Arizona proposes to pull back from its flat ban on building new subdivisions served on groundwater in the booming fringes of Phoenix.
A draft of a new proposal would partially walk back a flat ban that the state imposed on the approval of new developments in part of suburban Phoenix that use groundwater. The new draft would, critics say, allow such growth to occur under specific circumstances.
The practice that would now be allowed is commonly called “commingling,” and the Arizona Department of Water Resources had long opposed it in the past.
The agency drew national attention when it decided to not certify any new subdivisions in some of Phoenix’s fastest-growing suburbs that would rely on what a computer model analysis had found to be an over-allocated groundwater supply. The decision provoked an outcry from homebuilders and developers because it will put long-term limits on new housing development in areas with some of the fastest demand for it, in one of the fastest growing counties in the country that faces a major shortage of affordable housing.
Environmentalists and other advocates for tough groundwater regulation praised the earlier rule as a recognition of a reality that the area’s groundwater supplies are limited and declining.
The new proposal, however, would allow groundwater to be used for new subdivisions when “commingling” is used.
“In a commingled system, the (subdivision) applicant can’t avoid having some groundwater delivered to the subdivision in question. So homeowners in the new subdivision won’t have an assured water supply because they would bear the risks of groundwater shortage — a shortage that is already demonstrated in the Phoenix and Pinal AMA,” said Kathy Ferris, a former ADWR director and longstanding advocate for restrictions on groundwater pumping across the state. She was referring to the state-run Active Management Areas that govern groundwater use in urban area basins.
But Ferris’ concerns are off base, said Spencer Kamps, a vice president and lobbyist for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.
“This is about combining various water supplies to serve development. Every national standard when it comes to utility system requires redundancy and interconnection It’s not a physical availability issue. It’s an accounting issue. You gotta make sure water is in the system. Phoenix does it all the time.”
Kamps also isn’t happy, however, with proposals in the new draft that require water providers to reduce their use of groundwater by 25% to 30% when they bring in alternative water supplies to serve new growth. And Ferris is opposed to one of those proposals that is reducing by 5% the the amount that water providers would have to cut back on their existing groundwater use
ADWR spokesman Doug MacEachern declined on Tuesday to immediately respond to questions from the Star about the department’s new draft proposal. The department sent copies of it late last week to members of a committee that advised the water policy body on the new regulations and to members of interest groups that have been involved in this issue.
“These are works in progress. As we have explained previously, it is not productive to discuss these issues as if they are finished products. They aren’t. In fact, it would be inappropriate on our part to do so,” MacEachern said.
Department officials are hoping to publicly post the draft rules soon, “but we can’t say with certainty when that will be,” MacEachern said. “A great deal of time and effort is going into considering and incorporating stakeholder input. We have not yet completed that work.”
The new draft rules’ stated purpose is to give municipal water departments and private water companies an easier, alternative path to be designated by the state as having an assured water supply for 100 years — without increasing their groundwater use.
Kamps and others in the homebuilding community have particularly hoped the new rules will allow the city of Buckeye west of Phoenix to be designated as having an assured supply. That would allow rapidly growing Buckeye, one of the U.S.’ fastest growing cities, to keep allowing new subdivisions that otherwise would be stopped for not having an assured water supplies. Many new Buckeye subdivisions, including one for 100,000 homes, are now partially or completely stalled due to the ADWR rules approved last year.
“The process will not be successful; unless Buckeye can become a designated provider,” Kamps said. For now, it’s “a million dollar question that I can’t answer” as to whether the new rule will accomplish that, he said.
Buckeye officials declined Tuesday to say whether they support the new rules. City of Buckeye spokesman John O’Halloran said in a statement to the Star, “The collaboration with Governor Hobbs and the substantial progress made in identifying our state’s water challenges over the past year have been invaluable. Buckeye also looks forward to working with her office and ADWR to finalizing the Alternative Designation of Assured Water Supply that works not only for our city, but other non-designated cities and water providers.”
Supporters of a new process to designate assured supplies have said that would force cities and private water companies to use more renewable supplies such as water from Phoenix’s Salt River, or imported groundwater — such as the Harquahala Valley, located well west of Phoenix.
Making it easier for cities and water companies to get these designations also would let them get around the state’s ban on groundwater for new growth as long as they can bring in renewable supplies. In return, the new proposal would require them to buy an additional 25% renewable supplies on top of what’s needed to serve new growth — and use that 25% to replace some of their existing groundwater use.
A Water Policy Council appointed by Gov. Katie Hobbs had recommended that proposal to the governor. It appears to have made its way into the new draft largely intact. But the commingling provision wasn’t contained in the water council’s proposal to the governor, which is one reason that Ferris is concerned that it’s there now.
It’s a separate provision in the new draft ADWR proposal that deals with certificates of assured water supply. They are issued to developers and/or homebuilders of individual, new subdivisions. The designations are granted to cities and water companies that service numerous subdivisions well as apartments, stores and industries.
The commingling proposal would allow groundwater to become a part of an assured water supply under certain circumstances. It could happen if the assured supply certificate applicant can show that another supply will also be used that hasn’t been served to other users in that development’s service area since 2022 and that it’s not another groundwater supply from that same area. Plus, the city that would serve this new development would have to come up with 30% more of the renewable supply to replace some of its existing groundwater use.
Ferris argued that allowing mingling of groundwater with a new alternative supply would “dilute” the value of the newly imported supply. In general, she would prefer not to have any more subdivisions certified for having an assured water supply and switch completely to having entire city or private water company service areas designated with assured supplies.
“Certificates ... are never reviewed over their lifetime. Designations apply to all uses of water served by the water provider and must be reviewed by ADWR every 10 to 15 years,” now a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.
Kamps opposes the requirements the commingling provision and the alternative designation to bring in 25% to 30% additional supplies because, he says, the burden of paying for that supply will fall on homeowners because only new homes are required to meet the assured water suppl rules for new development.
“We opposed homeowners paying for more than 100% of that new water,” he said. “We’re not opposed to commercial, industrial and rental developments paying more than 100.”
But the new state proposal’s plan to reduce the amount of new water supplies that newly designated water providers must bring in to replace groundwater means less reduction in groundwater withdrawals, said Ferris, adding, “We want to see it reduced as much as possible.”
