How this program kept 9.6M gallons in the Verde River
Businesses pay for groundwater as others get paid for using less surface water
Framed in the foyer of Page Springs Cellars is a plaque certifying that Cornville winemaker Eric Glomski helped keep nearly 1.4 million gallons of water in the Verde River last year.
Rainbow Acres, a Camp Verde-based residential community for adults with disabilities, was similarly recognized after working to preserve 1.2 million gallons on behalf of the river.
And a local malt-maker and river enthusiast has contributed more than 400,000 gallons of water savings, with plans to add 700,000 next year.
The three businesses participate in a voluntary community-based water conservation program known as the Verde River Exchange.
The program connects surface water users and groundwater users through a credit system, with the goals of more sustainable water use and more stable base river flows. The participants are able to support conservation in an area where water resources are at a premium.
Much of the water used in the Verde Valley is groundwater, pumped from aquifers, but some users draw surface water from the Verde River and its tributaries. The exchange program is an effort to leave more water in the river, keeping it and its ecosystem healthier. The Verde is also a key water source for cities in metro Phoenix.
The Exchange is the only known voluntary groundwater offset program in the world, according to the organizing nonprofit Friends of the Verde River. The people who signed up for it did so not to meet any legal requirement, but because they wanted to help keep water flowing in a river that defines their community.
“That’s the life of the community running through the dirt over there,” said Aaron Fisher, manager of The State
Bar in Old Town Cottonwood, “so we do whatever we can to just keep participating and supporting.”
Since its start in 2016, the program has reduced the impact of 9.6 million gallons of groundwater pumping by ensuring that an equal 9.6 million gallons of surface water remained in the Verde River system. Equally important, though, is the conversation it has ignited about local efforts for water sustainability in the Verde Valley.
The Verde River Exchange is a voluntary program in which heavy groundwater users can purchase credits made up of savings from users of surface water,
typically from the Verde River or its tributaries.
The end goal is to keep more water in the Verde by making one user’s water savings match another user’s water use.
Think of it in money and banking terms, with credits representing water savings and use.
A farm or individual homeowner will promise to use less surface water than they would normally use by choosing crops that require less water or deciding not to irrigate a certain
field for a certain season.
Friends of the Verde pays them $200 per acre-foot (about 326,000 gallons) of water saved, which translates into a “water offset credit” and more water remaining in the river.
That credit represents water that has been saved. It’s as if it is deposited into a bank, giving the account a positive balance.
Groundwater users — local businesses, vineyards and the like — purchase these credits for $200 each to offset — or “pay for” — some of their groundwater use. In effect, with each credit bought, they pump groundwater equal to the amount that has been saved, leaving the account balanced.
Through this program, more surface water is remaining in the Verde River, contributing to more stable base flows in a river increasingly threatened by heavy surface use and rampant groundwater pumping.
In the program’s first three years, Friends had fewer than 10 total participants reduce their surface water use in exchange for $200 payments. In 2018, it had six participants as buyers of water credits. Buyers included Page Springs Cellars, The State Bar, Rainbow Acres, Sinagua Malt, The Fish’s Garden, and Merkin Vineyards.
The two vineyards were the only participants in the first year. In 2020, Friends hopes to have at least 10 buyers voluntarily purchase water offset credits, said Max Wilson, sustaining flows project manager and current head of the Exchange program.
Starting in 2014, Friends and a range of local stakeholders including conservationists, legal experts, policymakers, economists and downstream water rights holders began meeting to collaborate on how they could help mitigate widespread groundwater pumping and ensure the Verde would remain flowing and healthy 50 years down the road.
Looking at case studies from waterscarce areas around the world, Friends realized a water market or water bank could be a possible future path for finite amounts of water to be shared and balanced among holders and users with the goal of sustainability.
A first step, they decided, would be a voluntary water market.
“Everybody that really knew what was going on said, ‘you can’t do this,’” said Chip Norton, who was involved with the plan early on and is now president of Friends.
But they did it.
Trying to preserve the Verde River
The Exchange was envisioned as a local-led effort that could help one of Arizona’s few rivers that flow yearround but one suffering the effects of growing demands.
Over the past decades, increased groundwater pumping across the Verde Valley has significantly decreased base flows of surface water in the river. This impacts the riparian habitat, river ecosystem and water availability for local and downstream users in decades ahead.
Cottonwood Mayor Tim Elinski said growing up along the banks of the river he watched firsthand how it worsened over the years, fueling his efforts as mayor to get involved in protecting it.
“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how bleak things looked only 15 years ago,” Elinski said.
The U.S. Geological Survey found in 2013 that base-flow levels around Camp Verde had decreased by 10,000 acre-feet annually between 1910 and 2005, with a predicted further decrease of 5,400 to 8,600 acre-feet per year by 2110, depending on continued rates of groundwater pumping and other “past, present, and future human-induced stresses” on the river system.
Salt River Project, which obtains 40% of the surface water it delivers to Phoenix from the Verde River, has noticed firsthand the effect of increased groundwater pumping.
According to SRP, the number of wells along the river has grown from 250 in 1950, to 1,600 in 1974, and to 8,900 in 2017.
Today’s nearly 9,000 groundwater production wells have been proven to significantly decrease base flows.
‘Such a simple decision’
Why would anyone pay for groundwater when they could just pump it for free?
Under Arizona law, outside of five Active Management Areas, groundwater can generally be pumped by any user so long as the water is used and not wasted. And, aside from pumping costs, the water is free.
“We weren’t sure whether a voluntary offset program would be popular,” said Jocelyn Gibbon, a water policy consultant who headed the Exchange for its first two years. An early concern was that water users would not want to change how they access or think about water and would not want to pay for it.
“Why does anybody buy credits?” said Wilson. “I think the answer is we’ve just got good people who live up here who care. When you give people the opportunity to participate in a solution, they do.”
And participants do voluntarily buy water credits, spending as much as $800 or more annually, mainly, they say, because they recognize the river impacts their business and their community.
Fisher, of The State Bar in Cottonwood, said the river sustains the town, including his bar, and the town in turn must help sustain the river.
“You could say that it’s altruism, but in the end, it’s something that directly benefits us,” he said. “We participate to help support the river, the river supports the tourism, the river supports the wine, the wine and the tourism support us — that goes right back to the beginning to keep supporting the river.”
The Reverend Gary Wagner, president and CEO of Camp Verde’s Rainbow Acres, a Christian residential community for adults with cognitive or developmental disabilities, described the program in a similar way. He said they budget for it and plan to continue to pay for credits, ideally more in the years ahead.
By purchasing 3.75 acre-feet of credits, representing 1.2 million gallons of surface water saved, Rainbow Acres was able to offset 20% of its total water usage this past year, water that goes toward supplying nearly 100 residents’ homes and landscaping and gardening.
“It’s so important to us that organizations like Rainbow Acres participate,” Wilson said. “A big part of this process is about starting conversations and getting people thinking about what groundwater means to the future of the Verde Valley.”
Making malt to save the river
Norton, another program participant, comes at the Exchange from a unique perspective.
Norton is president of Friends of the Verde River and was one of the Exchange’s early founders. As a lifelong Arizonan and lover of the Verde River, Norton is most passionate about innovating solutions to save rivers without sacrificing agriculture, the economy or communities.
Over the past year, he has sought to do this by opening Sinagua Malt, a commercial malt house in Camp Verde, allowing him to target water conservation from two angles.
First, his business participates in the Exchange. The malting process uses 600,000 gallons of water annually, all of which Norton offsets through credits purchased from Friends.
“I think it’s just great to be able to offset water use voluntarily; I just think it’s the coolest thing,” Norton said. “I would’ve created this just to be able to participate in it.”
Second, he opened a malting barley business, specifically because it could help the Verde. He convinced a farmer to convert more than 120 acres of alfalfa and corn fields to barley, a far less water-intensive crop that is planted in January and harvested in June.
That means barley uses no water in summer, and its peak demand for water aligns with when the river is at peak flow in the winter. Planting barley prevents the use of summer water at a time when the river is most stressed. Norton said during the summer months, this crop conversion ensures at least 65 million gallons of water remain in the river.
Norton sells his malt to Arizona Wilderness Brewery, Wren House and Sedona Beer Company. But he said his goal wasn’t to get rich, but to make enough money to be able to sustain the business for the sake of the river. He said Sinagua Malt is the only commercial malt house in Arizona, a testament to the challenges of making a profit and to the long and sporadic hours of monitoring, steeping and weathering the barley into malt.
He believes it’s all worth it to maintain water in the Verde.
‘An absolutely invaluable resource’
For Glomski, winemaking has always been deeply tied to place.
“I got into winemaking through rivers,” Glomski said, explaining how he
spent his college and post-grad years studying riparian ecology and researching and building conservation programs, then learning about winemaking.
“I loved how I could get under the canopy of riparian trees and it was cooler, the smells, the lighting, everything about rivers was amazing to me,” he said.
So he worked to save it, creating a natural preserve area for his senior thesis, and doing whatever he can for a sustainable Verde today. He purchases Exchange credits to offset nearly 1.4 million gallons of river water each year.
From his earliest experiments making apple wine, Glomski said he remembers tasting not just the apples, but the place where he picked the apples.
“It was like I smelled the ponderosa pines, they get this great butterscotchy caramely smell in the sun in the fall, and all these things, this little babbling brook,” Glomski recalled. “I realized that wines are artistic; they’re liquid expressions of a landscape.”
Glomski has since moved on to grape wines, and he runs a successful vineyard in Cornville on a property overlooking Oak Creek, a tributary of the Verde. He said that location is an essential reason his business has been so profitable, with Arizonans able to sip wine under shade trees overlooking a beautiful creek, a rare experience in the desert southwest.
“I have an absolutely invaluable resource there, and if that went away, my business would be in jeopardy,” he said. “Without those flows, we don’t have that. It’s very clear to me what the link is between that value and that little bit of money I spend, and trying to maintain that for the future for our business, but in the bigger picture, my family, my community.”
He said the river is essential to his vineyard, community and life. He chose the land overlooking Oak Creek because it connected him to the Verde watershed. He believes in tasting the Verde Valley in his wines.
Making the river a place to go
Wilson said the Exchange has successfully allowed surface water to remain in the Verde River, albeit a small amount given the overall rates of groundwater pumping throughout the Verde Valley.
“There is a difference — it’s measurable, it’s distinct, it’s discrete — but there’s a lot of work left to do,” he said.
Elinski said beyond the “groundbreaking concept” of the Exchange and the measurable amounts of water it has saved, perhaps more important is the less measurable awareness it has raised. He said lots of people who moved to Cottonwood weren’t even aware a river ran through town. But that has begun to change.
Now, Elinski said when he walks on a trail down to the river, he almost always sees people. The Cottonwood area used to have no river outfitters, and now there are four companies that run trips on kayaks and explore the Verde. It is routine to see cars drive through towns with kayaks strapped atop, something that wasn’t common a decade ago.
Glomski hopes the Exchange and other river conservation programs will encourage people to spend time on the Verde and appreciate the river ecosystem.
“It’s easy to go out at the edge of the lake and cast in and drink a few beers and then go home. It’s another thing to think of how precious and special it is, especially in largely a desert ecosystem, to have water like that.”
Expanding a model and starting a conversation
Several years in, some are eager for the Exchange to expand its breadth.
Glomski said he would ideally like to offset 100% of Page Springs’ water use, not just water for one of its several vineyards. For now, he is limited by the finite number of participants as sellers. Wilson said finding people willing to forego water use for a small amount of money is the hardest part of the system.
“For me, the ultimate goal is how do we use this program to maintain the basic amount of flow in these waterways to sustain these values ecologically and to our community, to our economy, all the things that a river brings to a community,” Glomski said.
Wilson is working to expand the number of participants involved in the Exchange. He hopes to get municipalities and other big water users to participate as well.
“It is not a hard sell,” Wilson said. “There’s a lot of good folks out there, even individual homeowners, who want to do the right thing to make sure they can say to their kids with a straight face, ‘I didn’t hurt this place. I left this place better than I found it.’ ”
Nancy Steele, executive director of Friends, said she has been pleased to see the state forming committees to explore water issues in unregulated areas.
“There’s still a lot of work to do, but I guess from both the political side and the science side and then the community side, I kind of see all of those areas working in the same direction, which is what gives me hope,” Steele said.
From its earliest stages, the Exchange was a collaboration, thought up by a variety of voices together around a table, something stakeholders see as vitally important to its success.
“How many times do you get an entire community together and build something from the ground up to solve a problem that you recognize ahead of time that maybe isn’t impacting the river today but will for our children in the future?” Wilson asked.
But in large part, Friends has succeeded. It has maintained water in the river and started conversations locally and beyond.
What the river needs, Wilson said, is the Exchange and as much other hard work as can be mustered.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach,” Wilson said. “What we’ve got to do, especially from Friends’ perspective, is continue to build as many local solutions as we can until the river is saved. And we’re just going to keep working on that until we get there.”