Arizona officials to consider groundwater rule changes behind closed doors

State officials have closed to the public a meeting set for for Thursday, July 13 to discuss proposals for changing rules and possibly the state law requiring assured, 100-year water supplies for new subdivisions built in urban areas such as Tucson and Phoenix.

The meeting, originally planned to be open to the public, will be of a subcommittee of the State’s Assured Water Supply Committee. Behind closed doors, it will take up dozens of proposals from the committee’s 15 members. The proposals represent the first major opportunity to revise the law and/or the rules since the mid-1990s. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs wants them to be approved by the end of 2023 by the Governor’s Water Policy Council before going to the Arizona Department of Water Resources and/or the Legislature for full consideration.

Because of the importance of the issue, two committee members, state Sen. Priya Sundareshan of the Tucson area and former Arizona water director Kathleen Ferris of Phoenix, are raising concerns about the closed meeting. It could be the first of several closed meetings. They say the public should be in on discussions of these issues from the start.

“The decision to shift the conversation to private subcommittee meetings is inconsistent with the governor’s January pledge to tackle our water issues openly. We need an inclusive, public process if the council is to have any success building unified, bipartisan solutions that will be supported by the general public,” said Ferris, an Arizona State University water researcher and a crusader for tougher groundwater supply rules.

But another committee member and former top ADWR official, Doug Dunham, said, “I don’t have much heartburn” about the prospect of private meetings. Ultimately, the issues will be subject to a “robust public debate” before the full committee votes on whether to recommend specific proposals, he said.

An agenda for the private meeting shows these issues will be considered:

— The use of “comingling” of renewable surface water supplies or treated sewage effluent with non-renewable groundwater supplies as a way for a water user or water company to show they have an assured water supply. Its use is now restricted by state rules, but some committee members and ADWR have suggested expanding its use to allow water users having access to both kinds of supplies to more freely mix them.

— The use of future plans, promises or commitments to build additional water infrastructure that will deliver renewable supplies, to bolster a water provider’s claim of having an assured water supply. This tactic was successfully used in the 1980s and 1990s to accommodate new development in cities and towns that have access to Central Arizona Project water from the Colorado River.

— Ways to create incentives to develop farmland for subdivisions and other non-irrigation uses, because subdivisions typically use less water than farms.

“In my 26 years of experience with this issue, a lot of times, you get people in a less public forum, you can pry what you really need out of them and arrive at a mutually agreeable position, after they yell, cuss and scream,” said Dunham, now water resources manager for Epcor Water, a private company serving much of the Phoenix area as well as Tubac south of Tucson. “The public is going to be able to see everything and debate whatever the final recommendations are.”

Sundareshan, however, said, “I was surprised to learn that it was a closed meeting, and I do think it is concerning that the public does not have access to the meeting. It’s still very early in the governor’s water policy council process. We haven’t done much quite yet. It is concerning the public does not have access to these meetings.”

The meeting and the proposals to be considered come about two weeks after a much smaller group of suggestions were aired at a public meeting of the full Assured Water Supply Committee.

Originally, Thursday’s meeting was scheduled as a public meeting of the full committee, to be complete with an audio recording for future use by people who couldn’t get there. The full committee’s first meeting, on June 27, also allowed the public and committee members who couldn’t attend in person to watch it online.

But on July 5, an ADWR official emailed members to notify them that, “In order to meet the Governor’s request for Council proposals by December of this year, we are changing the upcoming tentatively scheduled AWS Committee to an AWS Subcommittee meeting.” AWS is short for Assured Water Supply.

“We are asking that for the subcommittee meetings attendance be in person. We are planning for the subcommittee meetings to be working meetings and very interactive,” Trent Blomberg, ADWR’s council coordinator, told committee members in the email. “We fully expect over the next few months there will be many subcommittee meetings as we work through the details on recommendations to the governor and, consequently, there is a good chance that some of you will not be able to attend every meeting. There will be an opportunity to catch up at the next meeting.”

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Christian Slater, Hobbs’ communications director, noted that for the full committee meetings and other open meetings, “you can find full recordings of meetings, agendas and presentations posted on ADWR’s website.”

ADWR spokesman Doug MacEachern told the Star there will be no public meetings in July of either the Assured Water Supply Committee or the Rural Groundwater Committee, convened by the Governor’s Office to tackle groundwater issues in rural areas where no regulation of groundwater use currently exists.

Having private subcommittee meetings will allow members “to immediately begin working through potential policy proposals to meet the Council’s December deadline to bring recommendations forward,” he said. “These meetings are only open to subcommittee members and technical subject matter experts, as needed.”

The entire process concerning the water policy council and its committees was put together by the Governor’s Office and ADWR, he said.

The next public meeting of the full committee is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 15. 

The Star asked five other committee members how they felt about the use of closed meetings. Three, Phoenix water resources planner Cynthia Campbell, Tucson Water Director John Kmiec and Phoenix-area homebuilders lobbyist Spencer Kamps, declined comment.

Two others, Metro Water General Manager Joseph Olsen and Joe Singleton, executive director of the Pinal County Augmentation Authority, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

Campbell said “I see both sides” of the open-closed meeting issue, and that she’s more interested in the outcome of these discussions than the process. She’s a water resources adviser for the city of Phoenix.

In discussing the use of closed committee meetings, Dunham recalled “the legend of the groundwater code,” a reference to the creation of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980, the state’s pioneering groundwater law.

He recalled that before a final version of the law was adopted in public by the Legislature and signed by then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, “the key players got together at a hot springs with a bottle of whiskey and worked out their general parameters.

“Then, they went back to their constituencies, came up with the code, presented it to the public and worked out the final details,” Dunham said.

Ferris, who in the 1970s was executive director of the State Groundwater Management Study Commission, said it’s “really, really hard” to liken what happened then to what’s going on now. First, the commission held two years of public meetings, with experts making public presentations and “all kinds of input of policy ideas” occurring in the open, she said.

It wasn’t until after all the public meetings and after the U.S. Interior secretary threatened to cut off Central Arizona Project funding unless a groundwater law was passed that the major water interest groups — cities, mines and farms — went into closed sessions with Babbitt to hammer out the law’s details, she said.

“My point is, we have all of these concepts now for proposals that haven’t been aired or vetted fully, and now we suddenly have a whole bunch of new ones,” and closed meetings are already happening, Ferris said.