What's going on up in Phoenix?

Our legislature in Arizona is currently in session.  This has always been a somewhat frightening prospect, but never more so than this year.  We have the usual raft of bills seeking to demonize illegal immigrants and micromanage state agencies, but the big story this year has been the legislators efforts to collectively flip a large bird at the federal government.  Everything from re-interpreting the 14th amendment's birthright citizenship provision to seeking to seize federal property through eminent domain.  Fortunately, most of the crazier stuff has not made it out of committees or has been voted down on the floor.  But I don't consider it my job to comment on everything they do up there - there are plenty of other people doing that.  I just want to talk about some of the ideas that have been floated this year dealing with water.

One in particular caught my eye recently.  It's SB 1522, which relates to use of harvested rain water for aquifer augmentation.  The original bill would have essentially created a new form of water right in Arizona - a right to harvested rain water.  The idea was that someone could harvest rainwater on a sufficiently large scale - think cities or large subdivisions - and put that water in some form of recharge facility where it would percolate into the ground and recharge local aquifers.  The entity that collected and recharged the water would then get a groundwater storage credit equal to 50% of the water that they could verify actually went into the ground.  That credit would allow them to legally pump the amount of water represented by that credit and call it "renewable water."  This idea was being pushed by a couple of legislators from Yavapai County (i.e. the Prescott AMA and city of Prescott) where there is a very serious lack of renewable water supplies (data from 2003 - it's definitely worse now).

If there is anyplace in this state that could really benefit from large-scale rainwater harvesting, it's the Prescott area.  Problem is, this area is also where a couple of the rivers (Verde, Agua Fria, Hassayampa) that supply quite a bit of water (both surface and groundwater inflow) to the Phoenix area have a source or sources.  So it obviously piqued the interest of a few of the bigger players in the state in terms of water.  This was evident in a recent article from the Prescott newspaper. 

In addition, the legislation asked the Arizona Department of Water Resource (ADWR) to develop a new regulatory scheme that would set rules for how rainwater recharge facilities would be managed, how the water collected and recharged would be accounted for, inspection of those facilities, and presumably a permitting system and accounting system to track the water.  But the legislature, I'm sure, had no intention of providing ADWR with additional money to take on and complete those responsibilities.

Looking at the original legislation, it seemed pretty silly to me that you would go to the expense of harvesting rainwater just to put it in the ground, then pump water back out of the ground to provide to customers.  Seems a lot simpler to just spend that money buying rain barrels for people they could use to harvest their own water to then use in place of potable water.  In theory, that would permit water providers in the area to reduce their pumpage, thereby cutting into the amount of the overdraft.  But it doesn't really work out that way.  Having decisions made by thousands of individual homeowners is not how water providers like to manage their water supplies (although to some extent it is kind of like that now).  And having current customers reduce usage doesn't mean that water will stay in the ground, it will just be used somewhere else or at some other time.  This also doesn't create more renewable water that satisfies the requirements of state law, so it can't help areas that need renewable water to keep growing.

This is an issue I've been wrestling with for a while now.  How do you set policy that encourages individual water users to do the right thing AND gives the water provider an incentive to want their customers to do the right thing?  Setting prices for potable water that make harvested rainwater competitive with tap water is clearly one option - just a politically difficult one.  And somewhat logistically difficult as well, but not impossible.  The other problem is that you want customers to actually replace existing uses of potable water with other sources - rain water or gray water.  Again, if you just incentivize it by providing subsidized rain barrels or mandating gray water stub-outs on houses there is no guarantee that people won't just view that as free water with which to support additional vegetation, rather than replacing existing water uses - which would seem to lead you back to the pricing solution.  And it's important to note that you don't need to change state law to use pricing to encourage more use of unconventional supplies of water.

Anyway, the law (as amended in the State House) now merely calls for creation of a commission to study the feasibility of establishing a scheme to do large-scale rainwater harvesting.  I think this probably puts the idea of any sort of state-sanctioned water right for harvested rainwater to rest.  It remains to be seen if this commission can come up with a viable way to make rainwater harvesting a significant component of regional water management strategies - as clearly it should be in places that lack imported, renewable supplies.

That was the main bit of water legislation that interested me enough to write about it here.  If anything else comes along that gets me excited I'll mention it in an upcoming post.

Note - Edited 3/29/11 to add reference and link to Prescott Daily Courier article.

Wacky Shenanigans in the AZ Legislature

I wish I had more time to track what our legislature is up to ... sometimes.  But it seems that when I do try to pay attention lately, what I find out just makes me want to smash things.
They do have some bills in the works that affect water use, water management, and especially the state agencies that oversee water.  I should try to make a few comments on them soon, so that's what I'm planning to do next.

Development Community Attempts to Derail Environmental Water Allocations

Previously I alluded to efforts by the development community in Southern Arizona to derail plans by the city and county to allocate up to 10,000 acre-feet of treated sewage for environmental uses in the region.  These folks have decided that the process for allocating this water to environmental uses wasn't sufficiently rigorous and risks the loss of a significant portion of renewable water that can be used to support future population/economic growth.  They sent a letter to both the County Board of Supervisors and the City Council saying (among other things) that: "[e]ffluent is a highly reliable, locally available component of our region’s renewable water supply portfolio" and "the proposed IGA does not contemplate replacement of these entitlements, which are needed to promote and support regional economic growth."

Whoa!  Wait a minute.  I didn't know that this water was surreptitiously taken from some magical bucket of water reserved to support future growth in the region?  Admittedly, that is one possible use for that water - not to be turned into potable water to be provided to future residents of Tucson (unless state law changes, that's currently illegal), but to be recharged to generate storage credits that permit future pumping of groundwater to supply homes and businesses.  But this water belongs to the entities that generated the effluent (the city and the county), who are free to allocate it in ways they believe will best benefit the region.  Clearly there was some discussion within the community when the decision was made to set aside this water for environmental restoration.  I don't remember any similar discussion when the decision was made to wipe out 90% of the riparian habitat in the region so that water could be provided for the growth of the community.

But the current reality is that most of that water is currently wasted (this links to a fairly large pdf, but go to page 6 - the table shows where the water goes from the treatment plants - the row titled AZPDES discharge is what is dumped in the river; some of that generates storage credits, presently, but most of it does not and quite a bit of it actually flows out of the AMA).  It does support some pretty degraded habitat along the Santa Cruz River, downstream from the sewage treatment plants and when the upgrades of those plants are completed in the future, the quality of that water will actually support some aquatic life.  But for now, some of that water is used to supply the reclaimed water system (replacing groundwater pumping for turf irrigation), a portion of it recharges naturally along the rivercourse and earns credits for various entities, but over 20,000 acre-feet of that water provides essentially no benefit to the region.

Fortunately, both the city and county governing bodies chose to continue with plans to implement their agreements for dedicating this portion of the water to environmental uses.  But I suspect this battle is not entirely over, because parties wishing to use this water for environmental projects still have to go to the city and county to be approved to take it.  Many of the arguments being made will be made again, especially because water supplies will almost certainly be tighter at that point than they are now.  But when it comes to finding ways to restore lost riparian habitat (and especially the water needed to do so) I think this is the most promising avenue to realize that objective.  It's not elegant, it's not simple.  But it may just be effective.

Conserve to Enhance - helping the environment via water bills

While my previous post discussed the myriad problems associated with allocating water for the environment, here I'd like to talk about something novel being tried in Tucson to connect individual water conservation decisions with environmental restoration.  The program is called Conserve to Enhance (C2E) and operates by having municipal water customers here in Tucson implement something on their property (i.e. rainwater harvesting or graywater reuse) that will decrease the amount of water they use each month, leading to a regular savings on their water bill.  That savings does not come off of their bill.  Instead they continue paying the same amount and the money they would have saved is put in a funding source for environmental restoration projects that typically require a water source to establish and maintain riparian ecosystems.

A pilot program for C2E was just started, so the program has been in the news recently (see here, here, and here).  The program evolved from an idea developed at the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center (WRRC) that was originally known as Environmental Water Banking.  It evolved from what was perceived as a need to link water conservation activities with environmental benefits in the community.  A common complaint in the past has been that water conservation only frees up more water for new development so why bother.

I'm not involved in the program, but Watershed Management Group (for whom I'm a board member) is the entity running the program, with assistance from WRRC and the Sonoran Institute and grant funding from EPA that is providing subsidies for some of the pilot program participants to install the infrastructure necessary to realize their water savings. 

While this is a rather small step in the overall goal of bringing the environment to the table when water is being dished up it is a very big step in public perception of water conservation and how it's connected to protecting the environment.  And perhaps more than that, it's an example of people assigning an economic value to environmental amenities and backing that up with real money to provide water for the environment.  Hopefully in a year I'll be talking about how successful the pilot project has been and that plans for a full-scale roll-out are imminent.

Allocating Water for the Environment

View of the Santa Cruz River near downtown Tucson from 1904.
Copyright Information: 1904 - Arizona Historical Society. Photo ID: 26691


Back in 2009, when I participated in a study of regional water resources with the objective of finding policies that would encourage sustainable water use in Tucson and Pima County (the City/County Water study - see multiple previous posts), one of the key findings of that study was that future water planning in the region needs to incorporate environmental water needs as well as water for people and our economy.  While acknowledging that fact was an important step in this community, the real challenge is determining how to actually incorporate the environment in water allocation decision-making.

The Phase II report produced from that study identified 5 broad goals and 13 recommendations related to "Respect for the Environment" that talked about identifying opportunities and water supplies for environmental restoration and preserving the few existing riparian environments remaining in this area.  But in terms of actually identifying those opportunities it talked about things like seeking to incorporate multiple benefits into future infrastructure projects and maintaining the "effluent dependent" riparian habitat that has been created in the Santa Cruz River as a historical accident of our need to dispose of treated wastewater.  Not exactly earth-shaking stuff.  As for identifying water supplies for the environment the main recommendation was to finalize a 2000 inter-governmental agreement (fairly large pdf) between the city and county allocating up to 10,000 acre-feet per year of the effluent coming from county-owned treatment plants for future environmental restoration projects.  Don't get me wrong - it was very important for that to be completed - but it hardly constitutes a long-term strategy to "put the environment at the table where water is distributed," as stated in the report.  That's putting the environment at the kids table, where the grown-ups tell it what it can have and when.

And this water is not entirely safe until they start actually allocating it.  The local development community has been trying to derail the plan to implement the Conservation Effluent Pool (CEP), as the 10,000 acre feet is known locally.  But that is the subject of a separate post.

So how does the environment get a seat at the grown-up table in future water allocation decisions?  One idea is to have the environment as a full economic participant in water allocation.  That means obtaining water rights for the environment by outright purchase (of water or land with water rights attached), various types of lease agreements, or conservation easements.  Some of these ideas are described in a recent article (links to pdf) in the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, by Aaron Citron (a fellow Arizona law grad).  But there are a lot of limitations to this type of solution because of various quirks of water law and land use law in Arizona. 

Those limitations are described very well in a forthcoming report from Ecosystem Economics that I hope to be able to share when it's finalized.  Their report resulted from workshops they conducted with a variety of Arizona water policy experts last summer (I was honored to be included in the second workshop) and will hopefully culminate in a number of policy recommendations the state could implement to foster greater market activity in water rights in the state that could benefit the environment if water from low-valued uses could be shifted to environmental uses via market transactions.  The biggest challenges (in my opinion, but also echoed in the report) are the failure of Arizona water law to fully recognize the connection between surface water and groundwater and the highly uncertain nature of many water rights in the state.

The first challenge means that even if surface water rights can be secured for environmental purposes they cannot always be protected from depletion resulting from groundwater pumping (i.e. San Pedro River).  The second, results from the lack of adjudication (another pdf) of most surface water rights in the state, which means that determining the value, the quantity, and the seniority of many of those rights is challenging - leading to high transaction costs that hinder the creation of robust markets.

What this all means, is that until the right conditions can be created for markets to reallocate water in the state, the best way to allocate water for environmental purposes may be by government edict (or enforcement of federal environmental laws - this could be another series of posts in its own right).  It's not entirely hopeless, the particular circumstances in some parts of the state do lend themselves to economic solutions to environmental problems with water allocation.  But those solutions most often require outright purchase or partial purchase of land with associated water rights - not the most efficient solution.  In the meantime, we can enjoy those rivers in the state where downstream senior rights holders (very politically powerful senior rights holders) will ensure that the rivers supplying those rights continue to flow.  But in other areas we have to rely on people flushing their toilets to provide the water necessary for rivers to flow.  How's that for imagery.

Moving on

OK.  I had my brief foray into political discussion (non-water related).  Time to get back on message.  I've been involved in a few things dealing with the challenges of allocating water for the environment within the context of western US/Arizona water policy/law.  I'm going to try to post something in the next week on that topic.

Enough already!

Something tragic forces me to speak to an issue other than water today.  Earlier this morning, my congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, along with several of her staff and bystanders were shot by a nut-job with a gun as she was meeting with constituents at a grocery store here in Tucson.  I didn't know Rep. Giffords personally, but I have supported her in the past and believed she was a good person, who did an excellent job of representing a district that is almost evenly divided among democrats, republicans, and independents.  What that means is she knew how to compromise and craft common-sense solutions.

First, I want to express my condolences as well as my thoughts and prayers for those injured and killed, their families, and those who worked with them and knew them for the good people they are.  While Rep. Giffords, at this point has a good chance of surviving despite being shot in the head at point blank range, it appears that among those killed were a federal district judge and a 9 year old girl.

Second, I want to note that while a part of me wishes that this were nothing more than another random, senseless acts of violence, the character of the political discourse that has evolved in this country, and especially some of the comments made about Rep. Giffords in the recent election, which she narrowly won over a republican candidate who ran a very negative campaign (supported by a lot of national conservative money that often used language against her that could be construed as advocating violence against those they oppose) makes me think there was more than that involved.  In this kind of political climate, common sense tells me that the acts of this individual, while clearly indicative of some degree of mental illness was surely motivated by political belief and may have been nurtured by strong statements against democrats from conservative commentators and bloggers.

It's time to return to more civilized discourse in this country.  If this tragedy can help us all realize that political power is not important enough to threaten or incite violence and focus our leaders in on doing what is truly important, then at least something good may come out of this tragedy.  But if it only leads to more anger and invective then we will have learned nothing and will be doomed to repeat tragedies like this.  I sure hope that's not the case.

Update:  A gunman is in custody and it appears that he was a very disturbed young man.  While his particular motivations are currently unclear, it's inevitable that the current state of politics will lead many to read a lot into his motivations and actions beyond the seeming prevalence of senseless violence in the world around us.  As I said before - if leads to some genuine discussion and redirection of our political discourse, that's great.  But if it will only add fuel to the flames, I'd prefer that we just call this more random, senseless violence.