Gov. Hobbs pushes tough pumping curbs in Willcox Basin visit

Willcox officials say they had to drill two of their three city wells much deeper this summer due in part to agricultural pumping lowering the underlying water table.

Vance Williams of the Sunizona area near Chiricahua National Monument — and near a big, water-slurping dairy — said he expects his well to go dry again, two years after it went dry and was deepened at the dairy company’s expense. He said he won’t be able to deepen it again, and he can’t afford to move.

Sharon Hill Hubbard, who lives north of Willcox with her husband on 10 acres, says she still has a functional well but it pumps a lot less water than it used to. It pumps about 100 gallons a day. She and her husband used to have a cow, a pig and a horse but now they run no livestock there and have trimmed their garden’s water use by 30%.

“We have children that would love to move to our place. We’re getting older. Quite honestly, we have room, but we don’t have the water,” Hubbard said.

The city officials and the two homeowners were among several people who poured out fear, anger and pleas Thursday to Gov. Katie Hobbs. They’re seeking state-mandated measures to tighten up on now-unregulated agricultural groundwater pumping they say is depleting their aquifer.

“Throughout the area, wells are going dry. The population is very low income, with 23% of city residents living below the poverty line,” City Manager Caled Blaschke told the governor. “We have an elderly community on fixed incomes.

“City wells are at risk. It endangers our economy and endangers our birding habitat and our natural habitat,” the manager said.

Hobbs visited the Willcox area for the better part of Thursday. Her trip came a little more than two months after efforts failed in the Legislature to pass a bill that would for the first time have allowed some state restrictions on rural groundwater pumping.

She and legislators of both parties continue to negotiate over a possible future bill, perhaps to be discussed in a special legislative session later this year. But the two sides are still divided over some major issues. The prospect of successful legislation is uncertain.

Yet Democratic and Republican legislators continue to say they’re close to an agreement, one that would have to be etched into law in a special session. They hope to have it done by the end of 2024.

Hobbs “prepared to act”

In between conversations with city officials, residents and a prominent chile grower, Hobbs told reporters who accompanied her on the trip that she is fully prepared to take executive action if needed to require state-level management of pumping in places like Willcox.

She and her entourage also briefly visited a major, 13-year-old fissure that cuts up to 20 feet deep and 10 feet wide along a road south of Willcox near the location of a dairy that is a major groundwater user in the basin.

Arizona water officials say this and other fissures in the Willcox area were caused by the collapsing of the ground — called subsidence — that’s typically triggered by major over-pumping. Hobbs said the sight of the fissure was “alarming.”

But she told reporters after her talks with residents that she would still prefer to see legislation passed than take executive action, not least because she believes that would be a more effective way to protect rural aquifers. The most likely administrative actions would be to designate the Willcox Basin and others as an Irrigation Non-Expansion Area or an Active Management Area.

Both measures would halt the continued expansion of well drilling in places like the Willcox Basin by large corporate farmers and smaller irrigators alike. And that expansion is proceeding rapidly in the Willcox area.

Irrigators have filed nearly 400 notices of intent with the Arizona Department of Water Resources to drill new wells in that basin over the past 18 months, Patrick Adams, a water policy staffer for Hobbs, told Willcox’s mayor and city manager.

ADWR released a spreadsheet on Friday showing notices of intent to drill, replace or modify about 340 wells in the basin from March 1, 2023 through Sept. 5 of this year. The agency will release a bigger list this week including well drilling notices since December 2022, ADWR spokeswoman Shauna Evans said.

But Hobbs said she believes executive actions wouldn’t be best suited for rural areas like the Willcox Basin and likely wouldn’t be as effective in reducing pumping as other measures that could be accomplished through legislation.

She declined in response to a reporter’s question to say how long she is prepared to wait for legislation to succeed until she takes administration action instead.

Saying she remains optimistic about the prospect of legislative compromise, Hobbs added, “We’re hearing directly how urgent the situation is now. It’s clear action needs to happen. I’m hoping we can we get something this legislative session. We’re prepared to act if the legislative path doesn’t work.”

After listening to residents pour out tales of dry and drying wells at a house in the unincorporated community of Pearce, southwest of Willcox, Hobbs also said, “I hear all the time peoples’ wells are going dry. It is quite different sitting at a table hearing people say ‘my well is going dry’ and what it means to them.

“You think about property values and the ability to pass that onto their family. Hearing that firsthand is incredibly impactful and underscores the urgency of the situation we’re in right now.”

Logjams in negotiations

Legislative Democrats and Republicans continue to disagree over two major provisions of any prospective rural groundwater legislation, although they’ve managed to compromise on numerous other issues.

Different legislation favored by different parties would both allow for creation of rural groundwater management areas. They would have authority to regulate and to some extent reduce groundwater use within affected basins such as Willcox.

One issue is how big of a cut in water use farmers in affected rural groundwater areas would have to take.

The Republican-backed bill that died on the Legislature’s closing day this year, Senate Bill 1221, would have allowed a 10% cut in a management area’s first 10 years and another 5% in the next 10 years. No farmer could be cut by more than 2% in a single year. Democrats have favored what they call a more flexible measure that would allow for larger cuts if hydrologic studies and other scientific studies found they were necessary.

The other split is over which groundwater basins would be covered by the new legislation. The Republican-backed bill would limit coverage to the Willcox, Gila Bend and Hualapai basins in Cochise, Maricopa and Mohave counties, respectively. They’re generally considered to be the most groundwater-short basins in the state following decades of unregulated agricultural pumping.

Democrats wanted more flexibility in legislation to allow for more basins to be covered if their aquifers were deteriorating enough to warrant that.

Late in the week, the Arizona Farm Bureau and Senate Republican committee chair Sine Kerr separately released a study done by University of Arizona economists that concluded the 10% reduction in pumping that both parties have agreed on would cause major economic impacts to farmers in the Willcox and Gila Bend basins.

For the Willcox Basin, such a cut would result in economic losses of $19 million to $23 million over a decade if the 10% cut occurred immediately, and of $10.3 million to $12.4 million if the cuts were imposed gradually over 10 years.

The losses would double if a 20% cut were imposed, the researchers concluded. The losses would be significantly greater in the Gila Bend Basin, where farmers use an estimated twice as much water as those in the Willcox Basin, the study found.

Kerr, who chairs the Senate Energy, Natural Resources and Water Committee, said, “The mandatory 10% conservation requirements over 10 years contained in Senate Bill 1221 offer significantly more total water saved than either an AMA or INA can provide. Notably, this was agreed to by the water users who would be the ones actually forced to reduce their water use with significant economic consequences.”

Importantly, that bill’s mandatory conservation requirements are not limited to the 10%-15% overall reductions, because any transfer of water rights in one of the affected basins would be subject to another 15% water use cut, Kerr said. Under that bill’s provisions, “we expect significant water savings from transfer activity,” she told the Arizona Daily Star.

Standing outside Pearce chile farmer Ed Curry’s house, Democrat Hobbs accused Republicans of “stall tactics” with their warnings of economic dislocation from water use curbs.

“We’ve seen the urgency of the situation here. We need to take action sooner rather than later. These folks we talked to today whose wells are going dry, they don’t have time to wait for more study,” Hobbs said.

Curry said that even if that study’s numbers are correct, “if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to face the same consequences” anyway.

He gave the governor and her staff a tour of the Curry Seed and Chile Co. plant where he grows, processes and dries chiles for use in enchilada sauce, tabasco sauce, chile paste and other ingredients. The plant and his 2,000 acres of chile fields are about 80 miles southeast of Tucson.

In an interview, he said his view in support of tougher groundwater legislation has the support of owners of 90% of all farm acreage in the Willcox Basin, including that of its largest water user, Riverview LLP, which owns two dairies there. The dairy spokesman, Kevin Wulf, didn’t return an email seeking comment on the groundwater issue.

“The water is not there. The water is leaving. I’m telling you it’s going to be a 30-40 percent cut,” said Curry, a member of Hobbs’ Water Policy Council that late last year recommended stricter measures than what was in the Republicans’ bill.

Farm Bureau President Stephanie Smallhouse said it’s not reasonable to require farmers to cut more than 15% until we learn more about technological improvements that could improve conservation practices, and of the economic impacts to rural communities.

“At this point, we feel like 15% is a huge amount. They’re acting like it’s nothing. If the other side truly wants to have a sustainable agricultural industry in these communities, to ask for more than a 15% cut in first 15 to 20 years is not reasonable,” Smallhouse said.

“They’re wanting us to agree to draconian cuts before a designation has been made” of any rural groundwater basin management areas, she said.

“They want something in statute to completely wipe out a farming community, before we know where those designations will be made. I don’t understand why they don’t think what we offer is reasonable. Ten to 15% cuts will cause harm to farms. It’s extremely painful.

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“It’s a serious offer. For them to act like it’s nothing is just hurting negotiations,” Smallhouse said.

Wells dropping

Willcox officials told Hobbs Thursday that one of their two main wells started “pumping air” in May. That came after a commercial user came in and started pumping massive amounts of water from a well located 400 feet from the city well. The well’s water level had fallen below where its pump stood.

While the commercial well was the immediate cause of the city well’s shutdown, Deputy Willcox City Manager Michael Resare told the Star later that both city wells, located in the same area, had already been dropping for years due to agricultural pumping. The city wells lie outside city limits in farming country because the water quality there is better, officials said.

Both wells’ pumping capacity dropped about 40% since they were installed due to groundwater depletion, a city memo said. The two wells’ water levels had dropped 60 and 75 feet, respectively, since the middle 2000s, the memo said.

Since May, officials have lowered both wells’ pumps to 550 feet deep from 266 and 350 feet, respectively, but that’s as far down as they can be lowered, Mayor Laws said.

Their water levels are now in the middle 200s, but if they fall below 550 feet, we have to drill new wells,” the mayor said.

Laws said he has been told both first- and secondhand that a number of farmers in that area — he couldn’t say how many — are now pumping out but not using extra water to gain more water rights for use at a time when water regulations arrive. The theory is that if they use more water now, that would give them more water rights they could claim through grandfathering.

“Farmers used to take care of the water. They would just lay out land on their own, lay out 1,000 acres, 2,000 acres, 3,000 acres,” Laws said, referring to the practice of fallowing land to stop using the water

“They just couldn’t afford to keep pumping a well, 600 feet every day. That is $75,000 a month. Now, you’ve got these big guys coming in here, digging deeper, deeper and deeper. They try to tell me they’re digging out of a deeper aquifer,” Laws said.

“There’s no water”

Vance Williams said he left his Sunizona home in 2019 and moved back two years later, along with a daughter and boyfriend. The daughter and boyfriend got there a week before him, and “she called me and said there’s no water,” Williams said.

“I said ‘you must have turned it on wrong’. I walked her through what you need to do to turn the house back on. She got nothing still. I told her ‘OK, we’re on our way. I’ll deal with it when I get there’.

“When I pulled in, the first thing I tried to do was turn the water on. Nothing. I think I even heard the pump click on, but nothing was going on. I ran into my neighbor that day. I went over and saw him. He told me his was dry.”

He and his neighbor started talking, and he learned that Riverview’s Turkey Creek Dairy had opened about a quarter-mile from his house while Williams was away.

“And we were seeing massive increase in sprinklers” nearby, Williams said. “I thought Arizona had to have laws to keep this from becoming an issue for residents.”

For the next six months, he used three- and five-gallon jugs to haul water from stores in Douglas, close to 70 miles away, he said.

“We only had so many jugs of water. … You’re tying to figure out what to do to wash your dishes, how to bathe, how to clean the house,” he said.

Finally, he found a local business to sell him water. “It took every dime I had left” to buy the water and to buy a 2,500-gallon tank to store it in, he said. He used a small pump to pressurize the house’s system to accommodate the outside water, and had to replumb some fixtures — “every ounce of energy I had went into that.

“We got 1,500 gallons a month in water. We had water coming into the sink, into the toilet and we could use the shower,” he said. “But we were not living much better. I couldn’t clean the way I wanted, I had to go to the laundromat every month and I was still debating, ‘Do I take a shower today?’”

Then in mid-2022, not long after he gave a press interview about his troubles, a top Riverview official called him and offered to deepen his well, he said. The dairy company also paid to connect his neighbor’s house to that well with a pipe, he said.

The well is now at 750 feet deep and its pump is at 460 to 480 feet, about 100 feet lower than it was when the well dried up, he said.

But “from what I’m told, when the well goes dry again in 10 years, I won’t be able to do anything with it,” Williams said.

Lowering the pump again won’t be possible because the well casing’s pipe is small and made of plastic, he said. “The ground is going to give here or there, and I have a feeling it will pinch the plastic pipe against the pump pipe” to keep it from pulling up water, he said.

As for his neighbors in Sunizona, “A ton of people are dry out here,” he said.

“Pumping air”

Sharon Hill Hubbard and her husband Michael Hubbard have lived in a house a little north of Willcox since 2004. They didn’t pay much attention to water levels until they began to drop quickly in 2013, after the area’s Coronado Dairy — then owned by a predecessor of Riverview’s — and farms filled with pecan trees moved into the area.

Since then, they’ve made adjustments to their lifestyle to keep their well from drying up, she told Hobbs at Thursday’s gathering in Pearce. Her husband used bartering to acquire two concrete septic tanks and later added a polyurethane tank, giving them the ability to store 4,000 gallons of water on site.

While she lived in Tucson for much of that time, she would drive to the Willcox area on weekends. She would run the well more heavily on those days to water a few fruit trees and a 30-by-30-foot garden, along with a cow, pig, a calf and two horses.

The watering was cut back during the week to give their well time to recover, she said. Plus, they began using solar power to pump from the well, which pumps much more slowly, she said.

“If you get to the point where you’re pumping air, which I do every day, it doesn’t damage the pump,” Hill Hubbard told the Star later.

“We made the decision over 15 years to lower our expectations, and lower them again,” she said. They eventually got rid of all their livestock and scaled back their garden to save water, she said.

Recently, two neighbors whose property adjoins theirs had their wells go dry. At one house, the owner who bought it from out of state and wasn’t aware of water issues, didn’t move in for two months after buying it, and the well “hardened off,” she said. That meant water won’t come through perforations in its casing, making the well not usable.

“Now, they’re trucking the water in,” she said, with the first water delivery occurring Aug. 30.

In her neighborhood, she sees more and more vehicles hauling water in pickup trucks and one bringing in a large water tank on a trailer, she said.

“To see an actual water truck similar to see what you see on construction sites, hauling water, it’s eye popping to see so many people hauling water,” she said.

“There’s a very, very long waiting list to get a well dug.”

“Consent of the governed”

As for the issue of how many groundwater basins should be covered by new state legislation, Sen. Kerr noted that the bill Republicans supported included “all priority basins” that advocates on both sides of the issue have identified as needing additional groundwater management tools.

“Throughout this process, our efforts have been grounded in the principle of ‘consent of the governed,’” Kerr said.

During the legislative debate over rural groundwater issues, citizens of the three basins now covered by the Republican-backed bill had a chance to make their voices heard at hearings, she said.

Once a bill is enacted covering those basins, “a future Legislature can add any additional basins requesting the tool, but local constituents will be afforded the proper opportunity for public comment through the legislative process,” Kerr said.

But on Thursday at the Curry chile farm, Hobbs told reporters that the Republican bill’s limit on the number of basins covered “is one of our big problems with it.

“Under my watch, we need more flexibility, and not wait till basins are as troubled as the Willcox basin is today, to have legislative tools in the statute to help them,” the governor said.

“It took from the 1980s to get where we are today (with water regulation). We don’t have time to wait now, and if other basins get into more trouble, we need to take action quickly. We need a tool available.”