Our View: Nasty fights are threatening the water we all need to live in Arizona

Our desert state has a secret weapon against those doomsday scenarios that predict an arid and unsustainable future.

It’s called leadership.

But we haven’t seen much of it lately.

Coupled with unity and sense of shared purpose, bold leaders of the past gave us the Central Arizona Project, the Groundwater Management Act of 1980 and other strategies that helped our state flourish.

Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much of that kind of single-minded cooperation lately, either.

We're fighting too many parochial battles

At a time when Arizona is facing drought and declining water levels, Arizonans are engaged in parochial squabbles and Arizona lawmakers are dismantling important protections for our water supplies.

• We’ve seen a turf battle between the CAP board and the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
• We’ve seen progress stall on a Drought Contingency Plan, a multi-state effort to refine (in Arizona’s favor) how to handle reduced allocations if water levels in Lake Mead fall enough to trigger the official declaration of a shortage.
• We’ve seen the Board of Supervisors in rural Mohave County approve a court fight to keep its Colorado River rights from being bought for the sake of development in urban central Arizona by a branch of CAP.
• We’ve seen the CAP board try to assert sovereign immunity to put itself above such lawsuits.
• We’ve seen farmers, business owners and elected officials crowd the Yuma City Hall to protest proposed legislation they fear will result in water from rural Yuma and Cochise counties being transferred to Maricopa County.

Those legislative proposals also undermine efforts to mandate an adequate water supply before development can occur in rural areas.

Gov. Doug Ducey, who has stepped up to provide some leadership on water, vetoed similar legislation in 2016.

Lawmakers are moving the wrong way

The current bills – House Bill 2512 and Senate Bill 1507 – represent grubby little parochial battles at a time when we need a unified vision to shape a sustainable future.

We need to know how much water we are using. About 40 percent of the water we use in Arizona comes from underground aquifers. Yet Arizona does not keep track of how much water is being pumped.

Instead, Republican lawmakers like Rep. David Cook and Sen. Gail Griffin, oppose measuring well pumping and insist well owners have a private property right to do as they please, according to reporting by The Republic’s Dustin Gardiner.

Yet in 1981, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that there isn’t a private property right to water in aquifers. Why? Because it is a shared, public resource.

That reflects as clear-eyed understanding of our shared interest.

Water law is dense, complex and hard to understand. But one thing is very simple: we are all in this together.

The conversation we need to have instead

We need to look for additional sources of water, whether through conservation, reuse, desalination or something so creative it hasn’t been imagined yet.

We need to ask hard questions about how much development an area can sustain, how to reallocate water from agricultural land that is fallow, how to assure that rural Arizona gets its chance to grow.

Arizona needs to come together to work on coordinated water management strategies for the future that are equitable, sustainable and built on respect.

Perhaps most of all, Arizona needs to find the courage to look at the harsh realities of a drier, hotter future with a sense of expansive optimism. With the creativity to find solutions that work for everybody.

The generations of Arizonans who came before us did not build this Sun Belt paradise with visions of a grim, arid future. They did it with confidence and a sense of purpose.

We will not successfully build on their accomplishments unless we drop the petty bickering, cease the us-versus-them nonsense and work together to find answers to our water challenges.

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READ MORE:

Your Turn: Arizona lawmakers want to decimate your groundwater (again)

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Arizona warns developers: There may not be enough water to build in Pinal County

As the river runs dry: The Southwest's water crisis