New Funding Source for the Arizona Department of Water Resources

Back in April I posted about a piece of legislation passed up in Phoenix that would allow the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) to replace the funding they used to get as a general fund appropriation by taxing all Arizona cities, based on their population.  ADWR finalized the rulemaking (specially exempted from the governor's moratorium on new regulations, that seems to be a moratorium in name only) last month and set the fees for each of the cities in the state.  The authorizing legislation allows ADWR to use the fee to collect up to $7 million each year, but they gave the cities a break by only going for just over $6.25 million this year.  Obviously Tucson and Phoenix, as the two biggest cities, will be covering a big chunk of the fees - $650k and $1.8 million, respectively.  This municipality fee is meant to cover roughly half of ADWR's budget - the rest coming from fees on permits, permit reviews, and other services the agency provides.  But in the current economic climate I suspect that is probably most of what the agency will be operating on for the coming year.

The big question that has been bugging me is - how are most cities planning to pay for this new fee?  There are many cities that have public water utilities that will permit them to pass the fee along in their water rates.  Tucson has a utility, but about 30% of that utility's customers live outside the city limits, so it doesn't seem fair to do that here.  There are also many cities that don't have their own water utilities - usually they have private water utilities.  That requires some cities to just cover this fee out of their general fund.  But budgets are pretty squeezed for everyone these days.  Then there are all the people who live in unincorporated areas.  They will pay nothing, presumably, but still derive some value from the services that ADWR provides.

Bisbee, a city of 5,500 people in far southeast Arizona has a private water utility and their city manager sounds none too happy about having to pay an additional 7 grand to the state to keep the doors open at ADWR.  I wonder how much value Bisbee receives from the work that ADWR does?  Or how much value the city of Tucson receives for their share of the money.  Admittedly, you might say that funding the agency the old way probably resulted in many parts of the state receiving more from ADWR than they were paying for, so maybe this method makes more sense.  But I have a feeling the only place that will be getting what they pay for under this system is gonna be the Phoenix metro area.  Although, that has arguably been the case since ADWR closed down all their offices outside of Phoenix last year.

It's just that the services different parts of the state require from a state water management agency vary based on the hydrologic issues that area is dealing with and those services are usually not directly related to population, although population is a factor - but in my opinion it's more about population growth than absolute population.  Maybe that gets covered by the fees for services part of ADWRs budget, hard to say.  But I remain astonished that things looked so grim for ADWR that the cities agreed to fund their activities in this way.

Oh and one other thing.  If you look at the bottom of page 2 of the notice of proposed rulemaking there is a sentence that says: "Monies in the fund are subject to legislative appropriation".  That means the legislature can sweep the fund in future years if they need to top off their budgets, just like they have been doing for the last 3 years.  They have had their wrists slapped by courts on a couple of occasions recently - including their sweep of money from Las Vegas that was intended to buy excess Colorado River water for banking in Arizona.  In that case the court said the fund sweep was unconstitutional, but they refused to order the legislature to give the money back.  Real nice.

A few water conservation ideas

I have received a couple of emails recently from people wanting to publicize their water conservation info.  One is about some simple ways to conserve water during droughts.
When I first saw the url I thought it said Connecticut Utilities and thought to myself, "well they certainly don't have to worry about drought right now."  But it has nothing to do with that soggy New England state.
The next one is from bestcollegesonline.com and presents a list of ways that different colleges are implementing water conserving projects.  Looks like some pretty progressive water conservation is happening on college campuses.

Recent Recognition

You may have noticed I have a new gadget along the right margin.  I was notified last month by someone from Seametrics.com that I was on their list of Top 25 Water Conservation blogs.  I of course promptly added the link on the side but failed to acknowledge the honor in any way.  Noticing who some of the other blogs on the list were I was humbled and felt quite honored to be included.  So this is a shout-out to all those other blogs on the list and to the good folks at Seametrics for including me.

Assorted Property Rights for Sale

For some reason I was searching through a list of books on water marketing on Amazon the other day and an advertisement on the bottom of the page caught my eye.  It offered a forum for buying and selling water rights and listed a website: http://georights.com/.

So I clicked through to take a look.  Seems they offer just about every sort of interest in land there could be: easements, mineral rights, hunting/fishing rights, etc.  It must be fairly new because they are offering free sign-ups to list and bid on properties in order to build their traffic.

So I checked out their listing of water rights for sale.  Not real extensive at this point, but pretty good geographic diversity for what is there.

I'm kind of curious if anyone out there has any experience with this outfit or knows of the people behind it.  Anyone .... Bueller?  Chris Corbin?

Training in Urban Stream Restoration

Watershed Management Group (WMG)* is planning a 3-day hands on short course in urban stream restoration this fall in Tucson.  If you or anyone you know might have an interest in this the info is below:

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Technical Training in Urban Stream Restoration with Watershed Management Group, October 6-8, 2011, in Tucson, AZ

Apply by August 1 for Reduced Course Fee!

Join Watershed Management Group (WMG) for a 3-day, hands-on course in Stream Restoration through the Watershed Technical Trainings program.  This course will provide participants with a basic understanding of how desert streams and arroyos function, how they change over time, and the human influence on them, both positive and negative.  Based on this foundation, students will participate in hands-on sessions in site assessment, design, and implementation of small-scale restoration features.  Emphasis will be placed on urban wash restoration approaches and practices from backyard to larger drainage scales.

The course curriculum includes:

·  Classroom lectures

·  Site assessment, surveying, design, and planning sessions

·  Hands-on restoration workshops

·  Tour of local restoration sites

Apply early for the reduced registration fee by August 1, 2011; application deadline for the regular registration fee is September 1, 2011.  To view the full course announcement and download an application, visit WMG's Watershed Technical Training webpage.  For more information, please contact Tory Syracuse at tsyracuse@watershedmg.org or 520-396-3266.

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* While I am a board member with WMG I derive no financial benefit from any of the work they do, only the satisfaction of seeing them be successful.

Sweet, wonderful rain!

The monsoon arrived in So. Arizona on schedule over the 4th of July weekend.  We received more rain at my house during the past week than we had received during the previous 7 months - almost 1.5 inches.  See how much fell in your neighborhood at www.rainlog.org.

Trying to re-discover my focus

I've had a number of things swirling in my brain for the last few months (being shoved out of the way several times by exogenous factors) but have been waiting to find some sort of motivation or focus to help them coalesce into a cogent written form.  In the meantime, I'll just take the route of some of my fellow water-bloggers and shoot out some quick updates.

Many of the readers of this blog probably already know this but for any who don't, David Zetland, of Aguanomics, recently released his first book - self-published no less - called "The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity."  David's a very bright guy and I'm sure his book includes some outstanding insight into water allocation problems, including actual solutions, and the dry wit that he is known for.  Should be an excellent read and I'm hoping to get a copy for myself before my vacation in August. 

But for the moment I'm working through Jamie Workman's recent book, "Heart of Dryness," about the struggles of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and how the indigenous wisdom of drought-adapted societies can help modern humanity cope with coming water shortages.  I'm a few chapters in right now and it's a very compelling narrative Jamie presents.  Of particular interest to me are the similarities I see between the Bushmen - their interactions with outsiders, struggles to maintain their traditional way of life, and the failure of those outsiders to learn important lessons from ancient cultures - and some of the traditional Native American cultures of the Southwest.  I had the opportunity to meet Jamie in Tucson a few months back and really enjoyed talking about our mutual passion for changing existing paradigms in water management to deal with scarcity.

A few things I'm hoping to compose some thoughts on in the near future:

• Response within the Arizona water management community to the CAP proposal for allocating new water supplies by a market-clearing auction.  This was a novel and interesting proposal that was given a less-than-warm reception when released almost 9 months ago. 
• The recent US Supreme Court opinion in Montana v. Wyoming that has important implications for the significance of return flows in interstate river compacts.
• The prospects for future Indian water rights settlements in Arizona - essentially, not especially good right now.