Arizona proposal to regulate pumping stirs emotions in Willcox

Janet Randall told a public hearing recently that she first started noticing cracking in her house northwest of Willcox back in 2012.

Over time, the cracks grew serious due to the sinking of the area’s ground. A doorway had an eight inch crack in a wall, at least three inches of bricks by her living room were “displaced,” and she has had to get her home structurally reinforced, she said.

At the hearing, she blamed the cracks on land subsidence due to heavy, unregulated pumping of groundwater by farms in her area, lying between Willcox and the community of Bonita in Cochise County.

Even now, after some work done on the home, “My house is not sellable and and it’s unsafe,” Randall testified, although she still lives in it.

She was one of about 40 people who testified at the recent hearing in Willcox on an Arizona Department of Water Resources proposal to designate the entire, 1,911-square-mile Willcox groundwater basin as a state-run Active Management Area.

It would usher in an era of state regulation of pumping after decades of over-pumping, particularly by large nut farms and grain fields, has left behind a large number of dried-up wells and earth fissures, among other damages.

But while Randall’s story was probably the most poignant told at the contentious, three-hour hearing on Nov. 22, her view was in the minority at the session, which drew an overflow crowd of more than 300 people. Another 200 people watched the meeting online.

The majority of speakers opposed an Active Management Area out of concern it would be overregulation, the wrong solution to the over-pumping problem, and a threat to their livelihoods. They also noted that basin residents voted overwhelmingly in 2022 not to create an AMA there.

“An AMA is a blunt instrument that should not be implemented by fiat. An AMA is something that’s a last resort,” testified Robert Carlson, owner of Carlson Creek Vineyard in Willcox. “At this point in time, (the state) should be working with local constituencies to find a more nuanced way to manage water.

“An AMA is not the solution,” Carlson said. “Everyone recognizes the problem. A lot of evidence presented here (by AMA supporters) is anecdotal. They should try to work with us and find a way that can work better.”

Would take 280 years for aquifer to recover

The testimony came after ADWR’s chief hydrologist, Ryan Mitchell, presented a series of slides and statistics showing how the basin’s groundwater is depleting and wells are declining.

So much ancient groundwater has been pumped out of the Willcox Basin that if all existing wells were turned off tomorrow, it would take 280 years for the aquifer to recover naturally from recharge by rain and snow to where it was in 1940, Mitchell said.

With the land subsidence that’s already occurred in the basin, it would take a few decades for the subsidence to stop and the ground to stabilize if all pumping in the basin were to cease, he said.

For obvious reasons, pumping is not going to stop in a basin with many thousands of residents, an abundance of nut, alfalfa, corn and wheat farmers, and a growing number of active vineyards and wineries.

Instead, by Dec. 22, 30 days after the hearing, ADWR must decide whether to create an Active Management Area for the depleted basin to rein in existing pumping and to keep new irrigators out. Over time, ADWR would have to draw up a series of gradually tightening management plans to make the area’s water supply more sustainable and to gradually issue conservation requirements for farmers and other residents to reduce their pumping.

The AMA proposal has already stopped new expansion of agriculture in the basin since it was announced in late October. That freeze would be continued if ADWR creates an AMA but will be immediately lifted if ADWR decides not to create one.

While more than half the 40 people who spoke at the hearing opposed creating an AMA for the basin, more than half of 44 who submitted written comments before the hearing wrote in favor of the AMA.

More than 300 written comments sent to the state agency the day of the hearing are being processed by ADWR, and it’s not yet known how they split on the issue.

Voters rejected proposal

One who supported an AMA was Randall, who said uneven land subsidence has lowered different sections of her property at different rates.

Land subsidence is the settling of the ground as excessive pumping causes the aquifer underneath to compact. The basin today experiences up to 3 inches of subsidence yearly, up from a range of .4 to 1.2 inches a year in 1996, ADWR’s Mitchell said.

“I purchased this home 25 years ago and there was no evidence of damage,” Randall said.

Today, the house is cracking in several places and “you can see daylight between two outside walls,” she told the Star after the hearing. To get the home completely stabilized would cost her $100,000, which she says she can’t afford.

Also, “The neighbor west of me has had her well destroyed by uneven subsiding. Her well casing is torn in half. It would cost $50,000 to repair and she is hauling water. My neighbor to the south is hauling water due to a drop in water level,” Randall testified.

But Sonia Basho, a rancher from the Pearce area near Sunsites, followed Randall’s testimony with a reminder that basin residents voted overwhelmingly in 2022 to reject a citizens’ initiative that would have created an AMA there.

Basho, who works with the Cochise County Farm Bureau, blasted as “insulting” the attitudes of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and ADWR Director Tom Buschatzke on this issue. Buschatzke’s office proposed the AMA about a month ago. Hobbs, his boss, has made it clear over the past year that creating such a management area may be necessary due to the Legislature’s failure to agree on compromise legislation to regulate rural groundwater usage.

“They’re taking a dictatorial position,” Basho said, adding, “Hobbs and Buschatzke should be here in person. It is the wrong management tool.

“It is a complex, nuanced decision that should not be chosen lightly. It won’t put water back in anyone’s wells. It will adversely affect the local economy. Agriculture is the main economic driver in this valley, besides government-related jobs,” Basho testified.

Winemakers oppose AMA

Many speakers, including a bunch from Willcox’s burgeoning wine industry, echoed Basho’s comments. They said an Active Management Area isn’t the best fix for the basin’s problems, that vineyards and wineries in particular use small amounts of water, and that artificial recharge and other voluntary solutions should be tried first before resorting to mandatory measures such as an AMA. Above all, they said regulation should be done by local officials and interested parties, not by the state.

“With an AMA, at least half of the (governing) board will be out in Phoenix, and they have no interest in this county,” testified James Schmidt of the Dragoon area. “If you’re telling this county what to do with its water, the (authority) should be made up 100% by the people who live there. They’re the people who have a vested interest.

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“Why does the governor think she has the ability to tell us what to do with our property?” Schmidt asked. “The county is an agricultural county. Where there’s no water, there are no people. That’s an absolute fact.”

Supporters of an AMA said the state has already waited far too long to act, even as stories continue to mount of homeowners’ wells drying up. They say the Legislature has done nothing to address the problem and that the solution proposed earlier this year by the Republicans who control the Legislature, Senate Bill 1221, is totally inadequate. It died on the final day of the legislative session after all sides failed to agree on a compromise measure.

It would have allowed creation of rural groundwater management areas that for the first time could have mandated some conservation in the Willcox basin and two others. But it would have limited mandatory conservation to 15% over the management areas’ first 20 years, which bill opponents said is inadequate.

Lucia Kiesel, who lives in the Sunsites area southwest of Willcox, wrote ADWR on Nov. 7 that a well her family shares with a neighbor was at 230 feet deep when drilled in 1993, but that ADWR just measured that well at 371 feet, for an average annual decline of 4.5 feet.

“We already had to deepen our existing well 12 years ago at considerable expense and when (not if) it goes dry again we will have to drill a new well to a depth of at least 800 feet,” Kiesel said. “I can’t imagine what that will cost.

“Wells are declining across the entire basin including domestic and small farm irrigation wells — we are all impacted. We need the AMA to begin the process to bring this aquifer back in balance. We have to stop the growth of new irrigation now — it should have been done years ago — and then we have to begin the process to reduce current irrigation,” she wrote.

It’s “unconscionable,” Kiesel wrote, that new land is being cleared and new trees are being planted within a few miles of her home, and it’s “morally corrupt to seek to profit on this land knowing what is happening in this aquifer.”

AMA opponent Chad Preston of Birds and Barrels Vineyards in Arizona testified, “We’re not just winemakers and grape growers. We’re your neighbors. We’re very empathetic to foundations breaking and wells collapsing. But if you put in an AMA, nothing will change. All these people pumping water will stay the same. You’ll be grandfathered in.”

He added, “We are at zero groundwater overdraft in our vineyards; we’re experimenting with technology to reduce our water use by 40% to 50%.”

Ground fissures

Nobody who testified at the hearing disputed that the basin’s chronic over-pumping of groundwater is a huge problem.

Mitchell testified that the over-pumping has lowered a section of the basin’s water table about 400 feet since 1940. That’s in the Kansas Settlement area east of U.S. 191, an area where one big dairy was expanded in 2015 and another one has been operating since the late 2010s. Both dairies, owned by Minnesota-based Riverview LLP, rely for cattle feed on alfalfa, corn and other crops grown in the area of the dairies that use lots of water.

Pumping since 1940 removed 5.7 million acre-feet from the basin, the hydrologist said. That amount is equivalent to more than 5 years’ worth of Central Arizona Project water deliveries from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson.

The department currently measures water levels every year at 48 index wells it runs, and has four more index wells that report water levels to the state automatically, Mitchell testified. Of all the index wells ADWR has run over the decades, 71 have gone dry, 29 have dried up in the past decade, and the rate of such wells drying up has accelerated, Mitchell told the hearing.

Mitchell showed the crowd several photos showing where land subsidence has lowered the ground in various parts of the basin, and more photos showing where the subsidence caused earth fissures to open up, in some cases quite wide and for long distances.

The state had mapped 48.76 miles of earth fissures in the basin — the most of any Arizona groundwater basin — by the end of July 2023.

“We know it’s gone up since then,” Mitchell said. “We have earth fissures that open up after every rainstorm.”

Also, “the rate of subsidence has increased year after year,” he said.

State Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton, a Tucson Democrat whose district includes part of Cochise County, said she’s enthusiastic that “science is being followed and the AMA is finally being considered.”

On the other hand, “I also feel we failed people of the Willcox Basin,” by the state not enacting a law to set up a local rural groundwater management system, she said.

“Our lack of action resulted in too many wells going dry and peoples’ livelihoods ruined,” Stahl-Hamilton said.

Melanie Lawrence, an AMA supporter and Willcox Basin resident, added, “I understand the concerns of ranchers and farmers who say their livelihoods will be diminished. But I am just as much a part of the economy as they are. I pay my taxes. I’m retired, (but) I work part time.

“When my well drops to the point where I have to find $40,000 or $50,000 to put a well casing in to lower it down, if someone is willing to start a Go Fund Me project so I can deepen my well, I’m all for it.”

But Barbara Pierce, a Willcox-area vineyard owner representing the Arizona Wine Growers Association, told the hearing that creating an AMA would have a “devastating” effect on the region’s “vibrant” wine and grape-growing industry, preventing it from realizing its potential. She was one of several farmers including a number of grape growers and vineyard operators to utter similar warnings that day.

The industry’s development has been with the intent of developing grapes with low water usage, Pierce said.

“We feel that subjecting wine growers and vineyards to the regulation of this AMA is the wrong approach. Arizona wine grapes are low water use, high value crops.

“Establishment of an AMA would have serious, irreparable negative consequences, not only to our members, and severely diminish their ability to grow grapes, manufacture its wines and produce high quality economic development in rural Arizona,” Pierce testified.

“Conservation is not driving farmers out of business”

The idea that creating a Willcox Basin AMA will drive farmers out of business is “just silly,” countered Kathleen Ferris, a former ADWR director from the 1980s who is now a researcher for Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

Conservation requirements in an AMA are set in state law, and they are not “you shall reduce water use by 25%,” said Ferris, who didn’t attend the public hearing. They are, the director shall adopt “reasonable reductions” in uses, and water “duties” — legal maximum amounts of groundwater that can be applied to an acre of land — that reflect conservation practices that would be reasonable for the area, she said.

“If you’re farming and you’ve been farming the last five years and you’ve got a lot of land in cultivation, there’s no way this designation will hurt,” Ferris said. “There’s just not this freewheeling ability where DWR cuts water use 50% in the first five years.”

Those who say an AMA won’t help the aquifer because many farmers will have grandfathered water rights from the start of its existence are also wrong, she said. That’s because there will be conservation requirements, although not as strong sometimes as she would like.

“Conservation is not driving farmers out of business,” she said. “What’s driving farmers out of business is the lack of water.”