In this morning’s Arizona Star, Tucson journalist Tony Davis asks, “Is California trying to take our water?” In journalism, there’s a joke known as “Betteridge’s Law“: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As Tony’s story strongly suggests, the notion making the rounds these days in some Arizona political …
Our big wet May looks to have all but eliminated the possibility of a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage in 2016, and it now looks like a better than 50-50 chance we won’t have one in 2017 either, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly outlook, published this afternoon (pdf). A shortage is triggered if …
Continue reading ‘Lower Colorado shortage now unlikely in 2016, maybe not in 2017’ »
Tony Davis asked Arizona officials if they had any actual evidence that California was trying to steal their water. Their official statement: “ADWR is not aware of any California efforts intended to take a portion of Arizona’s water supply directly. However, any changes to Colorado River operations could affect everyone who relies on the River. …
In the fall of 1934, Arizona Gov. Benjamin Moeur dispatched the Arizona National Guard to the banks of the Colorado River near its junction with the Bill Williams to try to block efforts to build what would eventually become Parker Dam. Their fear: that the Colorado River Aqueduct, which would tap into the new reservoir, …
Continue reading ‘Arizona – a century of fear that California wants to steal its water’ »
As Lake Mead drops toward a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage declaration, a group of UC Santa Barbara students have done an excellent analysis (pdf of their summary results) that shows where the real vulnerabilities are. They conclude that Las Vegas and the municipal areas of Central Arizona are on solid ground. Arizona farmers won’t …
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Kathleen Ferris explaining the new ordinance in Chandler, Ariz., creating a linkage between land use and water use as the city builds out its last vacant acreage: Chandler’s new ordinance helps the city make decisions about land use and water use simultaneously. The new ordinance allots water to new businesses based on the square-footage and …
Continue reading ‘Chandler builds a land use-water use widget’ »
Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of …
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The culture of federal water projects has trained state interests, like a puppy to a dog biscuit, to believe that the federal government has limitless federal largesse and that no contract term will ever be enforced against state water project interest. Robert Glennon, writing two decades ago, in Coattails of the Past: Using and Financing the …
In Phoenix for a meeting, I had a couple of hours’ hole in my schedule and skipped out to the “Gilbert Water Ranch”. It’s an interesting example of what the water management solution space looks like in arid central Arizona. It’s a series of groundwater recharge basins in the Phoenix suburb – both treated municipal …