said. On that issue and others such as wildfire fighting, “I felt constantly second-guessed, constantly challenged for my leadership.”

But she continued to believe privately, as she now says publicly, that Rosemont was going to become a poster child that would drive home the need to overhaul or reform the 1872 Mining Law, which Congress passed to encourage mining on public lands, she said.

She says the law needs to be changed to better relate to more recent public understanding and concerns about the environment.

Noting that the federal government gets no royalties from private extraction of hard-rock minerals from its land, while it collects royalties from some forms of oil extraction, she said the 1872 law “is allowing devastation to happen with absolutely no benefit to the federal government.”

While not opposed to mining in general, she’s against Rosemont as it’s proceeding today, she added.

While there is a valuable use for the mineral, “for now, the minerals can remain safely in place for future generations, until a time when their extraction can be achieved without unreasonable risk or detriment to the environment,” she said.

Newman, by contrast, called his views on Rosemont and mining in general “nuanced.” Few legal uses on national forests are as destructive as mining, particularly open-pit mining, he said.

But not only were national forests created to allow multiple uses, the critical need for copper and other minerals is obvious, “as you sit in your office and behind your computer.”

“You don’t want to see impacts but there is a voracious appetite for minerals. Where are they going to come from? People want things, but they want the consequences to be elsewhere.”

He agreed with Derby that Rosemont should be a poster child for mining law reform, saying review of the 1872 statute is long overdue. But it’s going to take more than just Rosemont to get that overhaul through Congress, said Newman.

In the past, higher profile mining battles such as one in the 1990s over an aborted plan to build a gold mine near Yellowstone National Park haven’t moved the needle enough to change the 1872 law, he said.

While a review and change of the law would be great, he said, “I personally don’t hold out a lot of hope.”

Rosemont Mine OK hamstrung by inflexible mining law, former forest supervisor says

This story told of how another, now-retired Forest Service supervisor felt hamstrung in his review of the same mine due to the limits placed by a 140-year-old mining law. Retired Supervisor Jim Upchurch said he was legally unable to consider a full range of alternatives for the controversial, $1.9 billion mine project because the law so heavily favored mining.

─ Tony Davis

A former Coronado National Forest supervisor says his experience with the Rosemont Mine shows it’s time to overhaul the 1872 Mining Law.

Without that law — which opened the West to mining with no federal royalties and little environmental oversight — there’s a reasonable chance the Rosemont proposal would have been scaled back or reshaped, and it might have even been killed, said former forest supervisor Jim Upchurch.

As supervisor from 2010 to 2015, Upchurch oversaw many of the key steps leading to the Forest Service’s approval of the mine. He supervised preparation of the mine’s draft and final environmental impact statements in 2011 and 2013 and issued a draft decision approving the mine in 2013.

Later, as a deputy Southwestern regional forester in Albuquerque after leaving the Coronado, he also was involved in preparing the 2017 final Rosemont decision. It was written by current Forest Supervisor Kerwin Dewberry.

Retired from the service since January 2018, Upchurch said in a recent interview that while he ultimately concluded that the mine proposal would meet all applicable laws — a finding recently overturned by a federal judge — he was frustrated that the mining law sharply limited his flexibility in making decisions on the project.

In particular, he pointed to what he saw as the law’s limits on the service’s ability to say “no” to a mine on its land, on its ability to require mitigation for a mine’s effects, and on how broadly it can analyze its impacts.

It was frustrating as a public official not to be able to look at the whole project and make the best decision about the facts, he said.

“Right now, there is no flexibility,” said Upchurch, who now lives in Albuquerque. “It’s either ‘do this’ (what the mining company proposes) or do nothing. There’s not much leeway.”

The $1.9 billion Rosemont Mine carries the promise of 500 high-paying jobs over at least 20 years of operations. But the Forest Service and other federal agencies found it has myriad potential environmental effects.

The mine, including an open pit more than a half-mile deep and more than a mile in diameter, would disturb about 5,431 acres of federal, state and private land, the Forest Service has said.

Not the best place for a mine, he says

Given the many environmental issues surrounding Rosemont, Upchurch said he felt that the site in the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson wasn’t the best place for a mine.

“That particular area has more endangered species than just about any other place in the nation,” he said. “It has significant water quality issues and significant archaeological issues. It’s also an important connectivity corridor for mammals from Mexico to the U.S.

“There are a lot better places where we could have mines with not so significant impacts,” he said.

Upchurch declined to say, however, whether he personally supports or opposes Rosemont.

He’s staying silent on that point because he expects to be called into court to testify on at least one of the five lawsuits now pending against Rosemont, he said. He doesn’t want to be accused of having a conflict of interest by taking a public position now.

He still sees both sides of the Rosemont dilemma.

Mines “are where the ore is. You can’t just move along because you don’t like that particular location,” he said.

At the same time, “that particular area has so many conflicts, it makes it difficult to come up with a solution that doesn’t affect significant resources such as (wildlife) migration, endangered species, water quality and air quality,” he said.

“I think there’s a place for mining. But there are places of such significance for other uses that you have to balance that out.”

He added that society still needs the ability to provide minerals from national forests.

Decisions do take too long, he says

Upchurch is also sympathetic with the mining industry on another key point — one that industry officials like to call “certainty.”

They want more predictability on how agencies will handle mining applications, and a shorter timeline for decisions.

The Rosemont issue was stalled in federal agencies for 12 years after Rosemont Copper filed its proposed mining plan of operations. The final agency decision came in March 2019, when the Army Corps of Engineers approved a Clean Water Act permit.

“We’ve gotta come up with a way that doesn’t take 15 years to come to a decision,” Upchurch said. “We need amendments to the act to allow us to shorten the time span. That might be the trade-off we need to provide more flexibility in our decisions.”

2nd former supervisor to call for reforms

In calling for reform of the 1872 law, Upchurch joined Jeanine Derby, his predecessor as Coronado National Forest supervisor, who made a similar pitch in an August interview with the Arizona Daily Star.

Her comments came shortly after U.S. District Judge James Soto ruled that the Forest Service had erred in approving Rosemont by improperly interpreting that law.

The law has been highly controversial for decades, but mining company lobbyists and other backers have been able to stop Congress from making major changes.

The Mining Law of 1872 lays down in its first section the basic ground rule for mining that has infuriated critics ever since.

“All valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, are hereby declared to be free and open to exploration and purchase, and the lands to which they are found to occupation and purchase, by citizens of the United States and by those who have declared their intention to become such,” the law says.

In addition, the law says that anyone who locates minerals on the public domain “shall have the exclusive right of possession and enjoyment of all the surface” where the minerals are found, “and of all veins, lodes and ledges throughout their entire depth.”

The law contains no provisions for how a federal agency could say “no” to a mine on its land.

Since then, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have generally said they don’t have that power, unless the mine would violate an environmental law.

Besides that, Upchurch said it’s a “shame” that hard-rock mining companies pay no royalties to the federal government for minerals they extract from federal land.

Oil companies and non-hard-rock mining firms such as coal companies typically pay such royalties. Hard rock mining claim holders pay $225 in fees in the first year they file a claim, and $165 annually to maintain the claim.

It’s also a “shame” that the law doesn’t allow federal agencies to look as broadly at mine impacts as he would like, said Upchurch, referring to the “total effects of the project based on the totality of all the laws.”

For instance, he said, the Forest Service couldn’t base its decision on whether Rosemont is in the public interest, which the Army Corps of Engineers can. Federal laws and rules also limit how broadly the Forest Service can require mitigation for a mine’s impact, he said.

Native American concerns arise

“In a world where I could just make believe stuff, you’d be able to look at the mine’s effects on Native American culture,” Upchurch said. “And can we shrink it down so it’s not such a big impact, or having different alternatives, so it’s not such a big impact?”

He couldn’t require mitigation of Rosemont on land outside the Coronado National Forest, he said. He lacked legal jurisdiction on such lands.

Such a restriction is “pretty limited, since Rosemont may have impacts on Cienega Creek and other, sensitive Bureau of Land Management and Pima County lands,” said Upchurch.

Also, dealing with cultural resources on the mine site that were considered sacred by three Native American tribes was hard for the Forest Service, because “we were affecting something like 76 archaeological sites,” Upchurch recalled.

The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to prepare a mitigation plan for such projects and to prepare a memo of agreement for agency and tribal officials — which for Rosemont the tribal leaders refused to sign.

But if cultural artifacts are to be placed under 700 feet of mine tailings, “there’s not much you can do except try to minimize the effects,” Upchurch said. “The law doesn’t allow you to not put the activity on top of archaeological sites.”

With a more flexible mining law, “you could better design something to fit a particular landscape. If you hypothetically had that flexibility, there’s a reasonable chance you could do something different,” he said.

“Decision space was limited”

Unlike his predecessor Derby, however, Upchurch said he never felt pressure from Forest Service higher-ups to avoid raising controversial issues internally.

For Derby, those included whether Rosemont should be allowed to dump 1.9 billion tons of waste rock and tailings on nearly 2,500 acres of forest land, when its mining claims on that land hadn’t been proven valid.

Derby told the Star in early August that she was told by Corbin Newman, then the Southwestern regional forester, to stop questioning the legality of the mine on those grounds.

It turned out they were the same grounds Judge Soto used this summer to rule that the service’s approval of Rosemont was “arbitrary and capricious.”

“I don’t know her. I think I met her once. I don’t have any reaction to what she did or didn’t experience,” Upchurch said of Derby.

After he arrived at the Coronado and started work on Rosemont, it took him six months to quit asking questions about mining claims and whether he could say “no.”

“My questions were probably the same as for everyone: What is my decision space? Can I say no? Is there any avenue for me to say no?” he recalled. “I raised those questions with our Office of General Counsel, with the staff in the Washington office. I wanted to have as much decision space as possible.

“It was pretty unanimous, that my decision space was limited. The advice from counsel, from attorneys in the Washington office, is that we don’t go through a validity exam. There is an inherent right for a person with claims to be able to use the national forest,” he said.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t raise the issue. It was advice of counsel. That’s why we hire these people. It wasn’t like, ‘Be quiet, don’t raise the issues.’ It’s just this is precedent, the way the courts have ruled over the past 150 years of the mining act.”

As for Soto’s ruling stopping the mine, Upchurch said he wasn’t upset about it and didn’t feel that he and his agency were shot down.

“Our job was to do the best we could with the sideboards of the law that limits the discretion that we have,” he said. “I think we did really good work with what we have. I don’t have any qualms about the courts making a different decision. I knew it would go to court at some point. It’s not unreasonable to think the courts could come up with a different decision.”

But for now, Upchurch won’t say if he agrees or disagrees with the ruling. Again, as long as Rosemont is in the courts and he could be called to testify, he’s staying mum on such controversies.

Rosemont go-ahead casts aside EPA fears over water

The day after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the proposed Rosemont Mine’s final permit authorizing construction, we published this article that showed the Corps had basically cast aside a wide range of concerns raised about the mine by the Environmental Protection Agency. The story also showed how the EPA – without citing a reason – had backpedaled from an earlier threat to conduct a higher-level review of this despite its long-held threats to do so.

─ Tony Davis

The federal government issued the final permit Friday allowing the Rosemont Mine to be built despite written EPA warnings that the mine will pollute surface water and shrink, if not dry up, two nationally important streams.

In its most recent memos on the mine, obtained by the Arizona Daily Star and not previously reported, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Rosemont’s construction will destroy or reduce the size of wetlands, pools and springs, will damage Cienega Creek and Davidson Canyon, and destroy or shrink riparian areas.

The EPA’s regional office also warned that the mine’s cutoff of stormwater flows into neighboring streams and its groundwater pumping will significantly degrade federally regulated water bodies.

The impacts will be contrary to the goals of the federal Clean Water Act, the EPA said, strongly implying the act itself would be violated.

Yet, the Army Corps of Engineers issued the mine’s Clean Water Act permit Friday — the last of many federal and state permits needed to allow a Canadian company to dig a half-mile deep, mile-wide open pit in the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson.

Hudbay Minerals Inc., the Toronto-based company that proposes the mine, strongly criticized the EPA’s conclusions in its own letters to the Army Corps. It accused the EPA of exaggerating the mine’s impacts on surface water and groundwater, particularly the pollution threat.

When the Corps issued the permit, it generally agreed with Hudbay that the mine probably won’t pollute streams.

It also agreed with Hudbay that some of the EPA’s other concerns lie outside the Corps’ legal jurisdiction. These particularly include the longstanding issue of how lowering the aquifer under the mine to create the open pit will affect Cienega Creek.

And the Corps agreed with Hudbay’s view that the mine’s planned mitigation measures will prevent a reduction in stormwater flows into neighboring streams.

“Regionally rare” waters are at risk, EPA says

The Star recently obtained the EPA’s comments and Hudbay’s responses from the Army Corps through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Clean Water Act permit will allow Hudbay to place dredged and fill materials into a number of washes at the mine site to make the mine’s construction possible.

Under federal guidelines used to carry out the act, discharges of dredged or fill material into streams can’t be allowed if they will cause or contribute to significant degradation of federally regulated water bodies, the EPA said in its memos. That’s precisely what the agency says Rosemont’s construction will do.

The two EPA memos, written in November 2017, are the most recent of eight reports, letters and memos the agency has written critical of the $1.9 billion mine project since 2012.

“The Rosemont Mine will degrade and destroy waters in the Cienega Creek watershed containing regionally rare, largely intact mosaics of some of the highest quality stream and wetland ecosystems in Arizona,” the EPA concluded in one memo. “These environmental consequences are substantial and unacceptable.”

For years during the Obama administration, the EPA’s regional office said it considered Rosemont a logical project to be elevated for additional review by the EPA and the Army Corps’ Washington, D.C., staffs. But on Feb. 28, the EPA’s regional administrator, Mike Stoker, told a lawyer for tribes opposed to the mine that the agency didn’t plan to elevate the case to Washington.

Asked by the Star to explain that decision, the EPA replied Friday in an email that “based on the revised permit” details, its regional administrator “exercised his discretion not to elevate.”

“Highly speculative,” Hudbay counters

Hudbay said the impacts forecast by the EPA were “highly speculative” and based in part on U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that substantially overstated problems the mine would cause.

In reports written in February 2018, Hudbay accused the EPA of misrepresenting or exaggerating findings of the other agencies and of overstating the ecological value of washes radiating from the mine site.

Hudbay also accused the EPA of failing to acknowledge mitigation measures that the company designed to forestall the impacts the EPA predicted — measures that filled 100 pages in the Forest Service’s final Rosemont environmental impact statement.

The company also said a separate set of mitigation measures that include buying a 1,500-acre ranch along Sonoita Creek in Santa Cruz County will compensate for the mine impacts.

Details of the EPA’s findings and Hudbay’s and the Corps’ rebuttals:

1. Impacts of groundwater drawdown.

To create and maintain the mine’s open pit, Hudbay will have to withdraw groundwater from the aquifer underlying the mine site throughout the mine’s 20-year life.

The EPA, like the Forest Service, admits the computerized groundwater models that agencies have used to predict these withdrawals’ impacts on neighboring streams can’t determine how severe they’ll be. That’s because the expected decline in the aquifer from groundwater removal likely will be less than the five-foot minimum needed to make accurate predictions, the agencies say.

But even small changes in groundwater levels will have “profound adverse effects” on surface water flows and the shallow aquifer directly underneath, EPA’s memo says. One reason is that wet areas of many Southwestern aquatic habitats, including those around Cienega Creek, are shallow and susceptible to drying from small changes in surface water depths due to declining aquifers, the EPA says.

“The vulnerability of springs, seeps, stream flows, wetlands and riparian areas in the study area to groundwater drawdown is great,” the EPA said. “These aquatic habitats are regionally rare, small in area and fragmented, and are currently shrinking in response to the ongoing drought.”

Again citing Forest Service reports, the EPA warned that the mine would, over time, change three miles of Empire Gulch, 20 miles of Cienega Creek and one mile of Gardner Canyon from intermittent or perennial streams to ephemeral ones that carry water mainly during floods. These impacts are more certain to occur at Empire Gulch than at the other streams, the EPA memo says.

In its response, Hudbay says EPA’s reasoning is flawed, as are the reports upon which it relied.

The groundwater models used to make predictions upon which EPA relied found the mine’s impacts across the entire Cienega Creek Basin are likely to be small and won’t occur until far in the future, Hudbay says. But these analyses are so otherwise flawed that they greatly overstate impacts, the company says.

The company accuses the Forest Service of conducting a “simplistic” analysis to learn the worst possible impacts. The service inappropriately assumed that one foot of groundwater drawdown will trigger a one-foot reduction in Cienega Creek streamflow, for example, the company said.

The agencies’ findings “ignore the dynamic interactions between precipitation, stormwater runoff, recharge, evapotranspiration, temperature, bedrock groundwater, alluvial groundwater and natural trends that influence streamflow,” wrote Hudbay’s consultant, Westland Resources.

2. Scope of analysis.

The Army Corps’ 83-page Rosemont permit decision released Friday didn’t look at this issue. It said the impacts of lowering the water table were outside the scope of the issues it is legally authorized to review under federal guidelines for considering permits.

First, that’s because the activity the Corps can control — the discharge of fill and dredged material into washes on the mine site — will be finished before Hudbay digs out the mine pit, 2,900 feet deep, the decision said.

Similarly, while the mine’s waste rock and tailings will be dumped into much of the area where Hudbay discharges the dredged and fill material, the discharges will be the result of land clearing on the site — not from putting waste rock on it. So the mine’s operations, like the tailings and waste rock disposal, also can’t be analyzed for the Corps permit, the agency said.

Stu Gillespie, an attorney for three Indian tribes who oppose the mine, sharply criticized the Corps’ view.

“What they are saying is that Hudbay is going to fill these washes ... eliminate those washes, but at the same time, saying we have no obligation to regulate the activities that will occur on top of those washes,” he said.

“It’s almost an invitation to developers to do whatever they want, and the Corps will turn a blind eye,” said Gillespie, who said he expects the Tohono O’Odham and two other tribes will raise the issue in an upcoming lawsuit challenging the permit.

3. Water pollution.

The mine will convert washes such as Barrel Canyon at the head of the Cienega Creek Basin into pollution sources, the EPA said. Heavy metals will run off the mine and degrade the quality of Cienega and Davidson Canyon downstream, it said.

In general, the water quality of the expected mine runoff is worse than the quality of creeks downstream, the EPA said. While the Forest Service has speculated that the mine’s contamination load will slacken as it travels downstream, the EPA disagreed.

“In fact, contaminated mine runoff is additive, increasing concentrations of heavy metals to existing downstream waters and worsening water quality,” it said.

Based on the EPA’s analysis of water quality data, “stormwater runoff from the mine’s waste rock and soil cover contaminated with lead, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, silver, sodium and sulfate will degrade the water quality of Barrel Canyon, Davidson Canyon and Cienega Creek,” the agency said.

The state calls Davidson and Cienega “Outstanding Arizona Waters” that legally can’t be polluted.

But the EPA’s warnings aren’t supported by findings from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Hudbay said. ADEQ has certified that if Rosemont sticks to the various conditions and mitigation measures the state has imposed, the mine “will not cause or contribute to exceedances of surface water quality standards,” Hudbay said.

Nor will it degrade Davidson or Cienega’s water quality, ADEQ concluded.

The EPA’s “speculative” warnings also don’t recognize requirements of ADEQ’s formal pollution discharge permitting system, Hudbay added. It requires the mine to meet conditions of a general industrial permit, containing specific standards for what’s discharged and monitoring requirements.

Hudbay also noted that the Forest Service’s Rosemont environmental impact statement predicted that the water quality in runoff from the mine’s tailings and waste rock isn’t expected to degrade the quality of surface water downstream. The Forest Service predicted dissolved silver is the only metal for which runoff would exceed water-quality standards, and ADEQ foresaw little likelihood of that happening.

In the Corps’ decision Friday, it said downstream pollution can be prevented by requirements it will place in its permit for Hudbay to conduct the best possible management of pollution risks, do erosion control and comply with state requirements. Also, because the mine site occupies only 13 percent of the entire Davidson Canyon watershed, “it is not appropriate” to assume a direct link between runoff from the site and Davidson’s water quality, the Corps said.

4. Surface water reductions.

The mine’s presence will reduce stormwater discharges into Barrel and Davidson Canyon and Cienega Creek, causing huge problems for trees, shrubs and wildlife living downstream, the EPA said.

The causes will be the direct fill of washes on the mine site and modification of stormwater flows by the construction of basins and diversions designed to retain, slow or convey storm water around mine areas, the EPA said.

During the mine’s 20- to 25-year life, it will slash stormwater runoff by more than 30 to 40 percent, which will reduce streamflow by at least 7 to 10 percent at the confluence of Davidson and Cienega, EPA said, based on Forest Service estimates.

“Even small statistical changes in low-water surface flows of a few percent will cause or contribute to significant degradation of the aquatic ecosystem through loss of aquatic habitat and declines in water quality,” the EPA said.

The cutoff of stormwater at the mine site can also reduce shallow, underground water flows into the creeks, the EPA said.

Those reduced flows will in turn decrease the size and depth of existing pools in the two creeks, significantly reducing the amount of surface water available for fish and insects, including the endangered Gila chub and Gila topminnow at the Cienega-Davidson confluence, the EPA said.

Hudbay, however, says the estimated 30 to 40 percent streamflow reduction was merely an extrapolation of data done by a Forest Service consultant. While EPA believes the Forest Service’s predictions of stormwater runoff were too low, Hudbay says it has documented that the predictions are too high.

It also says its planned mitigation measures, which include removal of four downstream livestock watering tanks from the site, “will more than offset any reductions in downstream flows.”

The Army Corps’ decision Friday agreed with Hudbay, saying the Corps has determined the removal of the tanks is needed to compensate for potential loss of streamflow due to the mine.

The Corps also noted that the mine site covers only 13 percent of the entire watershed feeding Davidson Canyon downstream. Because of that, “it is not appropriate to infer a direct correlation” between mine runoff and Davidson Canyon’s water quality, the Corps said.

Ancient aquifers are dropping as Tucson's suburbs pump groundwater

This story showed how a 1993 law aimed at allowing developers to pump groundwater near their projects while recharging renewable supplies into aquifers tens of miles away had caused widespread declines of the water table across the Tucson Metropolitan Area. While it’s legal under state law to pump aquifers as far as 1,000 feet deep and still qualify for having a legally assured water supply, hydrologists are warning that this practice has the potential to cause massive subsidence of the ground, fissuring and poorer water quality – and maybe even drain entire aquifers.

─ Tony Davis

Literature promoting the SaddleBrooke Ranch development west of Oracle touts feature after feature — high Sonoran Desert terrain with beautiful mountain views, “multimillion-dollar country club amenities,” an 18-hole championship golf course and more.

The development, now roughly 1,000 homes strong with 5,600 total planned, also has delivered something not promoted — a falling water table.

Since 2009, the water level has dropped 7.3 feet a year in one of two SaddleBrooke Ranch wells and 1.7 feet a year in the other, says the Arizona Water Co., a private utility serving the development.

This is one of many suburban developments surrounding Tucson where underground water tables are falling and are likely to fall much farther over the next century, state records show.

A prime cause is a 1993 state law that allowed continued groundwater pumping for new developments as long as the developer paid a three-county water district to replenish the aquifer elsewhere with Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project canal.

One of that law’s purposes was to ensure that development could continue in areas such as SaddleBrooke Ranch, which lie miles from the CAP canal that runs west of the Tucson Mountains.

The law was pushed heavily by developers and builders, including Robson Communities, a Pinal County-based developer that is developing SaddleBrooke Ranch as well as the SaddleBrooke and Quail Creek projects in Southern Arizona.

At the same time, that law’s passage cleared the way, politically, for the state to approve separate rules intended to guarantee that no new development is built in Arizona’s urbanized counties without an assured, 100-year water supply.

The rules are aimed at carrying out Arizona’s pioneering 1980 Groundwater Management Act. It requires the Tucson, Phoenix and Prescott areas to balance pumping with recharge across their entire groundwater basins by 2025.

The entire state-run, Tucson-area water management area is on the edge of achieving balance between pumping and recharging because the city of Tucson has made heavy use of CAP water.

But water tables underneath fast-growing unincorporated suburbs are heading in the opposite direction:

• Groundwater levels are falling anywhere from 2 to 7 feet yearly in wells serving three private water companies that supply nearly 60 subdivisions belonging to the replenishment district in the Green Valley-Sahuarita area, company officials said.
• Groundwater levels under eight Tucson-area subdivisions, including SaddleBrooke Ranch, are forecast by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to drop to at least 625 feet in 100 years.
• Water levels in five are predicted to drop to at least 800 feet deep, records show. SaddleBrooke Ranch and SaddleBrooke lie in southern Pinal County, but are in the same state management area that governs water use in most of the Tucson area.

Under state law, water levels can fall 1,000 feet inside water management areas for Tucson and Phoenix and 1,100 feet in the Pinal County management area.

Hydrologists for the state water department made the forecasts around 15 to 20 years ago, as the department granted the developments certificates showing an assured 100-year supply.

The replenishment with CAP water is carried out in recharge basins along the Santa Cruz River and on Pima Mine Road, south of the Tucson city limits.

This practice of pumping one place and recharging elsewhere is “an artifact of the groundwater code,” says Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke.

Under that 1980 law, the responsibility for safe yield is considered to be basin-wide, across a broad geographic area, he said. Safe yield means balancing the amount of groundwater pumped with the amount that’s recharged back into the ground both through natural and artificial means.

The state law is intended to raise water levels in one area and lower them in another, Buschatzke said.

“It’s a problem we have discussed over the years, in terms of how to create a closer connection between where you pump the water and where you store the water,” Buschatzke said in a recent interview with KAET-TV.

In interviews with the Arizona Daily Star, three retired Tucson-area hydrologists, all with extensive experience analyzing water pumping impacts, expressed major concerns.

If water levels under these subdivisions decline as far as the state predicts, the many problems typically associated with over-pumping could occur there, the hydrologists said.

Those include subsidence, or the settling and compacting of the ground caused by excessive groundwater withdrawals that can trigger earth fissures.

Others are lower water quality, higher pumping costs and, at worst, the possibility that some aquifers might run out of water.

“The thing you have to remember is most of the water in this basin, we’re pumping water that’s 7- to 8,000 years old in many cases,” said Thomas Maddock, the retired head of the University of Arizona’s hydrology department.

“As soon as that water’s gone, we don’t have another ice age to reestablish it,” he warned.

It’s not an acceptable tradeoff to allow localized depletion of some aquifers while an entire basin balances pumping and recharge of groundwater, said Mike Carpenter, a retired U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist.

“If you draw the water level down in one of these areas, then the water is going to flow from other areas to fill in that which in essence becomes a hole,” Carpenter said.

In years to decades, that will eventually cause water-level declines, aquifer compaction, and subsidence in areas that would otherwise achieve safe yield, Carpenter said, concerns that are shared by Stanley Leake, another retired USGS hydrologist.

“It doesn’t seem square to me to draw the water table down here and recharge CAP water over there, wherever there is,” Carpenter said.

A fourth retired hydrologist, Don Pool, agreed that subsidence could become a concern in some heavily pumped areas, but said that maybe “they can trade water across the valley somehow” to alleviate problems like that in isolated areas.

“I don’t see it as a huge issue if the region is in safe yield” overall, said Pool, also formerly of the geological survey.

“You’re going to look at trouble”

The city of Tucson has averted major subsidence by halting most of its pumping in favor of importing CAP water.

But in suburban areas where heavy pumping continues, “I think some disasters are possible,” said Leake, adding the risks should be examined case by case.

In terms of sheer water availability, as levels approach 1,000 feet deep, “you’re going to look at trouble,” said Maddock.

Water quality issues would probably be the first problem because the deeper water is typically at higher temperatures, which can leach naturally occurring contaminants from surrounding rock.

Also, at deeper levels, “energy costs are pretty damn severe,” he said.

Below 500 feet, the water is also more likely to have higher fluoride levels, which can cause browning of teeth, said Carpenter.

As a well and its pumps approach 1,000 feet, you can get to the point where they can’t reach water because the well casing isn’t deep enough, he said.

You can reconfigure the well, but “then what do you do? Go down another 1,000 feet? There’s not a guarantee that you’ll get some water. You could run out of water,” Maddock said.

Risk of earth fissures

Typically, areas of a groundwater basin most prone to subsidence have larger amounts of clay, the hydrologists said. Clay layers have finer-grained sediments than sands and gravels. That makes it harder to remove water from clay layers, but makes it easier for them to compact and settle when water is removed.

The Tucson basin’s heaviest clay concentrations — typically 60% to 80% — stretch along a belt-shaped band running from central Tucson south to the booming Sahuarita and Green Valley areas, a 1987 U.S.G.S. map shows. Clay concentrations of 40% to 60% are common immediately surrounding that belt. Heading north toward Catalina and SaddleBrooke, concentrations drop to the 20% 40% range.

“I’d say somewhere from 40% to 60% might be places that should be examined a little closer to see what the susceptibility to subsidence might be,” said Leake.

The 1987 report warned that subsidence in this area could someday get as bad as in the Eloy-Picacho area of Pinal County. There, heavy agricultural pumping has caused the ground to sink up to 20 feet and triggered earth fissures up to 2 miles long.

Rate of decline

Sam Sherrill, who lives in the SaddleBrooke subdivision south of SaddleBrooke Ranch in Pinal County, is concerned about the future of the water supply lying underneath.

Now 78, he moved to SaddleBrooke five years ago from Ohio after retiring as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Planning.

He started digging into his area’s water issues about a year ago, after he would ask people where “our water is coming from, and everywhere I asked, nobody knew.”

After hitting blind alleys, he recently found Arizona Department of Water Resources records for one private water-company well serving SaddleBrooke that shows it’s been falling about 1.5 feet a year since 1995.

To him, that’s no sign of impending crisis, since that well sits at 344 feet.

At that rate, water levels will only drop to 500 feet over 100 years.

But the rate of decline could increase, because Robson is now selling homes for a neighboring, 500-home development called the Preserve at SaddleBrooke.

In addition, a map recently circulated by officials associated with the SaddleBrooke Ranch project shows another, 3,534-acre “future potential expansion area” of lands surrounding the current development.

Sherrill said he’s concerned that the pumping and replenishment of water supplies by various agencies and companies is “a game of musical chairs. There are more and more people buying fewer chairs.”

He likens the practice of people buying subdivision lots for which pumped water will be replenished elsewhere to “a water insurance scheme, like buying insurance without knowing what the risk is.”

“Something’s not right”

Down in Quail Creek, which lies east of Green Valley along Old Nogales Highway, residents Chuck Stack and John Murphy also are concerned about falling water tables under their subdivision.

Quail Creek was granted assured water supply approvals by the state for more than 4,000 homes in the 1990s and early 2000s.

They know their subdivision will keep growing, since they see new building pad locations rising along Quail Crossing Road, the main drag through the red tile roofs, golf course and country club in their community.

And since the state law doesn’t require private water providers like theirs to report to the state how fast their water levels are falling each year, they’re concerned “something’s not right here,” Murphy said.

But Stack, who moved to Quail Creek from Aurora, Illinois, in early 2019, said he’s not concerned that the region will run out of water because as a certified environmental scientist, he believes lots of improvements can be made in water conservation.

“Illinois did a better job with capturing rainfall for recharging aquifers than we do here. Arizona is probably 20 years behind Illinois,” he said.

“Arizona is going to have to get its act together and do some aggressive work on rainwater harvesting and conservation,” he said.

“It takes money, but in the long term potable water is one of the most valuable resources in the Sonoran Desert. We should treat it that way.”