So What's the Hold-up?

From today's Arizona Daily Star, an article about the Vail (AZ) Water Company facing the prospect of refunding to it's customers the money it has been collecting for over 10 years to pay for a means of taking their allocation of CAP water.  Vail is about as far away from the CAP canal as you can get while still being technically within the Tucson area.  This makes it a challenge to get that water to their customers.  But in recent years the City of Tucson (and their water company) has been pursuing wheeling agreements that allow other water utilities to take their CAP water by having Tucson Water deliver it through the city's pipes to a point where the other utility can access it without having to build large delivery infrastructure of their own.  They have done this recently with Oro Valley and are working on doing something similar with Metro Water.

So why doesn't Vail do something similar, or at least why haven't they done so to comply with the agreement they made with the Corporation Commission?  A couple of ideas come to mind.  While the idea of doing wheeling agreements with Tucson Water has been discussed for several years, it's only within the last 2 or 3 years that the idea has begun to be looked at really seriously.  Earlier, utilities like Metro and Oro Valley were considering plans to take the CAP water themselves, possibly by building a treatment plant and pipes to deliver it themselves.  The cost of doing so was simply prohibitive.  I'm sure Vail at least thought about doing something similar at one time.  But they are a pretty small utility - only about 3,900 connections - so the cost of building that kind of infrastructure (at least 20 miles from the nearest point where they could tap into the CAP) would be pretty high per customer. 

The article suggests that wheeling had been considered previously, but Tucson Water wasn't that interested.  There is likely some truth to that.  Tucson Water had a reputation for many years of not wanting to play nice with others - deserved or not.  I also think that for a small company like Vail Water the cost of pumping groundwater is much less than they would have to pay for CAP water, so the prospect of coming into compliance and having to hit their customers with a big rate increase wasn't real attractive.  It's also likely that Tucson Water will have to upgrade some of their infrastructure in the vicinity of Vail to accommodate the extra water and Vail Water would have to pick up most, if not all, of the tab for that.  So even a wheeling agreement is not cheap - Vail may have just been counting the beans and deciding to continue pumping from their wells.

So solutions are not easy to come by in this situation.  But I do know for sure that a solution is extremely important in this case.  Because in the near vicinity of the rapidly growing community of Vail is one of the gems of riparian habitat remaining in Pima County - Cienega Creek.  This is a phenomenal spot where shallow groundwater surfaces to create a small flowing stream flanked by towering cottonwood, willow, alder, and ash trees and an amazing diversity of wildlife.  And the more development in the area that is supported by drilling wells to tap groundwater, the more likely it is that Cienega Creek will someday stop flowing.  So I really hope they can finalize a wheeling agreement, because Vail has a renewable resource it could use, Tucson is willing to work with them to get it to their neighborhood, and riparian areas in Pima County are few and getting fewer.  And once they're lost, they are really hard to get back.

Upcoming Conference in Tucson on Green Infrastructure and Low-Impact Development in arid environments

Not sure if I'll be able to make it to this one - a shame really, since it's so close to home.
But it looks like a great event, so if you're from Tucson or would like to come visit to attend the 2012 Arid LID Conference, March 27-29, check out the link for all the info you need.  The agenda includes several really interesting presentations, but the best part is there's lots of opportunities for hands-on learning.
Be sure to check it out.

The Failed Promise of Indian Water Settlements, Part II

Taking advantage of a sick day to finally get around to this thread again.

So you may remember from my previous post that it was the Arizona Water Settlements Act (passed in 2004, became law in 2007) that resolved a couple of the most significant Indian water rights claims in Arizona, as well as settling several other pressing issues in allocation of Central Arizona Project (CAP) water and costs associated with the project.  The legislation enacting those settlements allocated both water and money to help the tribes involved purchase their new water from CAP and put the water to use on their reservations, mostly in irrigation projects.

Water Marketing - Who Wins, Who Loses?

I just wanted to post a link to this commentary (that came to me by way of Aquafornia) about water marketing in California.  It makes the point that opening up markets can create unequal opportunities, when one one part of the supply chain is (functionally) controlled by a monopoly (the federal government).  Something that could be very prevalent throughout the West, where the Bureau of Reclamation controls access to much of the big water that goes to agriculture and might find its way into markets in the coming years.

This is also my way of introducing the upcoming Water Rights Trading Summit being hosted by American Water Intelligence and WestWater Research, in Scottsdale, AZ, in early Feb.

Should be an interesting conference.  And I'm hoping to re-connect with some contacts I haven't seen in a while at the conference.

Anniversary of a Tragedy

It was exactly one year ago that I posted something completely uncharacteristic for this blog.  It was an event that had a tremendous impact on me, but I'm still not sure it had the kind of impact it should have had on society-at-large.  This idea is well articulated in this piece by Jeff Biggers, posted on Salon today.

I don't want to initiate an ongoing discussion on this blog about these events, but didn't want to let the anniversary pass without at least mentioning it.  It's one of those events in our lives we should try to never forget because the lessons to be learned from them are just too important.  The most important of which is to be part of a community, know your neighbors, be nosy sometimes, and take care of each other.  Fear and suspicion are enemies of these ideas - they need to be fought.

I'm hoping to pick up the thread of my recent discussion of Indian water rights soon, so bear with me.

Nefarious shenanigans in redistricting process

Found a link to a funny article from the Yuma Sun in BC Arizona Water News this week and just had to share.  If you're from Arizona and follow the news you have probably heard about the big fight going on in the state over the decennial redistricting process that is currently going on.  I won't go into the details here, it's too convoluted and at times sordid.

Let's just say that folks from both political parties have their gripes about the way the process has been going, but the ones who identify with an elephant have been griping the most - probably because they have the most to lose and since they hold most of the power now, they actually have some ammo to derail the process.

But the alarm bells being rung by State Senator Don Shooter from Yuma are a new form of attack on the process that I confess I never saw coming.  His premise is that because the new district boundaries that include the Yuma area - along the Colorado River where this is lots of farmland and high priority rights to water from the river (higher priority than CAP rights) - divide the area and those districts stretch all the way to Phoenix and Tucson, there must be plans afoot by those city folk to rustle up some water rights.  Well maybe not plans afoot, but the idea is that if someone were to concoct a plan it would be easier to implement if there was no one representing the interests of those folks out in Yuma in our state legislature.

Have to admit it makes for a nice story.  Seems pretty far-fetched though, right.  Yeah, probably.  The only way the cities are going to wrest that water from the farmers out in Yuma, though, is by buying up the rights and getting approval from Reclamation to transfer that water.  That certainly seems more do-able if you have the state legislature and our congressional delegation on board.  But really if they are intent on doing that, how much difference will one local representative make?  If those water rights could be taken away by legislative fiat I think it there would have been more action along those lines already.  The water rights, if and when they are transferred to cities, will be purchased in a heavily negotiated transaction that the people giving up their rights will fully support.  And they're not gonna let some state senator stand in the way of that deal.

And if you take a look at the maps, his claim about those Yuma districts being controlled by people from Maricopa and Pima Counties is a bit overdone as well.  The districts that cover Yuma do stretch towards the big cities, but only touch the outskirts, so the population should be pretty well balanced between urban and rural.  Sounds to me like just another shady attempt to derail the process.

C'mon, the Arizona legislature never acts without thinking things through first

A quick follow-up on my earlier post about funding the Arizona Dept. of Water Resources (ADWR).  Seems some people in our fine legislature here in Arizona came to the realization that a tax imposed to cover general services of a state agency is probably not accurately described as a user fee.  The Phoenix paper reports that they might reconsider the bill passed last year that allows ADWR to make up the money they used to receive as a general fund appropriation by taxing municipalities in the state on a per capita basis.  It's not an idea entirely without merit, but the way it was implemented just reeked of a hastily devised plan to patch a hole in the state budget.  What I find really amusing is that the political mind finds it preferable to admit that they didn't really know what a bill they voted for meant than to admit that they previously supported a complete piece of garbage.