Only laws will stop Arizona wells from going dry

Saudi Arabia has a water problem. Having nearly drained its precious underground aquifers through unsustainable agriculture, the country is taking drastic measures to preserve what’s left. So where does Saudi dairy giant Almarai go to grow alfalfa, a notoriously thirsty crop used to feed dairy cows?

One place is Arizona’s La Paz County, another groundwater-dependent place that – as a recent investigation in The Republic eloquently demonstrates – is rapidly depleting its own aquifers, which recharge extremely slowly in desert climates.

Agricultural conglomerates farming in Cochise county, even domestic ones like Minnesota-based Riverview Dairy, have less incentive to practice sustainability than farmers who intend to live out their lives in Arizona and pass their property on to future generations. They also have the resources to drill deep, while owners of nearby residential wells can’t afford to keep up with falling water tables.

Although the Saudi example is particularly ironic given the country’s own water rules, it ultimately doesn’t matter who’s pumping — only that they pump too much.

As a student with no vested interest in Arizona’s water allocation (besides being of the generation inheriting the global environmental crisis), I’d offer the conclusion I’ve drawn from my research – which includes interviews with local experts, lawmakers and stakeholders – on the state’s regulation of groundwater: There’s not nearly enough — groundwater or regulation.

In 1980, Arizona staved off the water crisis with the Groundwater Management Act. However, overcoming rural districts’ resistance required compromise: The act’s standards apply only in Active Management Areas (AMAs), leaving rural, groundwater-dependent areas largely unregulated.

Now that these areas face aquifer depletion, this story of bipartisan cooperation is threatening to end in tragedy. The paucity of monitoring outside the AMAs means we don’t know exactly how much water is pumped. The only certainty is that if nothing changes, it will run out.

There’s no painless solution. A desalination plant in Mexico – a proposal on the negotiating table – would require copious electrical energy and expense while offering no clear remedy for groundwater-dependent areas. The proposal would merely replace some of the Colorado River water reserved for Mexico, freeing up more for Arizona’s use.

Better regulation is the only viable option. Tom Buschatzke, director of the

Arizona Department of Water Resources, sensibly proposes mandatory statewide reporting of water extraction for nonexempt wells so the department can assess depletion and respond. He also supports changing the requirements for creating Irrigation Non-Expansion Areas to include projected water use, in order to preempt increased use in places that cannot sustain it.

There’s already some bipartisan support for action. Republican Rep. Regina Cobb favors increasing groundwater regulation and has proposed creating a regulatory unit called a “Rural Management Area,” a designation local officials would use to introduce aquifer monitoring and research in their areas.

This legislative session, Democratic Rep. Kirsten Engel has proposed bills to implement well monitoring and change Irrigation Non-Expansion Areas requirements to include prospective water use. Legislators, particularly Rep. Gail Griffin, chair of the Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee, should give these bills thorough consideration, breaking with the precedent of past years, when water regulation bills, including ones proposed by Cobb, were denied committee hearings.

Ultimately, Arizona needs to stop pumping water out of its aquifers faster than they recharge. In the long term, it's an economic imperative. If an aquifer runs out or the water table falls low enough to make drilling a new well prohibitively expensive, irrigated agriculture operations can’t continue.

As Engel puts it, unless the state reaches a safe yield, “we're just building an economy that is somehow going to run out of steam in the future as we run out of water.”

While ambitious, the goal of a safe yield is not without means. Agriculture can, perhaps with the help of state incentives, move towards crops adapted to a desert climate, irrigated with watersaving methods or grown through dryland farming. It’s time to shift the discussion from how Arizona can promote the economy in its current form to whether anyone should be growing alfalfa in the desert at all.

Many rural Arizonans take legitimate pride in self-sufficiency and value freedom from regulation. But if there’s anything for which government is necessary, it’s the protection and allocation of scarce, shared resources. I hope that in 2020, Arizonans will extend the success of 1980, pioneering a response to the latest developments of the water crisis.

Polina Whitehouse is an undergraduate at Harvard College and the recipient of this year's Arizona Scholarship, through which the Harvard Club of Phoenix has funded her independent research on groundwater regulation in rural Arizona. Reach her at polina white house@college.harvard.edu.