some sad news to report

I heard this afternoon that Gregg Houtz, deputy counsel with the Arizona Department of Water Resources, passed away this morning.  I only met Gregg on a couple of occasions and saw him speak on a few others.  But in those brief encounters I could tell that he was one of the most knowledgeable people around on Arizona water law in general and the rather arcane world of Native American water rights settlements, in particular.  He was also passionate about his work, down to earth, and a pleasant guy to be around.

Gregg had been with ADWR for several years and prior to that had worked as a legislative attorney on Capitol Hill.  If I come across a complete bio on him from somewhere I'll post it.

The recent difficulties at ADWR with budget problems and staff reductions probably created a lot of stress for people like Gregg.  I just hope that wasn't a major contributor to his death.  What I do know is that he will really be missed in some circles around this state.  My sincere condolences go out to his family.

City council decides not to decide

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

The city council first voted unanimously to reconsider their previous vote in favor of annexation (as was expected).  Then they heard from a few people in the audience and voted to go into executive session so they could discuss the options with the city attorney.  When they came out, they simply voted to give the city attorney 30 days to find an alternative solution to resolving the lawsuit - i.e. find some other land for the pension fund to develop, or more specifically, ask the county to find some other land they could trade with the developer or just buy this parcel outright.  OK.

Seems to me that if that option was on the table in the first place the county wouldn't be asking the city to refuse annexation and water service to the developer.  And that's pretty much what the county administrator says in the article.  So 30 days from now we'll have another round of political theater, except this time the final act will be the council seeking forgiveness because their backs were really against the wall on this one and the only thing they could do was to cut a deal with the developer.  But hey - they tried right?

Seeing red over Painted Hills - aka another edition of Using Water Policy to Manage Growth

There's a big, ongoing fight coming to a head this month in Tucson.  On one side you have the county administrator, environmentalists, and a powerful and well organized neighborhood association.  On the other side you have a property development company that represents the interests of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund.  And in the middle, for the moment, is the Tucson City Council.

The fight is over the right to develop a parcel of land just west of downtown Tucson, but outside the city limits, known as Painted Hills.  This parcel is just under 300 acres of prime Sonoran desert landscape, just 10 minutes from downtown.  Most of the land surrounding the parcel is developed (to the extent allowed by the terrain), but there is also a large county park in the general vicinity.  The site is supposedly home to over 1000 10,000 mature saguaros - the acknowledged symbol of the Sonoran desert - as well as prime habitat for many birds, small mammals, and probably quite a few coyotes.  It's a pretty location and something of a rarity so close to a rapidly growing Sunbelt community.

more below

Economist special report on water

The Economist magazine has a special report on water in its latest issue and they tackle subject in the thorough and well-written style they are known for.  The articles in the report have a very international flavor - special focus on China, India, and Africa with only passing mentions made of much of the developing world - such as the U.S.  I think the focus is wholly appropriate, considering that while water crises are much discussed in places like the western U.S. and Australia, the real dire situations in the near future are in areas of the world undergoing rapid economic development - with rapid development of water supplies going along with it.  The effects of climate change on water supplies are also going to be disproportionately felt in places like China and India, which have extensive arid areas, enormous populations, and astounding economic growth - coupled with little effective management of water supplies.

The sections of the report that really impressed me were:

1) The section that discussed local management efforts to protect groundwater resources in parts of India.  This is a great example of how communities on the watershed or basin level can develop workable solutions to managing their resources without top-down mandates from governments imposing one-size-fits-all policies.  It also demonstrates how good science, coupled with good data collection, can empower farmers and other local water users to manage their resources for the benefit of all - what gets measured, gets managed.

2) The author also does a pretty good job of debunking the water footprinting concept in the section on using economics to encourage conservation.  There was some good discussion of the general need to match demand with supplies but he didn't go into much depth on how this can be used to develop sustainable water policies.

Overall a really good bit of journalism - about what I expect from the The Economist.  Check it out for yourself.

Chiming in on the ADWR situation

At this point the fate of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) should be old news to most people.  But I've commented on this in the past so I wanted to chime in with a few observations.

First of all this was in the works for quite a while - the budget problems in Arizona have been big news around here for almost two years now and any part of the state budget that isn't protected by a voter mandate or required by some existing law has been fair game and taking major hits.  That's what happens when the yearly deficit in the budget equals about 20% of the total budget.  There were plans floated in the legislature to allow ADWR to become self-funded through fees and/or taxes.  The problem with using fees is that the same factors leading to the state's budget deficit have seriously impacted the ability of the department to collect fees.  Most of those fees would come about as a result of economic development occurring that requires various permits from the state.  That economic development just hasn't been happening.  One idea that came up was to allow ADWR to impose a tax on most large water users based on the amount of their usage.  Arizona has a state legislature that wanted to cut corporate taxes during what must be the biggest budget crisis the state has faced since it became a state - you don't really think they would allow a new tax on water use?  And of course they didn't.  It was an ambitious plan, but it had some merit.  A main reason for having a department of water resources is to provide some certainty to water users (especially those who have a significant economic stake in their continued water use) that those water supplies are being properly managed.  So instead the department's budget has been reduced from over $20 million just two years ago to about $7 million for the coming year.  The staff in the department was over 200 two years ago and is currently at about 90.

The only ADWR office that will remain open is in Phoenix - there used to be satellite offices in Tucson, Nogales, Casa Grande, and Prescott that handled matters related to the state Active Management Areas (AMAs), which were created by the Groundwater Management Act of 1980 that finally imposed a sensible legal structure on groundwater use in the areas of the state under greatest development pressure.  That legal structure is supposed to bring those areas into safe yield in the next 15 years and those local offices were responsible for developing the management plans to guide that process.  The fourth of five management plans mandated by the law was supposed to be nearing completion about now because it would cover the period from 2010 to 2020.  If it does get completed it's going to take a few more years.

So why would our legislature gut a state department that has such an important role in the functioning of water management in a state where very little development can occur going forward without adequate management of water supplies?  Are they just ignorant of the importance of ADWR or are there more sinister motives lurking under the surface.  Other people have speculated on this point and I've talked to some others who have their opinions.  John Mawhinney, who was a state legislator when the Groundwater Management Act was passed and currently helps run the Arizona Water Banking Authority and heads up the Groundwater Users Advisory Council in the Tucson AMA, wrote an op-ed piece for the Tucson paper recently where he speculated that ADWR was a victim of their own success in some respects.  They have done such a good job of managing water in the state that no one is aware of what they do or thinks they serve an absolutely necessary purpose.  There may be some truth to this - in regards to some in the legislature and much of the general public.  Also John, as a former legislator, may be giving some in the current legislature the benefit of the doubt.  But many other people I have talked to - very knowledgeable people - think that there is an element in state government and the private sector that wanted to see ADWR emasculated, presumably to remove the yoke of regulation and give them freer reign with water.  Seems to make sense, but frightening nonetheless.

One other place where some discussion of this matter has been occurring is on the blog run by Gary Yaquinto, of the Arizona Investment Council.  He put up a very thoughtful post on this earlier this week and has received some enlightening comments.  He references an article from the Arizona Republic that pretty well spells out what is going on with the budgets of both main state agencies that regulate water ADWR (quantity) and Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) (quality).

The amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost from these departments in order to balance our budgets is staggering.  Even if they can return to previous staffing levels when the economy recovers it will be a long, long time before they can return to their previous level of competence.  And I mean nothing against those people who remain in their jobs there.  They must all be stellar performers and dedicated to what they are doing.  But they can only do so much.  Keep an eye out for those people who want to take advantage of the lack of oversight to endanger our water supplies - we are all watchdogs now.

Update on previous post

My last post included a feeble attempt at showing that there is some correlation between price and water usage.  The connection, I believe, still stands but a helpful reader made a suggestion that greatly improves the interpretation of the data.  So I switched the x and y axes and tried some other types of regression and came up with a pretty good fit using a power function.  Here's the new graph:

I'll spare myself the embarrassment of trying to explain power functions, but the equation listed on the graph (above the R-squared value) describes the curve and indicates a non-linear relationship between price and consumption.  As might be expected, demand drops off rapidly when price increases initially, indicating greater sensitivity to price at the high end of water usage, then drops off more slowly when you get down towards 50 gpcd, which would mostly be indoor water use (less discretionary).  That seems to make sense to me.

Also, the most recent update from Circle of Blue includes the data shown on the map in their previous update in table form.  And provides sources for the data as well!  Ask and ye shall receive.  The article also discusses the alarming phenomena of falling demand and rising prices that seems prevalent among water utilities recently.  This is an unintended consequence of some of the more progressive rate-setting policies (like increasing block rates) and has been occurring for several years here in Tucson.  It could be largely avoided, most easily by returning to single or seasonal rates for water but that would have other, unwanted consequences.  So until the standard formulas for cost recovery in water rates are changed it will continue to be a fact of life in many cities.

How strong is the connection between price and water use?

I get a weekly email with updates from the website Circle of Blue, that occasionally contains gems like this one that showed up recently. What I've really been impressed with on their site are some of the nifty things they do by combining data with mapping functions.*  So if you scroll down on the Circle of Blue page linked above you will see a Google map that has a bunch of data call out points on it. Click on any of those points and it will show you data on per capita residential water use and average costs for water in each of the cities shown.**

By way of background, I received an email from John Fleck last year where he asked if I knew of a source listing per capita water use that compared "apples to apples" - i.e. comparing only residential water use, not just taking some random total water use number and dividing it by population. This can be surprisingly hard to find.

So as I was looking at the water use data I got the idea that it might be interesting to try plotting the gpcd numbers against the average price numbers just to see how well they correlate. And this is what I came up with:

 If I remember my statistics, 0.3563 indicates pretty strong correlation, but obviously there are other factors present besides price.  You might notice that I pretty much cherry-picked the data I presented as well.  I tried to include data from Western cities that might have similar water use patterns so that price would be main variable being tested here.  Is the result fairly obvious - sure.  But that's often the point of statistics - to test something that appears obvious and try to figure out if it really is.

Oh, and there was one other nice bit of data in the call outs attached to the map - it says what type of rate structure each city uses.  I hope the Circle of Blue folks keep up the good work.

* My only quibble with data presented in this way is that they don't indicate a source for their numbers.  There's an email address for the person who put the graphic together, so I might have to email him and find out where he got all his data from and verify that it really is "apples to apples".

** The data for Fresno is pretty shocking, but when you consider that they charge a flat rate for water and I believe still don't meter most of their connections it seems pretty self-evident.  Also I was disappointed that there was no gpcd data for San Diego and Los Angeles - they're probably pretty tired of taking their lumps for residential water use.