The residents of Southern Arizona’s most imperiled groundwater basin got angry when outsiders decided to impose regulations on them.
The state Department of Water Resources is establishing an active management area in this Cochise County area, where groundwater levels are dropping at alarming rates. It’s an overdue effort.
But in a story Sunday, my colleague Tony Davis noted that while some residents of the Willcox basin support the state getting involved, most who have spoken up oppose it, some angrily.
One rancher called it a “dictatorial decision.” A winemaker said it is “a blunt instrument that should not be implemented by fiat.”
“At this point in time, (the state) should be working with local constituencies to find a more nuanced way to manage water,” that winemaker, Robert Carlson, said.
If they really want to blame someone for the outside imposition of groundwater regulation, they should look in the mirror. The residents of the Willcox basin are responsible.
They have, through their longtime representative in the Legislature, killed effort after effort to establish new groundwater regulation regimes that local people could have controlled, with appropriate “nuance.”
“They had options before this point, and they chose not to take these options,” former state Rep. Regina Cobb, a Kingman Republican, told me Tuesday. “They could have had local control.”
The person most responsible for killing these bills, even carefully considered ones brought by fellow Republicans, is Rep. Gail Griffin, the Hereford Republican. Session after session, fellow legislators have worked earnestly and proposed laws intending to begin curtailing the overdraft of groundwater in threatened basins around the state.
Year after year, in her position as chair of the Natural Resources, Energy & Water committee, Griffin has refused to even bring the bills to a committee hearing, including many of Cobb’s. It could have helped the Willcox basin, said the director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, Sandy Bahr.
“During that time, she has blocked numerous bills that would have made a difference for Willcox and not just legislation from the Democrats,” Bahr said via email.
A well head stands in a field owned in Elfrida in the Willcox Basin.
When I say that Willcox basin residents are responsible for Griffin, I don’t say that casually. I went back through the last four legislative elections, since Griffin switched back from the Senate to the House, and compiled the results in Cochise County’s 11 precincts in the Willcox basin.
Every election, even when there were four candidates running, Griffin was the top vote-getter in the Willcox basin.
They knew what they were getting with Griffin, and they embraced it. She was a candidate, funded by agribusiness and real estate interests, who would reliably stand in the way of any effort to regulate the groundwater free-for-all in rural Arizona.
Cobb isn’t the only current or former legislator, not even the only Republican, to protest Griffin’s obstructionism. In late 2023, Sen. Sonny Borrelli and Rep. Leo Biasiucci lashed out at Griffin for blocking their bill letting rural counties establish groundwater stewardship areas, and later insulting their bills as part of the “liberal agenda.”
Borrelli, a reliably right-wing Republican, has argued that Arizona’s lack of regulation on groundwater pumping makes it “the laughingstock of the world,” as outsiders come in to exploit our groundwater, making it ever harder for local residents to reach the water with their wells.
“Obstructionists at the Capitol would rather choose the deepest pockets who can drill the deepest wells over everyday Arizona residents, farmers and ranchers,’’ Borrelli said.
Griffin, of course, has argued that’s not what she’s doing. She said the bills proposed have all amounted to outside control, even when they have provisions that state otherwise.
“While the idea of ‘local control’ might sound good, the actual provisions are far from local or voluntary,” she said in an Arizona Daily Star guest editorial last year.
At the end of the 2024 session, Griffin spearheaded a last-minute effort to pass a groundwater regulation bill. But opponents rejected it as inadequate, noting it would have required an excessive number of conditions to be met before any action could be taken.
The years of inaction, along with the explosive growth of agriculture in the basin, are what led to the state’s intervention.
Cobb thinks that if groundwater bills were simply given an airing in the Legislature, lawmakers could arrive at solutions. But Griffin has not allowed a hearing.
In fact, Cobb had experience of this in 2022, when she proposed attaching a rural groundwater management bill as an amendment to one of Griffin’s bills. The amendment passed, but Griffin withdrew the bill, she said.
There is little hope for change in this legislative session. A new speaker has been named in the state House, Rep. Steve Montenegro, and he duly appointed as the chair of the Natural Resources, Energy, & Water Committee the chief obstructionist herself, Griffin.
In the Willcox basin, they’ve picked her in election after election, and now she’s forced them into the position of having their groundwater regulated by the state. That’s a natural consequence of their own actions.
