THE MIRAGE IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN

PAUL HIRT, ANNIE GUSTAFSON, KELLI L. LARSON

VALLEY OF THE SUNthe mirage in the

Paul Hirt, Annie Gustafson, and Kelli L. Larson, “The Mirage in the Valley of the Sun,” EnvironmentalHistory 13 (July 2008): 482-514.

ABSTRACTThe Valley of the Sun, a booming metropolitan region of 3.7 million people in a desertthat gets seven inches of annual rainfall, has enjoyed an oasis lifestyle during thetwentieth century, supported by government-funded reclamation projects and waterpumped from aquifers deep underground. Following World War II, groundwaterdepletion accelerated rapidly, threatening the sustainability of that Sunbelt boom.The state of Arizona, with prodding from the federal government, passed the ArizonaGroundwater Management Act of 1980 designed to end groundwater overdraft by2025. Initially considered a progressive statute, the law has been systematicallyweakened over the past twenty-five years, increasing water insecurity and delayingnecessary conservation and growth control measures.

WALK ACROSS A DESERT VALLEY in the mid-day sun and you may see a familiarmirage: a lake shimmering in the distance. Even though you know surface waterin this parched landscape is scarce, you wonder if it might be real, your hopesincreasing with the degree of your thirst. Inevitably, you arrive at the location tofind nothing wet in sight. On the far horizon, though, another lake glistensthrough the desert heat. …1

Current water politics in rapidly growing desert cities of the U.S. Southwestresemble chasing this kind of mirage. Exploding with subdivisions and shoppingmalls and golf courses, creating artificial oases all around them, these desertcities and their citizens, urban planners, political leaders, real estate developers,and public opinion-molders all see a hopeful vision of water on the horizon, even

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though the natural landscape they are transforming is unrelentingly dry. Carryinga load of water they managed to acquire over the years, these cities grow into anuncertain future, believing that when they need more of the wet stuff they willfind it. They have faith that the shimmer on the distant horizon will be real water,not a mirage. But Sunbelt cities in the arid Southwest increasingly findthemselves in the position of the hiker with a half-empty water bottle arriving atthe imagined oasis only to find desert.

This most feared scarcity—running dry—has dominated resource politics inthe West for the past 150 years and continues to profoundly shape the politicsand economics of the region today. Cities with millions of inhabitants now dependon overallocated and vulnerable fresh water supplies. This challenge tosustainability is unprecedented in scope and scale. Never before have watersupplies in the arid West been so severely strained with the potential to affect somany people. Arizona is particularly vulnerable, especially its rapidly growingurban areas. Our focus in this essay is the urban region in central Arizona’sSonoran desert dubbed the “Valley of the Sun,” a Chamber of Commerce monikerthat includes Phoenix and twenty-four adjacent rapidly growing towns and citiesspreading inexorably across the desert like ink spilled on porous paper.2

Commonly, people within and beyond the region refer to the whole megalopolisby the name of its capital city: Phoenix. An icon for Sunbelt demographic growth,Arizona held the record for the fastest growing state in 2006, and Phoenixsupplanted Philadelphia as the nation’s fifth most populous.3 Every year since2000, more than 100,000 people have moved to the Valley of the Sun. Three millionpeople called this place home at the start of the new millennium with six millionpeople expected by 2025.4

The iconic saguaro cactus evolved over millennia to adapt to the intense aridityof the Sonoran desert. Cities in the Valley of the Sun, on the other hand, createdan oasis of lush green landscapes with a relatively abundant supply of waterdiverted from four rivers and with ancient water pumped from aquifers beneaththe Valley. The deep water in the aquifers beneath Maricopa County accumulatedover millions of years. The climatic conditions that filled these aquifers no longerexist, and the geological pace of groundwater recharge is now wholly inadequateto make up for the rapid pumping taking place in recent decades. Arizonans tookthe water supply bull by the horns over a quarter century ago in a landmark waterconservation law, the Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980, butsubsequent loopholes and evasions have gutted its original intent and taken thestate off the path toward sustainability. The story is paradigmatic: populationgrowth and economic development strained the local water supply, which led toexpensive water importation projects, which supported more development, whichled to the need for even more water—a self-perpetuating cycle of unrestrainedgrowth driving a competitive, acquisitive water policy. Virtually every desert cityhas followed this path. Water supply crises in Arizona’s history have punctuatedthe cycles of growth, with each crisis stimulating institutional reforms aimed atcapturing more water or regulating consumption. The greater the crisis, the moresignificant the reform. But as soon as the fear of running dry passed, commitment

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to the reforms waned. While the next and most challenging water supply crisislooms in the early twenty-first century, the water elite in Arizona continuouslydismantled water consumption restraints established in 1980 while gazinghopefully toward shimmers on the horizon.

The story of Phoenix and its fresh water supply is a microcosm of the story ofdesert cities everywhere today promoting unbounded growth in a land of limitedresources. In the arid American West, economic development desires typicallyhave driven water policy. As water supplies reach their limits in this arid region,however, water availability will begin to drive development policy.5 That difficultbut inevitable transition from a growth-based to a water-supply-based politicaleconomy can be gradual or wrenching, planned or crisis-driven. This study revealshow and why the path taken by one of the largest and fastest growing urban areasin America will be a rough journey likely to end in thirst rather than security—anoutcome that unfortunately may be all too common throughout the arid West.

WATER, CLIMATE, GROWTH, AND SUSTAINABILITYFRESH WATER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT natural resource sustaining life onour planet. Humans now capture and consume about 54 percent of the world’sfreshwater supplies, and that figure is expected to go up to 70 percent by 2025.6

Table 1. Population Growth in Metropolitan Phoenix.

Graph created by authors.


Many of the biggest cities in the world currently are vulnerable to water shortages.The WorldWatch Institute in 2004 noted that more than half of the world’s sixteenlargest cities—those with populations of 10 million or more—are experiencing“mild to severe water stress, a condition where withdrawals are outstrippingavailable supplies.”7 In a Catch-22, the thirstiest regions tend to be in aridenvironments with the most limited water supplies.8 In a double irony, thesethirsty regions are often the locations with the greatest population growth. Thisis certainly true for America’s arid Sunbelt stretching from Texas to California.According to a U.S. Geological Survey national water summary in 1995, the LowerColorado River region, which includes most of Arizona, had the dubiousdistinction of being the first region in the country where water withdrawalsexceeded the renewable water supply.9

Recent climate change research indicates that concerns about water scarcityin the Southwest have been understated and are rising in urgency. A 2007 NationalResearch Council report on water supply in the Colorado River Basinacknowledges that the region is more prone to drought than previously believed,that the “normal” flow of the Colorado River is probably 20 percent less than thepresumed annual flow when the waters were jealously divided between sevenstates in 1922, and that global warming is likely to exacerbate dry spells in theregion, reduce critical snow pack and river flow, and increase evaporation andwater demand.10

Further complicating the problem, most southwestern rivers have more claimsstaked to them than the actual amount of water flowing in the rivers. The mostimportant example, as mentioned above, is the Colorado River, which provideswater for about 30 million people in the Southwest. The Colorado River has 16.5million acre feet of legally-recognized, court-enforceable water diversion rightsbut an average of only 13 million acre feet of annual flow.11 Even more ominousfor Arizona, California’s congressional delegation blocked funding of the CentralArizona Project (CAP), which now brings Colorado River water to thirstyPhoenicians, until 1968 when Arizona’s delegation finally agreed to California’sdemand that its water rights receive priority. In other words, under the lawCalifornia gets all its Colorado River water entitlement before Arizona’s CAP getsany.12 The potential for conflict, especially in drought years with low river flows,is obvious. And long-term drought is upon us now. The flow of the Colorado Riveris at its lowest since water rights were allocated in 1922. The two biggest storagereservoirs—Lake Powell and Lake Mead—are half empty and experts predict thatneither is likely to be full again in our lifetimes.13

In response to concerns over future water supplies—and a threat from thefederal government to cut off funding for the Central Arizona Project Canal—Arizonans adopted the Arizona Groundwater Management Act (GMA) in 1980, atthe time considered quite innovative and to this day heralded by some experts asstate-of-the-art water policy.14 Its aim was to achieve a sustainable water supplyfor the state by ending groundwater overdraft by 2025—a policy called “safe yield.”15

Since then, Arizonans have made impressive efforts to reduce per capita water


consumption by city dwellers, maximize the use of Colorado River water fromthe CAP canal, and end overpumping of the groundwater aquifers, but as thisessay will reveal, the results of those efforts are clearly inadequate to avert acrisis in the not-too-distant future if the region continues on its present course.

An often-cited scholarly assessment of the GMA’s implementation byKatharine Jacobs and James Holway in 2004 optimistically claimed that“substantial progress has been made within central Arizona in moving towards amore sustainable water future.”16 We argue here that pride in Arizona’s progresstoward implementing the GMA is unwarranted. While progress has been madeon the supply side with the arrival of CAP water in 1986, progress on the demandside is lacking in the metropolitan heart of the state. Total water supplies in theValley of the Sun are more likely to decrease than increase in the future, makingdemand management and population stabilization key elements to averting awater crisis and achieving sustainability. Yet, instead of making necessaryprogress in reducing water demand, the conservation goals of the law have beensystematically weakened by legislative amendments, consumer resistance, andtimorous regulators. In appearance, Phoenicians have been working concertedlytoward a sustainable future water supply, but that future is a mirage.

WATER SUPPLIES AND AQUIFER DEPLETIONALTHOUGH ARIZONA POSTCARDS FEATURE Sonoran desert scenes, much ofthe state actually is covered in forested uplands that receive significant rain andwinter snow. Numerous small and medium-sized rivers drain the high country inthe northern half of the state and fortuitously flow through the Valley of the Sun,merging with the Gila River, which eventually empties into the Colorado Rivernear the borders with California and Mexico. Consequently, though extremelyparched, the Valley has an unexpected wealth of surface water that has beencaptured and dispersed across the region with the aid of federal reclamationprojects, often building new canals in the same location as those originally hand-hewn by the Hohokam Indians one thousand years ago. Beyond the artificial oasesirrigated green with federal reclamation dollars is a desert landscape that receivesonly seven inches of rain annually but has the capacity to evaporate over six feetof water per year.17 This climatic condition creates a stony, desiccated surfacethat disguises another unexpected wealth of water: underground aquifers. Thedesert alluvium is piled thousands of feet deep, and all of it was saturated withwater accumulated over millions of years. Rivers and groundwater are thus thetwo main sources of water for the human and other biological inhabitants of theValley.

These two types of water correspond to two human ideas of central importanceto this study: renewable versus nonrenewable. Arizona’s rivers are “renewable”in the sense that water flows day after day, year after year, with fluctuations basedon seasonal precipitation patterns and long-term climate cycles. Groundwater isdifferent. It flows, but glacially. It is renewed, but only incrementally as seepagethrough deep layers of sand and gravel. While only a small fraction of the seven


inches of annual rainfall ever makes it into the aquifer each year, pumps todaycan extract seven inches from an underground water table in a matter of hours,or even minutes. The history of groundwater pumping for agriculture and citiesduring the last half century is almost invariably a story of steady, troubling aquiferdepletion, a condition called “overdraft” or “groundwater mining.” It is a seriousproblem from Florida to California, as well as in many other regions of the world,including China, Mexico, and the Middle East. Overdraft threatened Californiairrigation as early as the 1920s and led to increased efforts to import water fromother areas of the state. Groundwater pumping already has emptied parts of theOgallala Aquifer in America’s agricultural breadbasket, and what remains isexpected to last only another generation. As a result, the prospects for sustainableagriculture in the southern plains are not favorable.18 Likewise, the prospects arenot favorable for sustaining large rapidly growing urban centers on nonrenewablegroundwater in the desert Southwest. This has been one of the key water supplychallenges facing Arizonans for over half a century.

The problems associated with groundwater overdraft go beyond supplyconcerns. Groundwater overdraft increases water pumping and well drilling costs,erodes the quality of the water remaining in the aquifer, and causes land fissuresand subsidence that damages roads, water reservoirs, canals, and the foundationsof buildings. Groundwater depletion also lessens or eliminates the flow of surfacewater in Arizona’s scarce valley rivers and streams, harming the state’s preciousriparian ecosystems, which make up only 0.2 percent of the state’s land base butsupport most of its wildlife and much of its recreation.19

In Arizona, and in the arid West as a whole, agriculture consumes the vastmajority of the region’s water supplies—typically 80 to 90 percent. Agriculturerepresented 82 percent of Arizona’s water consumption in 2000. The numbersare different, however, in urbanizing Maricopa County (the Valley of the Sun)where seas of stucco homes with tile roofs are rapidly replacing fields of cottonand groves of citrus. Farm consumption there declined from 82 percent of thetotal in 1985 to 63 percent in 2000.20 At the time of this writing in 2007,agricultural use of water in the county reached parity with municipalconsumption. All analysts agree that farm use will continue on a steady downwardtrend.21 Along with urban consumption, industrial use also is expected to continuegrowing as agriculture declines. This remarkable and no doubt irreversibletransfer of water from farms to cities means that future considerations ofsustainability will require a focus on how cities consume and conserve water.

POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUNBESIDES BIOPHYSICAL FACTORS, sociopolitical conditions in Arizona and theWest have shaped options and outcomes. A libertarian, acquisitive, pro-propertyrights, antiregulation ethic predominates in the region’s political culture. Eventhough people may value sacrifice and communitarian ethics in their families,religious and civic organizations, and even offices and classrooms, in westernpolitics those same people usually favor weak state and municipal controls over


the economic landscape. More specifically, and just as ironically, westerners favoraggressive state involvement in capturing and delivering water resources foreconomic development, but prefer private ownership of the wet stuff and laissez-faire policies regarding its consumption.22 Over time this has led to a sense ofentitlement, resistance to regulatory restrictions, and profligate waterconsumption as government subsidies disguise the true cost of delivering cleanwater to users. In fact, for homeowners in the Valley of the Sun, a ton of delivereddirt is twenty times more expensive than a ton of delivered potable water.23

When water supplies run short, governing institutions have sought toaugment the supply through importation, technological innovation, or thepurchasing of water rights from elsewhere. Augmentation, however, is just thepractice of moving water from one place to another—taking it out of rivers anddelivering it to farms and cities, collecting it from one basin and sending it toanother, pumping it from underground aquifers and using it on the surface. Theabsolute supply of water is never really augmented in any significant way; moreis made available in certain places, with less available in others. As such, the questto “augment” water supplies in arid regions is an effort to move water from placesof little political or economic consequence to places with political and economicclout. It is an act of power in which one group’s gain is another’s loss. Los Angeles’sheist of Owens Valley’s water (portrayed in the film “Chinatown”) is the iconictale of this imperialist relationship.24

Conservation, or demand reduction, has become part of the strategy ofaugmentation in the United States and beyond, especially since the 1970s, butvolunteerism and regulatory timidity have made conservation programs in centralArizona little more than window dressing. Preferred responses to water scarcityin the West in general and Phoenix in particular rarely involve significantbehavioral changes or mandatory restrictions in consumption. Private ownershipof water and irrational water pricing support this laissez-faire condition, posingsignificant obstacles to balancing water consumption with water supply. Theproblem is no longer hypothetical. According to a 2003 U.S. Bureau of Reclamationreport, central Arizona may face a water supply crisis as early as 2025. Nor is itjust a Phoenix problem: “The social, economic, and environmental consequencesof water supply crises are no longer local or regional issues,” the Bureau reportcontinues, “these crises now affect economies and resources of nationalimportance.”25

HISTORICAL PATTERNSSINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Euro-Americans colonizing the Westgenerally have taken great pride in conquering nature and native peoples, revelingin their ability to overcome competitors, obstacles, and constraints. WilliamSmythe’s famous 1899 call to arms The Conquest of Arid America opened with apoem titled “Emancipation” that captured the missionary zeal of the irrigationcrusade dedicated to greening the Western deserts:


The Nation reaches its hand into the Desert.The barred doors of the sleeping empire are flung wideopen to the eager and the willing, that they mayenter in and claim their heritage!26

Smythe, presuming the heritage of indigenous people was destined to beclaimed by his own race, was at the leading edge of a national movement promotedby John Wesley Powell to match government assistance with individual andcorporate initiative to develop the arid regions by capturing and controlling riversfor the benefit of white Americans migrating from agricultural regions in theEast. Providing financing, engineering expertise, and social organization, thefederal government built most of the infrastructure needed to remove water fromrivers and deliver it to farmers and eventually town-builders. The NewlandsReclamation Act of 1902, which created the agency now known as the Bureau ofReclamation, clinched this public-private partnership that sustains most of theoasis civilizations in western America today, including that of the Valley of theSun.27

Roosevelt Dam, located approximately eighty miles east of Phoenix, wasamong the first group of dams undertaken by the Bureau of Reclamation. At thetime of its completion in 1911 it was the largest solid masonry dam in the world.28

The proposal to water the Valley spared no ambition. Named after PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, who signed the Reclamation Act into law, the dam capturedand stored the waters of the Salt River so they could be more efficiently delivereddownstream through an extensive canal system to farms and irrigable land inthe Valley. The Salt River Project (SRP) facilitated the rapid spread of agriculture,a population boom, and a proliferation of towns.29 Reclamation, a government-sponsored program to make the desert bloom, thus fueled the real estate andconstruction industries as well as agriculture. SRP remains the largest watersupplier in the Valley. Federal paternalism was good to Greater Phoenix. Smythewould be proud.30

The construction of Roosevelt Dam, however, did not satiate Valley boosters’thirst for securing additional water supplies. The 1922 compact between ColoradoRiver basin states allocated to Arizona 2.8 million acre-feet (maf) of the 7.5 mafto be shared among the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada.31

Hoping to secure a larger entitlement, Arizona refused to ratify the compact until1944, leaving its Colorado River allotment in legal limbo during the 1920s and1930s. Bitter competition with other Colorado River basin states, especiallyCalifornia, marked what Public Administration scholar Frank Gregg termed the“Arizona style” of water politics. According to Gregg, the Arizona style sees waterentirely as an economic commodity, equating its presence or absence witheconomic life or death.32 This philosophy was prominently displayed on a sign atRoosevelt Lake in 1961: “Arizona Grows Where Water Flows.”33

Water certainly flowed in central Arizona, but not always by the natural lawsof gravity. Instead, it was stored and shuttled through an increasingly intricatenetwork of canals, pumps, and pipelines. By 1946, the Bureau of Reclamation’s


Salt River Project had expanded to six dams on the Salt and Verde rivers with atotal storage capacity of over 2.3 million acre-feet of water. SRP currently deliversapproximately one million acre-feet (maf) of water annually to its 388-square mileservice area in the Valley of the Sun and some “off-project” recipients such asIndian communities and irrigations districts.34 As Arizona historian ThomasSheridan noted, “Whether with pumps, canals, or dams, Arizona history has beenone long reversal of gravity.”35

With the Salt and Verde rivers dammed and controlled by mid-century,Phoenicians turned the bulk of their attention to the Colorado River and topromoting the coveted Central Arizona Project Canal (CAP). Their task was toconvince the federal government to fund what would become the most expensivewater delivery project in American history. The CAP would bring half of Arizona’sallocation of Colorado River water two hundred miles east and one thousand feetuphill from the riverbed to the Valley of the Sun.36 Getting the CAP funded wouldbe an uphill battle, so to speak. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., aware of Arizona’sintense desire for this extraordinarily expensive project were wary of the state’sdependence on reclamation subsidies for its water supply and worried about anew and growing problem in Arizona and other parts of the arid West: theaccelerating depletion of groundwater aquifers from overpumping made possibleby the invention of the centrifugal pump. This new pumping technology spreadrapidly starting in the 1920s and greatly accelerated the capacity to “reversegravity.” As a result, all over the arid West new farms and urban growth sproutedup wherever a well could be drilled and a pump could be powered. Pumping fromthe Ogallala Aquifer on the southern plains fueled an explosion of new farmsthere, as did pumping from the Snake River aquifer in southern Idaho, the CentralValley aquifer in California, and the aquifers under Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas,Denver, Albuquerque, and every other city, big and small, in the arid West.37

Policy makers in Washington felt Arizona should “earn” funding for the CAPcanal by lowering the annual rate of groundwater depletion in order to put it on apath toward sustainability and wean it from dependence on federal bail-outs.Accordingly, threats to withhold funding for the CAP became the “stick” by whichofficials in Washington, D.C., forced Arizona into acknowledging—or at leastfeigning interest in—the consequences associated with the rapid depletion ofgroundwater. The “carrot,” of course, was garnering congressional support forwhat became a $4 billion project by the 1980s. In response to a Bureau ofReclamation warning that CAP would not be approved without restrictions ongroundwater use, the state of Arizona adopted its first Groundwater Code in 1945.The 1945 Code only required the registration of wells, no restrictions on pumping.It looked like regulation but actually did nothing to deal with the problem ofoverdraft. A successor to the 1945 Code passed three years later designated“Critical Groundwater Areas” where overdraft was a problem, but it also lackedmechanisms of enforcement. According to one legislator, the 1948 Code was “asweak as restaurant soup and should have been sent from the Senate withcrutches.”38 Although a Groundwater Study Commission drafted a new


groundwater bill in 1951 during a brief water supply crisis, the legislature failedto pass it, and the 1948 Code remained unchanged until a few amendments wereadded in 1977, none of which addressed pumping limitations.39

Despite Arizona’s paltry efforts to restrain groundwater overdraft, Phoenixwater boosters made steady headway in garnering federal support for the CentralArizona Project. Perhaps no one was as dedicated to or as enthusiastic about waterimportation as Arizona’s Congressional representative Carl Hayden. During hisfifty-seven year tenure in the House and Senate, Hayden lobbied tirelessly for theCAP.40 Advocates of the CAP finally succeeded in getting it authorized in 1968under the aegis of the Colorado River Basin Project Act, providing support forseveral more decades of central Arizona boosterism and growth. The nextchallenge would be to actually build the CAP canal and successfully deliverColorado River water to the Valley of the Sun.

POSTWAR URBAN GROWTHTHE POPULATION OF THE CITY of Phoenix grew more than any other city in thecountry between 1950 and 1960, quadrupling its residents from 109,000 to nearly440,000 and soaring from the ninety-ninth largest city in the United States tothe twenty-ninth largest city in that one decade.41 The size of Phoenix greatlyexpanded as well, from 17 square miles in 1950 to more than 180 in 1960. Becauseof the abundance of flat land, much of which was irrigated cropland, as well as ahost of other “pull” factors such as the strength of the regional economy andmild winters, Greater Phoenix has been and continues to be geographicallyamenable to sprawl. In 1955, more than 80 percent of the Valley’s newly urbanizedregions were built on land that had been agricultural. According to a 1971 reportprepared for the Arizona Department of Economic Planning and Development,the availability of large tracts of land and the overall attractiveness of Phoenix’saffordable housing lured thousands of homebuilders and millions of residents tothe central desert region.42

As the metro area sprawled, consuming cropland in its path in the 1950s and1960s, Valley water suppliers remained optimistic and welcomed the growth.Transferring water rights from agriculture to municipalities made possible theremarkable transformation of Valley farm towns like Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe,and Mesa into a merged metropolis that became the undisputed financial,political, and cultural capital of Arizona. Ironically, because farms use at leasttwice as much water acre-for-acre as housing developments, every time an orangegrove was razed for a subdivision, the Valley had a little more water. Whileresidents of these burgeoning cities intuitively recognized that water in Arizonawas a scarce and precious commodity, in Greater Phoenix it remained cheap andabundant. The perception of Phoenix as an oasis reigned supreme.43 Thisperception, however, was partially built upon increasingly unsustainablegroundwater pumping. The aquifer was a common pool resource, and anyone witha permit and a pump could extract groundwater to their heart’s content.44 In theface of continuing aquifer decline in agricultural and urban areas of the state,


the Arizona legislature passed a law in 1973 offering some weak protection forhome-buyers. It required residential developers to either show that they had anadequate supply of water for their housing developments or to notify the originalpurchaser of a home that there might not be adequate water in the future. This“buyer beware” clause could be hidden in the fine print of the purchase contractand did not have to be disclosed to subsequent purchasers of those homes.45 Itwas a gesture, but little more.

Groundwater depletion clearly needed to be addressed more conscientiously,but until 1980, water politics in the region focused solely on augmentation ratherthan reducing consumption. The annual overdraft for the Phoenix region in 1980was 1.3 million acre-feet, enough water to supply about 2 million households inthe Valley. Forty percent of the water consumed in the same year wasunsustainable “mined groundwater.” In some areas of central Arizona, the watertable had dropped as much as four hundred feet.46

CRISIS, REFORM, AND RESISTANCEBY THE 1970s, with federal budget deficits skyrocketing from the Vietnam Warand social welfare programs, competition for federal dollars grew fierce.Beginning with President Richard Nixon and continuing with presidents JimmyCarter and Ronald Reagan, massive federal water projects met increasingly harshscrutiny from the Office of Management and Budget. President Carter, trainedas an engineer, had clashed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over anenvironmentally destructive water project in Georgia while he was governor. Thisexperience imbued him with a skeptical eye toward federal water developmentand a reformer’s impulse upon entering the White House in 1977. Announcingthat he would address both economic waste and environmental damage in onestroke, President Carter made a list of ten water projects he consideredboondoggles and for which he wanted federal funding canceled. To the horror ofArizona’s water boosters (and to the delight of Arizona environmentalists), theCAP was on President Carter’s “Hit List.”47 Not surprisingly, the western states’congressional delegations rose up in a bipartisan regional revolt against Carter’sHit List and eventually gutted most of it. As the most expensive project on thelist, though, the CAP remained threatened for several more years. It was abouthalf finished and Phoenix area boosters could almost taste the water. Becausethe project was far too expensive for the state to fund on its own, the Arizonacongressional delegation pulled out all stops to revive CAP funding. But the state’sunresolved groundwater overdraft problems hampered its efforts to get federalassistance.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the Arizona legislature created aGroundwater Management Study Commission in 1977 to work on a seriousgroundwater code. The process dragged on inconclusively for two years, untilCarter’s Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus informed then Governor Bruce Babbittthat Arizona had to pass a comprehensive groundwater management codedesigned to put the state on a path to sustainability before Carter would support


funding of the CAP. At stake was 1.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water,slightly more than the amount of groundwater overdraft in the Valley at that time,so CAP appeared to be the solution to aquifer depletion. In response to SecretaryAndrus’s threat, Arizona politicians acted quickly. Babbitt formed a “rump group”to negotiate a bill that would appease Andrus. “In one sense, this process doesnot speak well of democracy,” wrote Baltimore lawyer Desmond D. Connall, Jr.“This issue was too controversial for the legislature,” he continued, “and thuswas left to three interest groups [mining, municipal, and agricultural], eachrepresented by its ‘hired guns.’ The image of the proverbial smoke filled roomcomes to mind. ... However, without secret negotiations limited to the threeprincipal interests, most doubt that there would have been a bill.” The bill for theArizona GMA was delivered to the state legislature and passed by both houses inone hour and fifteen minutes “with minimum debate and no amendments” onJune 11, 1980.48 On June 12, 1980, Babbitt signed the GMA into law.49 AttorneyTom Galbraith opined that the real impetus for the GMA was far removed fromenvironmental concern or hydrological benevolence for the state’s deterioratingaquifers. “The state’s political leadership summoned this group,” he wrote, “notbecause reform of the state’s antiquated groundwater law was overdue, but tosolve a funding problem.”50

On the surface, the GMA seemed visionary, unprecedented, a serious long-overdue effort to end the groundwater overdraft problem. In 1986, the FordFoundation recognized Arizona’s GMA as one of the ten most innovative programsin state and local government.51 For the three most populous areas of the state,the primary objective of the GMA was to attain “safe-yield” of groundwater by2025, defined as “a long-term balance between the annual amount of groundwaterwithdrawn in an AMA and the annual amount of natural and artificial rechargein an AMA.” The Act created the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR)to implement its policy goals, including a new program of groundwater withdrawalrights; a system for registering groundwater wells and reporting usage; amandatory conservation program that established specific water reduction goalsfor agricultural, municipal, and industrial users; and a requirement for developersto demonstrate a one-hundred-year assured water supply for new housing.52

This regulatory program focused on the rapidly growing urban areas of thestate—Tucson, Phoenix, and Prescott—as well as the agricultural area of PinalCounty between Tucson and Phoenix, regions in which groundwater overdraftwas the most severe over which ADWR would have the most authority to enforceconservation programs. These areas were designated “Active Management Areas”(AMAs) under the new groundwater code. The AMAs included 80 percent of thestate’s population, 60 percent of the state’s groundwater pumping, and 70 percentof the state’s overdraft. The Phoenix AMA is the largest at 5,646 square miles.53

In order to establish a timeline to meet the goal of safe yield, the GMAmandated five consecutive water management planning periods spanning from1980 to 2025. At the time of this writing, in 2007, the Phoenix AMA was near theend of its Third Management Plan period and drafting its fourth plan. In principle,


each successive management plan would contain more rigorous conservationrequirements. As water scholar Robert Glennon explained, “The GMA operateslike a ratchet and moves only in one direction: controlling water use.”54 In contrast,however, our analysis of the successive management plans for the Phoenix AMAreveals that the ratchet is slipping in the reverse direction.

The First Management Plan required modest but specific goals for thereduction of agricultural and municipal water use. For farmers, it establishedthe long-term goal of “maximum feasible conservation,” tied irrigation rights tocropping patterns of the previous five years, and prohibited agriculturalexpansion in the AMAs. ADWR defined maximum feasible conservation as 85percent efficiency in crop irrigation; in other words, under best practices only 15percent of irrigation water should be lost to evaporation or run-off. ADWR thenset targets for gradually reducing the irrigation allotments until farmers reached85 percent efficiency. If farmers did not use their allotments, they could bankthose irrigation rights for later use.

This seemingly rational program floundered within a decade. First, allotmentsof irrigation water were based on maximum use in the previous five years ratherthan average use, so farmers started out with an overly generous baselineallotment. Then, as farmers changed crops or took land temporarily out ofproduction, as often happens, they were able to bank those water savings and usemore later or even sell those rights to others. Babbitt expressed anxiety over thecreation of a lucrative market in agricultural water rights during the drafting ofthe GMA. He famously warned that he did not want to encourage farmers “retiringto beachfront condos in La Jolla to raise martinis instead of alfalfa.”55 As it turnedout, the conservation program consistently allocated more water to farmers thanmost of them actually used, undermining any conservation incentives.56

Despite this ineffectual regulatory program, lawyers and lobbyists for theagricultural industry pushed to further weaken ADWR’s conservationrequirements and authority. As a result, in 2002 the state legislature passed alaw that repealed the “maximum feasible conservation” requirement, droppedthe irrigation efficiency bar down to 80 percent, and eliminated specific waterconservation targets in exchange for farmers adopting “Best ManagementPractices” (BMPs). By implementing certain BMPs farmers would not be requiredto meet conservation goals. Presumably, the BMPs would reduce waterconsumption, but ADWR no longer sought or enforced quantifiable reductionsin water use.57

Many people tolerated this revolt against conservation regulation because ofthe steady conversion of farms to residential housing. The decline in farm acreagein the Phoenix AMA reduced groundwater consumption and slowed the rate ofgroundwater overdraft, making it appear as though the GMA was working. But,in fact, a lower intensity use of water (houses) simply replaced a higher intensityuse (crops), providing a temporary surplus. Rapid population growth, however,quickly consumed this margin and erased any sense of progress. Sustainabilitywill require much more success in managing urban demands, yet a closer look at


the regulation of municipal water consumption illustrates the same pattern ofloopholes and evasions.

Like many other state water authorities, ADWR uses a water consumptionmeasure called gallons per capita per day, or “GPCD,” to calculate annual rates ofwater consumption in cities and to establish conservation goals.58 The FirstManagement Plan, which covered the period from 1980 to 1990 (belatedly adoptedby ADWR in 1984) established conservation targets for municipal water providersthat were supposed to be met by 1987. ADWR chose to regulate the water providers(city governments or private water companies that delivered water) instead ofregulating the “end user” of water—homeowners and businesses. It also chose toregulate only “large” water providers.59 Using 1980 as the baseline, ADWR groupedthe region’s large municipal water providers into three categories, assigning toeach a specific water reduction mandate based on their rates of consumption.Cities with higher per capita rates of consumption had to achieve greaterreductions in GPCD.60

The program started off rather timidly. Total water consumption in the city ofPhoenix in 1980 was 267 GPCD, considerably higher than the average for theUnited States as a whole and on the upper end among the arid West where waterconsumption is greatest.61 The First Management Plan required Phoenix to reduceits per capita water consumption by a mere six percent to reach an average annual

Map 1. Arizona Active Management Areas, The Phoenix AMA.

Map created by authors.


consumption of 251 GPCD by 1987—still above the national and regional average.62

But ADWR’s regulatory program was designed to grow more demanding over time.Since the GMA set up a fifty-year planning horizon designed to end groundwateroverdraft by 2025, the first plan called for only modest reductions. Policy makersestablished a system requiring gradual but steady progress in reducingagricultural, municipal, and industrial water consumption rates. At the end ofthe First Management Plan, ADWR warned, “It will be necessary for mostproviders to further reduce their per capita use rates during subsequentmanagement periods”—the ratchet would presumably tighten in subsequentplans.63

Unfortunately, this hopeful vision for gradually progressive waterconservation accomplishments met widespread intransigence. One of theprimary weaknesses of the First Management Plan was its vague languageregarding consequences for noncompliance and the unwillingness of ADWR toenforce the plan’s conservation targets. The First Management Plan did notinclude any criteria for determining the extent of a violation or articulate howdifferent types of violations would be penalized. Notably absent was adiscussion of the fees or penalties municipal providers might face if theirconservation targets were not met.64 The 1980 law authorized ADWR to assesssignificant penalties, but ADWR chose not to use that leverage. The targetscalculated in 1984 and enforceable by 1987 were largely ignored. Over 60 percentof the large water providers still remained out of compliance with their 1987targets in the mid-1990s.65

Water providers complained that they should not be expected to alter or beaccountable for the water consumption habits of individual homeowners andbusinesses. ADWR similarly felt it was incapable of regulating the landscapechoices of homeowners, so progress stalled.66 Many cities, however, haveeffectively employed regulations and incentives to significantly reduce outdoorwatering. The city of Tucson, 120 miles south of Phoenix, and the Southern NevadaWater Authority (Las Vegas) have been quite successful at this.67 But Valley of theSun water providers and state regulators chose instead to dawdle and bicker. Oneprivate water provider, the Arizona Water Company, even challenged in municupalcourt ADWR’s authority to regulate municipal water providers, miring theprogram in legal mud for over a decade.68

Mid-way through the implementation of the Second Management Plan inthe mid-1990s, ADWR responded to this resistance and lack of compliance bycreating an “alternative” conservation program, in which municipal providerswould be exempt from meeting their GPCD-based water use reduction targetsif they implemented a suite of agreed-upon Best Management Practices. Sincethe GMA required reductions in per capita use and this new program wouldnot, the legislature had to approve it, which it did in 1992.69 These exemptionswere codified in the Third Management Plan and set the precedent for thesimilar BMP-based agricultural program mentioned previously. By 2007, fourcities significantly out of compliance with their conservation targets had joinedthe alternative program.


Thus, rather than enforcing compliance when faced with the failure of waterproviders to reduce consumption rates to even modest initial goals, ADWR andthe state legislature chose to give the providers a pass by rewarding effort ratherthan accomplishment.70 Participating water providers essentially bought their wayout of compliance by spending public or rate-payer dollars on education andconservation incentives, regardless of whether those measures resulted in wateruse reductions. Scottsdale, for example, was one of the out-of-compliance citiesthat joined the alternative conservation program. It had the largest number ofpublicly-funded conservation programs of any city in the Valley in 2007, proudlytouting its progressive commitment to conservation, yet it also had one of thehighest per capita water consumption rates in the Valley, with per capita water useactually going up after 1998.71 Table 2 shows how the four cities in the alternativeconservation program have increased their per capita water consumption, despiteimplementing a suite of BMPs, in contrast to ADWR’s assigned conservation targetsthat mandated lower consumption rates over time. The creation of the alternativeprogram allowed high rates of water consumption to continue and pushedsustainable water management even farther into the future.

In the Phoenix AMA as a whole, groundwater overdraft declined by about halfin the two decades between 1980 and 2000 due to the arrival of CAP water in1985 and the steady retirement of agricultural lands, but with continued rapidpopulation growth and the failure of conservation regulations overdraft isprojected to rise steadily for the foreseeable future, contrary to the fundamentalgoals of the GMA. According to ADWR’s projections in the Third ManagementPlan, under the region’s “current use scenario,” groundwater overdraft will riseby over 30 percent between 1995 and 2025, making it impossible to reach “safeyield.”72 A 1999 performance audit of ADWR by Arizona’s Office of the AuditorGeneral unequivocally stated that all three of the state’s most populous AMAs(Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott) would not achieve safe yield by 2025, even if allthe requirements of the management plans were met.73 Clearly, this is not thepath to sustainable water use in the Valley of the Sun. The loosening of GPCDtargets and ADWR’s tolerance of noncompliance followed by only a few years thecompletion of the CAP to its terminus in Tucson in 1991. The carrot and stick thatmotivated Arizona to pass the GMA apparently no longer carried the same weightor urgency. A political culture that thrived on capturing resources but notregulating users had triumphed again.

‘ASSURED WATER SUPPLY’ UNRAVELEDWHILE FARMERS AND MUNICIPAL WATER PROVIDERS garnered accom-modations and legal loopholes allowing them to continue business as usual, landdevelopers pursued their own path of resistance, securing a novel and remarkableamendment to the GMA that poses perhaps the most significant threat of all tosustainable water use. An important component of the GMA is the requirementthat new developments within the Active Management Areas prove they have aone-hundred-year Assured Water Supply (AWS). This requirement strengthened


the 1973 law mentioned earlier by essentially prohibiting development where anassured water supply was not available. This feature of the law is one key reasonwhy so many policy analysts have considered the GMA rigorous and progressive.But land developers and their allies secured revisions to the law in 1993 thatrendered this requirement moot.

Real estate developers first challenged the AWS requirement through the rule-making process, then in the halls of the state legislature. State agencies thatadminister laws must promulgate regulations that serve as detailed blueprintsfor implementing the laws. While ADWR managed to produce a comprehensivemanagement plan for the entire Phoenix AMA in four years, they struggled fortwice as long to simply issue a draft set of regulations for the assured water supplyrequirement. When the initial AWS rules came out in 1988, they generated “astorm of controversy” from the development community.74 The protest was so

Table 2. Water Use Trends and Conservation Targets for Four Cities in Non Per CapitaConservation Program*

Graph created by authors.


vigorous that ADWR withdrew the regulations and went back to the drawing boardfor seven more years. The developers complained that the AWS rules would, asthe law intended, block the construction of new housing developments that couldnot demonstrate the availability of at least one hundred years of assured water.Many land speculators had purchased desert lands on the outskirts of the boomingmetropolis hoping to build profitable planned communities—a process thatfacilitates sprawl in the region. Under the initial AWS rules, if landowners couldnot acquire an adequate and sustainable water supply, they could not build.Developers found this simple regulatory mandate intolerable, equated it with aproperty “takings,” and convinced ADWR and the legislature to back off.

After years of public hearings and private negotiations, a complex compromisewas hammered out that ostensibly met the goals of safe yield and assured watersupply without putting any breaks on land development. Phoenicians could havetheir cake and eat it too. The solution that developers found acceptable requiredan act of the legislature in 1993 to establish a new public body called the CentralArizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGRD), a convenient subsidiaryof the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (CAWCD) that manages thedeliveries of Colorado River water from the CAP. This new GroundwaterReplenishment District had access to surplus CAP water not yet being deliveredto actual consumers. Ingeniously, CAGRD took payments from those who lackedan assured water supply, used the money to buy CAP water, and recharged it intothe aquifer at convenient locations. Two years after this was approved by thelegislature, and fifteen years after the Groundwater Management Act becamelaw, ADWR finally promulgated its assured water supply regulations with CAGRDa significant feature. Policy scholars have readily admitted that CAGRD was “aconvenient mechanism for most residential developers … to continue building”;adding that ADWR would not have been able to enforce the Assured Water Supplyrule on politically powerful real estate developers without this program;75 andthat CAGRD essentially “buffered developers from the growth managementpotential of those [AWS] rules.”76

While the architects of CAGRD were proud of the innovation, it contains twofundamental flaws completely contrary to the spirit and intent of the GMA. First,the term “replenishment” is a misnomer because CAGRD water does not have tobe recharged in the area of the aquifer where the drawdown occurs. In other words,CAGRD does not replenish the actual overdraft caused by the development;instead, it can recharge groundwater anywhere in the AMA. The water goingunderground at the recharge facilities along the CAP canal does not refill theaquifers being depleted many miles away. Housing developments enrolled in theprogram that are fed by unsustainable groundwater pumping do not necessarilyhave access to that recharged water.77

The people who purchase homes in the areas lacking an assured water supplypay for this shell game. Developers pay a modest enrollment fee per household tobecome a member of CAGRD, which then assumes the responsibility of findingwater to compensate for the overdraft caused by the development. Once the home


is sold the developer is off the hook. The homeowners are then saddled with anannual assessment fee (tax) to pay the cost of buying water to meet thereplenishment obligation. As water becomes scarcer, its cost will rise and so willthe assessments. In short, developers who cannot show a one-hundred-yearassured water supply can build homes anyway if they pay an enrollment fee toCAGRD. From then on, the homeowners pay CAGRD to acquire water for thereplenishment district—at whatever cost from whatever source—even though thatwater is not necessarily available to them. By definition CAGRD enrollees do nothave a one-hundred-year assured supply of water and nothing in thisreplenishment scheme changes that. Meanwhile, their homes sit on an aquiferbeing steadily drained. As aquifers are drained, soil compaction and subsidencefollow, threatening homes, roads, and utilities. Already in north Scottsdale, theCAP canal itself has been damaged by subsidence. A one-mile section of the canalhad to be retrofitted recently at a cost of $350,000.78 Superficially on a ledgerbook, overdraft in one place is compensated by recharge in another. But theaquifer under the Valley of the Sun is not a ledger book and the numbers do notadd up to sustainable, responsible water management.79

The second fatal flaw is that the CAGRD has no permanent water supply andis not required by the 1993 enabling legislation to have its own assured watersupply, even though its replenishment obligations are supposed to be assured forone-hundred years. From 1995 to 2004 the replenishment obligation of CAGRDwas met mostly by purchasing excess CAP water from its parent agency thatmanages the CAP canal. But all CAP water then and now is contractually obligatedand the only “excess” water available is that which rights holders have chosennot to use yet. As Valley growth proceeds and rights holders take their fullallocation, this excess water will disappear, yet CAGRD’s replenishmentobligations in the Valley of the Sun are projected to increase sixfold in the nexttwenty years, from about 30,000 to 180,000 acre-feet—ironically, with no assuredsource for acquiring that water.80

The popularity of the replenishment program compounds the problem.Perhaps naively, the first CAGRD Plan of Operation in 1995 assumed statewidedemand for its services in 2014 (after twenty years of operation) would be 37,000acre-feet. Its second ten-year plan of operation in 2004 raised that expectation to97,000 acre-feet, with another doubling of demand expected by 2025. Statewide,in 2025 CAGRD expects to have replenishment obligations equal to the totalamount of water delivered to the city of Tucson today with nearly 1 millioninhabitants. Ominously, the same 2004 Plan of Operation acknowledges that soonafter 2015 it will not have enough water to meet its obligations and will have toseek new supplies. Again, neither the “excess” CAP water nor a number of potentialalternative sources of water for CAGRD (farmers, tribes, water rights holders alongthe Colorado River, effluent, desalinization) are assured, yet enrollment in thereplenishment program continues unabated. Once again, rather than significantlyreducing consumption or restraining growth, the water elite place their hope inacquiring more water, that promising shimmer on the horizon.


Reviewing CAGRD and its implications for the future, a group of Arizonaattorneys, law professors, and university researchers concluded in 2007 that“unless we fix CAGRD, and fix it soon” the GMA’s goal to achieve water securityand sustainability will be an “empty” promise.81 Another legal scholar at ArizonaState University put it even more bluntly: “With the passage of the AWSrequirements [in the 1980 GMA], Arizona made a momentous choice—thatachieving a ‘safe-yield’ is more important than unencumbered growth. However,the CAGRD operates in opposition to that principle. It is time to stop pretendingthat such actions comply with the policy and purpose behind AWS regulations.Arizona must decide whether it wants to abide by the policy behind the AWSregulations—that of sustainable development and groundwater conservation—orovertly admit that it is willing to sacrifice that policy for short-term economicgain.”82

WEIGHING OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISMKATHARINE JACOBS AND JAMES HOLWAY, water policy scholars and formerhigh-level ADWR administrators, argued in their seminal 2004 article “Managingfor Sustainability in an Arid Climate” that the GMA was remarkably innovative,that “substantial progress has been made within central Arizona in movingtowards a more sustainable water future,” that “Arizona’s water managementefforts within AMAs … have largely been successful,” and that despite a fewobstacles “it is clear that achieving the goals of the GMA is possible.”83 Whatexplains their optimistic assessment? First, they argued that the GMA providedextraordinary authorities to a new agency (ADWR) to regulate water use. Whiletrue, these authorities have been wielded only half-heartedly and have beenemasculated legislatively. The authors stated that “a key component of Arizona’sprograms is significant enforcement authority. GMA violators can be fined up to$10,000 per day for illegal groundwater withdrawal.”84 The problem is, as theauthors themselves acknowledge, these penalties are rarely assessed or collected.There is virtually no enforcement beyond voluntary compliance and fewdisincentives for noncompliance. In 1999, department officials admitted that they“took a nontraditional approach to enforcement” and that “a high level oftolerance was employed.”85

Jacobs and Holway base their assessment of GMA success in part on the rapidintegration of CAP water into the Phoenix AMA water budget, judging it to be alaudable substitution of “renewable” surface water for “nonrenewable”groundwater. They point with pride to the fact that by the year 2000 Arizona wasusing its full CAP allocation, both by direct consumption and by injecting excessCAP water into the aquifer at “water banking” sites across the Valley for futurewithdrawal.86 While this helped reduce groundwater overdraft for about fifteenyears, the aquifer depletion problem persists in the face of population growth,resistance to conservation regulations, exempt wells, drought, and dwindlingsurface water supplies. By as early as 2015 CAGRD will no longer be able to meetits groundwater replenishment obligations solely with “excess” CAP water, and


by 2050 there will be no “excess” CAP water at all.87 The assumption that CAP is“renewable,” moreover, ignores the fact that the Colorado River is overallocated,that drought and climate change are reducing river flow, and that Arizona’s rightscome last in times of shortages. A significant proportion of CAP water in factmay not be dependably renewable. Complicating matters, the Arizona WaterRights Settlement Act in 2004 awarded over 600,000 acre-feet of Colorado Riverwater rights to the Gila River Indian community, redressing a historical injusticebut reducing the amount of CAP water reliably available for the growing cities inthe Valley.88

Perhaps most ironically, Jacobs and Holway praise the one-hundred-yearassured water supply feature of the law and tout the variety of innovativemechanisms established since 1980 involving water-banking authorities,including CAGRD.89 While the assured water supply policy is indeed laudable andwater banking is indeed innovative, many of the practices as explained aboveinvolve not much more than smoke and mirrors. While all major new developmentswithin an AMA must get a certificate of Assured Water Supply from ADWR, theapproval is automatic if the developer contracts with CAP or a municipal providerthat already has earned its AWS designation. For those who cannot get theircertificate that way, there is always CAGRD. The “assurance,” such as it is, onlylasts for one hundred years, not “in perpetuity,” and the whole house of cards isbased on the presumption that groundwater overdraft will end, that surface watersupplies will remain constant or increase, that CAGRD will be able to import morewater supplies to meet its replenishment obligations, and that population growthwill somehow level off mid-century.

Much of the failure to get serious about conservation and safe yield andassured water supply is tied to an overwhelming commitment by Valley moversand shakers not to upset the status quo, not to restrain the political economy ofgrowth. An unjustified confidence in future water supplies sustains a falseoptimism that lulls potential critics. Rather than holding firm to simple, clearconservation mandates or to actual assured water supplies, ADWR and the statelegislature created a complicated morass of regulations that ultimately servedto postpone water conservation accomplishments and undercut the goals of theGMA. These regulations are so complex and change so often that only a handfulof experts can navigate the bureaucratic maze. This complexity insulates theexperts from the public and prevents the public from understanding the full extentof its water supply insecurity. While the proliferation of new laws and authoritiesand conservation programs supports the view that responsible decisions are beingmade and the future is bright, the actual record of failed implementationcontradicts this optimism. Meanwhile, the region continues to draw newcomersand tourists alike with promotional campaigns claiming that, “the desert is amyth.”90 This continuing social disconnect is perhaps most glaringly revealed inthe 2007 voter approved (by a 65 percent majority) 125-acre water-based recreationfacility to be built in the east valley city of Mesa, complete with a simulated oceancapable of producing twelve-foot waves, a scuba lagoon, snorkeling pond, andartificial whitewater river for kayakers.91


CONCLUSIONIN 2005 THE BRILLIANT POLYMATH Jared Diamond tackled the question of whysome societies experience catastrophic collapses while others survive seriousenvironmental, political, and economic challenges. Throughout history,uncontrollable environmental stresses (e.g., drought and disease) or externalthreats (e.g., warfare) have caused or contributed to societal collapses. But socialresponses to these challenges, Diamond argues, are a key factor in determiningwhether a society fails or succeeds. The choices we make usually determine ourfate. Some societies perceive problems as they develop and act to rectify them.Others ignore or deny the problems or persist in behaviors that eventually lead tocrisis. Crises are wake-up calls, opportunities to adapt behavior. When a societyfails to learn from a crisis and adapt its behavior, it courts catastrophe.92

An ancient people, the Hohokam, built a densely populated civilization in theValley of the Sun a thousand years ago. With muscle power and Stone-Age toolsthey excavated over a thousand miles of canals to bring life-giving waters to theirmany towns and crops. They flourished for millennia then disappeared in thefifteenth century AD. Archaeologists still seek to untangle the mystery of theHohokam collapse.93 The most common arguments point to long-term droughtand its affects on a society that had reached or exceeded the “carrying capacity”of the local resources. An Anglo opportunist, John William “Jack” Swilling noticedthe ruins and half-buried irrigation canals in the Valley in the late 1860s as hedreamed about a future town. Initially called “Pumpkinville” and “Mill City,”Darrell Duppa’s timely recollection of the “Poem of Herodotus” prevailed, andthe area was named “Phoenix,” destined to rise from the ashes of the previouscivilization.94

One short century after Swilling named his town, with modern tools andtechnologies Phoenicians had greatly expanded their capacity to capture, control,and consume precious water resources to support a much larger and richercivilization. At a certain point, despite this technological genius, Phoenix willreach its carrying capacity and residents will need to adjust behaviors,expectations, and institutions to avoid what sociologist William Catton in 1980termed “overshoot.”95 In stark contrast to Jacobs and Holway’s optimism, authorCraig Childs suggested the imminence of just such a future in his April 16, 2007,High Country News exposé that portrayed modern Phoenix as a latter dayHohokam civilization beyond carrying capacity and bound for collapse. A seriesof pensive archaeologists documenting Valley ruins one step ahead of thebulldozers provided Childs with the pessimistic long durée viewpoint. Childs laidit out succinctly in a quote by archaeologist Banks Leonard who opined that theHohokam “built to the carrying capacity of the land and then they tumbled… Youknow what I think? I think we’re there. I think it’s just about time for the fall.”96

We take a middle path between the optimists and the pessimists. While we donot believe the collapse and abandonment of Phoenix and other desert cities isimminent, we think the evidence shows a harsh reckoning on the near horizon. Ifstate and local water managers and government officials do not institute stronger


mandatory conservation measures, invest in effluent re-use infrastructure, returnto credible assured water supply programs, and engage in serious growthmanagement, the region will quickly confront its widely predicted water crisis.Some optimists believe that when the need arrives, Phoenix will be able to importmore water as it did throughout the twentieth century. They march undeterredtoward that glistening mirage. However, more sober observers acknowledge thatthe era of mega water projects is over. Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus saidso during the Carter administration, Commissioner of Reclamation Daniel Beardreiterated it fifteen years later during the Clinton Administration, and theNational Research Council report of 2007 cited at the start of this essay confirmsit today.97 The inequities, expense, and environmental impacts of waterimportation schemes, in addition to political competition and the blunt fact thatall the region’s rivers are already overallocated, make it extremely unlikely thatthere will ever be another SRP or CAP for central Arizona. The Valley’s waterimperialism has reached its practical limit. Many policy makers and watermanagers are aware of the seriousness of this situation, yet they currently lackthe will, leadership, political clout, economic resources, and societal support tochange the profligate patterns of water use and population growth that havedefined Arizona’s history. Rather than solving the problem, water decision makersin the Valley wring their hands, bicker over regulations, and hatch improbableschemes for augmentation. This pattern is common throughout the arid West.

Responsible, sustainable water and growth management is as much a globalchallenge as it is a local challenge. The Valley of the Sun offers instructive lessonsin both success and failure. One of those lessons evident in this case study is thatproblem-solving reforms often require a crisis in order to overcome inertia, vestedinterests, false hopes, and a libertine culture fixated on consumption.Unfortunately, the corollary lesson is that vested interests are remarkably adeptat resisting and sidestepping regulations, and that once a sense of crisis subsidesregulatory agencies and lawmakers are amenable to dismantling long-term fixesin favor of short-term economic benefits.

A remarkable feature of this tale is how failure is so commonly portrayed assuccess. Western boosterism is key to understanding that contradiction. Selective,willful optimism obscures risk, forgives failure, and promises rectification inthe future. This is a common motif in the history of the West. A half-century agoWalter Prescott Webb wrote a provocative and prescient article in Harper’sMagazine titled, “The American West: Perpetual Mirage,” in which he chastisedthe region’s residents for denying the reality of the desert and constructing anoasis civilization based on depleting aquifers and ever more expensive waterimportation schemes. After profiling five western cities facing water crises inthe 1950s, he noted that behind their booster optimism these cities were “hauntednow by a growing consciousness that in every oasis the desert resides outside.”98

For Webb, the oasis cities of the West engaged in a perpetual denial of the realityof aridity. Clearly, not much has changed in the intervening five decades.

Thirty years after Webb’s essay, the talented environmental journalist MarcReisner used the mirage theme to characterize the Central Arizona Project canal:


“A political mirage for three generations of Arizonans, the Central Arizona Projectis now a palpable mirage as incongruous a spectacle as any on earth: a man-maderiver flowing uphill in a place of almost no rain.”99 Reisner argued that the CAPwould ultimately prove disillusioning due to drought, the overallocation ofColorado River water, and the priority rights of California. “Despite one of themost spellbinding and expensive waterworks of all time,” he wrote, “Arizonansfrom now until eternity will be forced to do what their Hohokam ancestors did:pray for rain.” Ironically, because the CAP supports an unjustified expectation ofabundance—a false hope of a perpetually full aqueduct—Reisner argued that “theCentral Arizona Project may make the state’s water crisis worse than everbefore.”100

For us, the “mirage” in our title is a metaphor for the propensity of watermanagers and purveyors of the ideology of endless growth to interpret anyglimmer they see far out on the horizon as real water rationalizing the statusquo. The histories of Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, Las Vegas, and other desertmetropolises over the past century justify some of this optimism. For the mostpart, these cities have acquired water whenever they needed it. A sense of securitybased on repeated success supports the water supply optimists, lulls the generalpopulation into apathy, and forestalls course corrections. But conditions havechanged significantly. Surplus and security are becoming ever scarcercommodities. The comforting faith that more water lies ahead is the mirage thatdrives Phoenix and its sister cities toward crisis. Time will tell if these cities willeventually rise like a phoenix to the critical challenge of achieving sustainabilityin the face of limited water supplies, rapid population growth, and a widelypredicted drier future.

PPPPPaaaaauuuuul Hl Hl Hl Hl Hirtirtirtirtirt is associate professor in the Department of History and the School ofSustainability, Arizona State University (ASU). In addition to collaborativeresearch on water and sustainability in southern Arizona, Hirt’s other researchprojects include the history of electric power in the Pacific Northwest,conservation in the US-Mexico “Sky Islands,” and a public education program onNature, Culture, and History at the Grand Canyon. AnnAnnAnnAnnAnnie Gie Gie Gie Gie Gususususustttttaaaaafffffsssssononononon earned anMA in environmental history at ASU in May 2008 and is currently pursuing acareer in environmental journalism. KKKKKeeeeelli Llli Llli Llli Llli Larararararsssssononononon is assistant professor in theSchools of Geographical Sciences and Sustainability at ASU. Her research focuseson human dimensions of the environment, especially water resource managementin metropolitan areas of the U.S. Currently, Dr. Larson is conducting research onperceptions of water scarcity and attitudes about resource policies, includinglandscaping practices and their ecological impacts in urban ecosystems.

NOTESThis material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundationunder Grant No. DEB-0423704, Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological


Research (CAP LTER), Grant DGE-0504248 Integrative Graduate Education andResearch Program, and Grant SES-0345945 Decision Center for a Desert City.Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in thismaterial are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of theNational Science Foundation (NSF). the authors would like to thank Lilah Zautnerand Barbara Trapido-Lurie for their assistance with figures.

1. During the writing of this essay, the April 16, 2007, issue of High Country Newsarrived with a feature story by Craig Childs on Phoenix, water, and growth ominouslytitled “Phoenix Falling?” On the cover, an artistic representation of the ancientHohokam civilization that flourished in the desert valley before it “fell” in thefifteenth century AD was juxtaposed against a modern Phoenix of skyscrapers andsuburbs surrounded by cracked-mud earth. The headline phrase “Mirage of Progress”presaged Childs’s storyline. While our assessment of the Phoenix mirage is moreempirical and less apocalyptic, we agree that much of what counts as “progress” inmanaging area water resources in Greater Phoenix is unfounded optimism basedon a culture of consumption and evasion that stymies the region from dealinghonestly and adequately with aridity.

2. The number of cities in the Valley is taken from the Maricopa Association ofGovernments website: http://www.mag.maricopa.gov/members.cms.

3. The city of Phoenix measured 248 square miles in 1970 and 475 square miles in2000. In the same thirty years its population more than doubled from 582,000 to 1.3million. Population and land area for Phoenix for each decade through 1990 is foundin the U.S. Census Bureau’s report, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and OtherUrban Places in the United States,” accessible at: http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027.html. Population and land area for the census year2000 is available at the Census Bureau’s “State and County Quick Facts” website at:http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04/0455000.html.

4. Population growth projections for Maricopa County can be obtained from the ArizonaState Workforce Informer at: http://www.workforce.az.gov/?PAGEID=67&SUBID=138.Population data from the US Censuses of 1990 and 2000 are available from the samestate government source at: http://www.workforce.az.gov/?PAGEID=67&SUBID=127.

5. This important concept of transitioning from development-driven water policy towater-driven development policy is suggested in a report by Susanna Eden andSharon B. Megdal, “Water and Growth,” ch. 4 of 88th Arizona Town Hall, Arizona’sRapid Growth and Development: Natural Resources and Infrastructure (Tucson:University of Arizona Office of Economic Development, 2006), 81.

6. Don Hinrichsen, “A Human Thirst,” Environment: Annual Editions 04/05 (Dubuque,IA: McGraw Hill/Dushkin, 2004), 173-76. For global perspectives, see also SandraPostel and Brian Richter, Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003); and Peter Gleick, The World’s Water 2004-2005: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Washington, DC: Island Press,2002).

7. The WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 2004 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004),55.

8. Ibid., 49.9. See USGS summary and map “Consumptive Use and Renewable Water Supply, by

Water-Resources Region”: http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/misc/consuse-renewable.html.

10. National Research Council, Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating


and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic Variability (Washington, DC: National Academy ofSciences, 2007), 1-9, quote is on 6. The New York Times covered the NRC report in anarticle by Cornelia Dean, “That ‘Drought’ in the Southwest May Be Normal, ReportSays,” New York Times, February 22, 2007.

11. When delegates from the seven Colorado basin states met at Lee’s Ferry in Arizonain 1922, they based the terms of the Colorado Compact on Bureau of Reclamationhydrological data that claimed the annual flow of the river was 16.4 maf. Tree ringstudies, however, indicate that annual flow is closer to 12.5-13 maf. For a concisebackground on the division of the Colorado River, see: Norris Hundley, Jr., “The WestAgainst Itself: The Colorado River—An Institutional History,” New Courses for theColorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century, ed. Gary D. Weatherford and F.Lee Brown (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 9-49.

12. The Colorado River Basin Project Act of 1968 established California’s priority rightsto Colorado River Water as it authorized the Central Arizona Project. Paul L. Bloom,“Law of the River: A Critique of an Extraordinary Legal System,” in New Courses forthe Colorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century, ed. Gary D. Weatherford andF. Lee Brown (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 139-54.

13. Jon Gertner, “The Future is Drying Up,” New York Times, October, 21, 2007.14. See, for example, Chris Avery et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences:

The Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District,” Arizona Law Review 49(2007): 341-42, where the authors state that the 1980 Arizona GroundwaterManagement Act “was truly progressive” and that its regulations on developers were“more rigorous than regulations anywhere else in the United States.” See also BonnieG. Colby and Katharine L. Jacobs, Arizona Water Policy: Management Innovationsin an Urbanizing, Arid Region (Washington, D.C.: RFF Press, 2007).

15. The Arizona Department of Water Resources [hereafter ADWR], “Overview of theArizona Groundwater Management Code,” (2004) and accessible fromwww.azwater.gov.

16. Katharine Jacobs and James Holway, “Managing for Sustainability in an Arid Climate:Lessons Learned from 20 Years of Groundwater Management in Arizona, USA,”Hydrogeology Journal 12 (2004): 52.

17. Elisabeth K. Larson et al., “The Paradoxical Ecology and Management of Water inthe Phoenix, USA Metropolitan Area,” Ecohydrology and Hydrobiology 5 (2005): 287.

18. John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of theTwentieth-Century World (New York: WW Norton, 2000), 151-56. John Opie, Ogallala:Water for a Dry Land (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 2-9, and ch. 5.

19. On the physical repercussions of overdraft, see Jacobs and Holway, “Managing forSustainability,” 53. Arizona riparian acreage is based on a 1997 refinement by Kublyof the results of a 1993 study by Valencia: D. M. Kubly et al., Statewide RiparianInventory and Mapping Project, Executive Summary, Nongame Technical Reports111 & 112 (Phoenix: Arizona Game and Fish Department, 1997). R.A. Valencia, ArizonaRiparian Inventory and Mapping Project a Report to the Governor, President of theSenate and Speaker of the House (Phoenix: Arizona Game and Fish Department,1993).

20. Data from A. D. Konieczki and J. A. Heilman, “Freshwater Withdrawal by Water-useCategory in Counties in the Basin and Range Physiographic Province, 1985-2000,”in Water Use Trends in the Desert Southwest—1950-2000 (Reston, VA: USGS, 2004),23 (figure 8).

21. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, non-Indian agriculturein the Phoenix Active Management Area accounted for 46 percent of total demandin 2000 and municipal water demand accounted for 48 percent. ADWR, Phoenix


AMA Virtual Tour (Power Point Presentation), 2003. Accessible online: http://www.azwater.gov/WaterManagement_2005 /Content/AMAs/PhoenixAMA /default.htm.

22. Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: the Rise of the New AmericanWest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982).

23. With a water bill, a phone, and a calculator, anyone can determine the per-ton cost ofwater versus dirt for their location. For 5,300 gallons of water delivered to a home inMarch 2007 (176 gal/day), the city of Tempe, AZ, charged $14.38. Since water weighs8.33 pounds per gallon, that figure equals 65 cents/ton. A local sand and gravelcompany charges $130 for a 10-ton dump-truck load of dirt, which is $13/ton or 20times the cost of water.

24. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, rev.ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), ch. 10.

25. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, “Water 2025: Preventing Crises and Conflict in the West,”2003, 12. See also Dave D. White et al., “Water Managers’ Perceptions of the Science-Policy Interface in Phoenix, Arizona: Implications for an Emerging BoundaryOrganization,” Society and Natural Resources (in press, 2007).

26. William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America, rev. ed. (1899; reprint, Norwood,MA: Norwood Press, 1905), ix.

27. Smythe, in his foreword to the 1905 edition, dedicates his book to “homeseekers who,under the leadership of the paternal Nation, are to grapple with the desert, translateits gray barrenness into green fields and gardens.” xii-xiii. This public-privatepartnership in developing the arid West has spawned a cottage industry of polemicalas well scholarly analyses. Still the best critical appraisal is Donald Worster, Rivers ofEmpire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985).

28. See Smith’s “Building the Roosevelt Dam,” in The Magnificent Experiment: Buildingthe Salt River Reclamation Project, 1890-1917 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1986), 70-91.

29. Between 1910 and 1920, the population of Maricopa County increased by 160 percent,from approximately 34,500 to 90,000. During the same decade, the population of thecity of Phoenix nearly tripled in size to 30,000. See “Selected Maricopa County CensusInformation: Population and Approximate Land Area,” in Kim Knowles-Yánez et al.,“Historic Land Use: Phase I Report on Generalized Land Use,” August 1999, CentralArizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Contribution No. 1, Arizona StateUniversity, Tempe.

30. Many scholars have written about the relationship between water and growth andpolitics in Greater Phoenix. A thorough analysis of the early years of SRP and thegrowth of agriculture in Greater Phoenix is found in Smith, The MagnificentExperiment. Douglas E. Kupel provides a longer-term narrative comparing Phoenix,Tucson, and Flagstaff in his book Fuel for Growth: Water and Arizona’s UrbanEnvironment (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). Arizona State UniversityProfessor Phil Vandermeer offers a broader political history of Phoenix in his bookPhoenix Rising: The Making of a Desert Metropolis (Carlsbad, CA: Heritage MediaCorp, 2002). A lively romp through post-WWII Phoenix water and growth politics isavailable in Wiley and Gottlieb’s Empires in the Sun, pp. 175-90. For a more sanguineview of growth politics, see Phoenix real estate development lawyer turned politicalpundit Grady Gammage, Jr., Phoenix in Perspective: Reflections on Developing theDesert (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 1999). Most recently, geographer PatriciaGober addresses the question of urban sustainability in her survey, MetropolitanPhoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert (Philadelphia:


University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); see especially ch. 2, “Building a Desert City,”11-52.

31. Allocations of the Colorado River: 7.5 maf to upper basin states (CO, NM, WY, andNV), 7.5 maf to lower basin states (AZ, NV, and CA), and 1.5 maf to Mexico. Totalallocation is 16.5 maf annually, although there is about 20 percent less water thanthis in the actual river. The negotiators completed the compact in 1922, but the statesratified it at different times. Congress legalized the U.S. allocations in 1928 underthe terms of the Boulder Canyon Project Act, and Mexico’s water rights wereconfirmed in a U.S.-Mexico Treaty in 1945. William H. Swan, “New Developments onthe Colorado River,” Water Law: Trends, Policies, and Practice eds. Kathleen MarionCarr and James D. Crammond, (Chicago: ABA, Section of Natural Resources, Energy,and Environmental Law, 1995), 337-344; Joe Gelt, “Sharing Colorado River Water:History, Public Policy and the Colorado River Compact,” Arroyo, 10:1 (August 1997).

32. Frank Gregg, “The Widening Circle: The Groundwater Management Act in theContext of Arizona Water Policy Evolution,” in Taking the Groundwater ManagementAct into the Nineties, Proceedings of a Conference/Symposium commemorating theTenth Anniversary of the Arizona Law (Tucson: Water Resources Research Center,University of Arizona, 1990), 1-7.

33. Sign erected in 1961 for the Theodore Roosevelt Dam Jubilee, which celebrated the50th anniversary of the dam. James Labar and Dr. John Keane (Salt River Projectemployees), interview with Gustafson, 28 November 2006, recording andhandwritten notes in possession of interviewer.

34. For early twentieth century information on SRP, see Smith, The MagnificentExperiment. For additional historical and contemporary data, see Salt River Project,“Building a Legacy: the Story of SRP” (Phoenix: Salt River Project, 2006), p. 7; andSRP, “Dams and Reservoirs managed by SRP,” http://www.srpnet.com/water/dams/default.aspx.

35. Thomas E Sheridan, “Arizona: The Political Ecology of a Desert State,” Journal ofPolitical Ecology 2 (1995): 41.

36. “CAP History,” http://www.cap-az.com/static/index.cfm?contentID=20 .37. Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, especially ch. 4. On irrigation in Idaho, see

Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: the making of an agricultural landscape in the AmericanWest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999).

38. On groundwater pumping in California, see Worster, pp. 234-35; Reisner, CadillacDesert: 353-54; and Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water,1770s-1990s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 235. On the role ofgroundwater pumping in the rise of Tucson agriculture and urbanization, seeMichael F. Logan The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the SantaCruz River (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). On groundwater pumpingand overdraft problems in Phoenix, see Patricia Gober, Metropolitan Phoenix, 139-140. Quote is from Dean Mann, The Politics of Water in Arizona (Tucson: Universityof Arizona Press, 1963), 52. See also Byron Lewis, “Basics of AZ Water Law,” (1982),reprinted in Arizona Waterline (1989), 9-11.

39. The water supply crisis in 1951 is profiled by Karen L. Smith, “Community Growthand Water Policy,” in Phoenix in the Twentieth Century: Essays in CommunityHistory, ed. G. Wesley Johnson, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p.155-163. The amendments in the 1970s addressed the transportation of groundwaterand were added as a result of a 1976 lawsuit, Farmer’s Investment Company v. Bettwy.See Appendix B, “History of Groundwater Management in Arizona” in 85th ArizonaTown Hall, Arizona’s Water Future: Challenges and Opportunities (Tucson: Universityof Arizona Office of Economic Development and Water Resources Research Center,


2005), 161-70. Other useful historical analyses of Arizona groundwater law includeDesmond D. Connall, Jr., “A History of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act,”Arizona State Law Journal (1982): 313-43; Mann, The Politics of Water in Arizona;State of Arizona, Office of the Auditor General, Performance Audit: ArizonaDepartment of Water Resources, Report # 89-4 (Phoenix, August 1989), 1-2; LloydBurton, “The Arizona Groundwater Management Act: Origins and Issues” in Takingthe Groundwater Management Act into the Nineties, (Tucson: Water ResourcesResearch Center, University of Arizona, 1990), 9-17; Governor Bruce Babbitt, “FacingOur Water Future,” (1982) in Arizona Waterline (1989), 3-4.

40. Jack August, The Vision in the Desert: Carl Hayden and Hydropolitics in the AmericanSouthwest (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999).

41. On the growth spurt between 1950 and 1960, see Campbell Gibson, US Census,“Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,1790-1990,” Population Division Working Paper no. 27 (June 1998), Tables 18 & 19;available on line at http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027.html.

42. On the Valley’s amenability to sprawl, see Gober, Metropolitan Phoenix, 139-40. Thereferenced 1971 report is Wilbur Smith and Associates, “Arizona New TownDevelopment Concepts,” Arizona Department of Economic Planning andDevelopment (May, 1971), 1-1. The conversion of agricultural land to urban isaddressed in “Change in Urban Land Sources (New Urban Areas Only)” chart inKnowles-Yánez et al., “Historic Land Use.”

43. There are no significant disincentives to profligate water consumption in the Valleyof the Sun. Water flows openly in great and small canals that criss-cross the Valley.Flood irrigation of lawns and parks is still widespread in older valley neighborhoods.

44. Paul Kelso, “The Arizona Ground Water Act,” The Western Political Quarterly (June1948), 178-182.

45. Avery, et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences,” 341.46. For data on mined groundwater in 1980, see ADWR, Management Plan for the First

Management Period, 1980-1990, Phoenix Active Management Area (Phoenix: ADWR,December 1984), 22. On the extensive drop in the groundwater table during thetwentieth century, see Phoenix Active Management Area, “Virtual Tour,” availablefor download at http://www.azwater.gov/WaterManagement_2005/Content/AMAs/PhoenixAMA/default.htm.

47. Reisner, Cadillac Desert, ch. 9. See also Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 54-62.

48. Gary C. Woodard, “Safe Yields and Assured Supplies Or Dreams Deferred? Evaluatingthe Arizona Groundwater Management Act,” Taking the Groundwater ManagementAct into the Nineties, Proceedings of a Conference/Symposium commemorating theTenth Anniversary of the Arizona Law (Tucson: Water Resources Research Center,University of Arizona, 1990), 19.

49. Connall, “A History of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act,” 332.50. Galbraith, “Municipal Service Areas, the Napoleonic Code, and Arizona Pettifoggery,”

(1986) in Arizona Waterline, 185.51. http://www.azwater.gov/dwr/Content/Find_by_Category/About_ADWR/default.htm.52. A.R.S. 45-562 A. ADWR’s summary of the Groundwater Management Code and its

six major provisions is available at www.azwater.gov/dwr/Content/Publications/files/gwmgtovw.pdf.

53. For excellent maps and summaries of the AMAs, see the ADWR website: http://www.azwater.gov/WaterManagement_2005/Content/AMAs/default.htm. ADWRadded a fifth AMA, Santa Cruz, in 1994. ADWR also established two Irrigation Non-


Expansion Areas (INAs): Douglas and Joseph City. A third INA, Harquahala, was addedin 1982. While the purpose of the AMAs is to manage groundwater supplies forcurrent and future use, the primary management goal in the INAs is to restrictagricultural water use. Because this paper is focused on the municipal water usesector, INAs are not discussed in further detail.

54. Robert Jerome Glennon, “‘Because That’s Where the Water Is’: Retiring Current WaterUses to Achieve the Safe-Yield Objective of the Arizona Groundwater ManagementAct,” Arizona Law Review (1991): 91.

55. Dan Goodgame, “Just Enough to Fight Over,” Time, July 4, 1988.56. The State of Arizona, Office of the Auditor General, determined in 1999 that

grandfathered agricultural water rights and “accrued credits for unusedgroundwater” by farmers were two key reasons that the Arizona Department of WaterResources would not be able to achieve the mandated “safe yield” goals of the GMAby 2025. See the Auditor General’s report, Performance Audit: Arizona Departmentof Water Resources, Report # 99-8 (April 1999): i-ii.

57. Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” 57, 62.58. GPCD is calculated by taking the total water supplied by the provider and dividing

that number by the population served and the number of days in the year. ADWR,First Management Plan (1984), 67.

59. In 1980, ADWR defined a “large” municipal provider as an entity or individual thatdelivered more than one hundred acre-feet water annually to residential and/ornonresidential customers. The agency revised that definition upward in 1995 toinclude only providers delivering 250 acre-feet or more annually. See ADWR, ThirdManagement Plan, (1999) 5-11.

60. Municipal providers with 1980 rates of water consumption greater than 350 GPCDwere required to achieve an 11 percent reduction by 1990. Providers withconsumption rates of 140-350 GPCD had to achieve a 6 percent reduction. Providersbelow 140 GPCD (13 out of 51 municipal water providers) had no conservationrequirements. ADWR, “Table V-5: Per Capita Conservation Requirements by ProviderCategory Phoenix AMA,” First Management Plan, (1984), 73.

61. W. B. Solley, R. R. Pierce, and H. A. Perlman, Estimated use of Water in the UnitedStates in 1990, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1081 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1993),see especially Table 9; accessible online: http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/wucircular2.html.

62. ADWR, First Management Plan, (1984), 137.63. Ibid., 88.64. Ibid., 125-27.65. Thirty-two of the thirty-four large water providers listed in the Second Management

Plan also were included in the First Management Plan. Twenty of those thirty-twolarge municipal providers had an average annual GPCD (1992-1996) that was aboveADWR’s1987 compliance figure, and this results in an out-of-compliance rate of62.5percent. Data: ADWR, First Management Plan, 136-137; ADWR, SecondManagement Plan, 5-78 – 5-79.

66. Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” 61. At the time their article waspublished, Holway was the assistant director of ADWR and Jacobs was the formerdirector of the Tucson AMA. So their perspective likely reflected that of ADWR. Inregard to managing urban water consumption, they stated: “In Arizona, it is notpolitically or administratively feasible for a state agency to regulate the landscapechoices and irrigation practices of individual homeowners.” Of course, other citiesand state regulatory agencies have proved otherwise (see below).

67. Tucson has implemented much more aggressive and effective water conservation


policies, and has an average residential GPCD a third lower than Phoenix’s. SeeWestern Resource Advocates, Smart Water: A Comparative Study of Urban WaterUse Efficiency Across the Southwest (2003), 43. The Las Vegas Valley Water Districtand the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which manage the water supplies serving1.8 million residents, likewise regulates residential landscaping quite effectively.See National Public Radio stories in 2003 and again in 2007 online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1436803 and http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10939792 . See also the award-winning article byMatt Jenkins titled “Squeezing Water from a Stone,” in High Country News, Sept 19,2005, accessible at http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=15778.

68. Arizona Water Company (AWC) filed three separate actions against ADWR inmunicipal court in the following years: 1990 (CV 90-01840), 1999 CV 99-08015, and2000 (CV2000-001700). In the face of this litigation, which initially went againstthe department, ADWR abandoned all pretense of enforcing its municipalconservation program for the whole valley in 1999, even though the lawsuitsculminated in a 2004 decision in which the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that ADWRcan impose conservation requirements on municipal water providers. Summary ofthe case Supreme Court of Arizona, 208 Ariz. 147 available in “Water Law,” ArizonaState Law Journal (2005): 44-49.

69. Forty-Eighth legislature, first regular session; title 45 “waters”, chapter 2, article 9.Arizona Revised Statute, “Non-per Capita Conservation Program for MunicipalProviders; Second Management Period,” 45-565.01. Accessible online: Arizona StateLegislature, www.azleg.gov.

70. ADWR, Third Management Plan, 5-9. See also Jacobs and Holway, “Managing forSustainability,” 62.

71. A comparison of water conservation targets versus water consumption rates, alongwith an overview of conservation programs and policies among the largestmunicipalities in the Valley, is summarized in the following poster presentation: A.Gustafson et al., Water Conservation Policy in an Arid Metropolitan Region: AHistorical and Geographical Assessment of Phoenix, Arizona, (January 2007). PDFavailable from http://caplter.asu.edu/home/symposia/symp2007/index.jsp.Scottsdale’s average annual per capita water consumption remains particularly high.According to the Western Resource Advocate’s analysis of 2001 water use data amongthirteen southwestern cities, Scottsdale had the highest GPCD: 366. WesternResource Advocates, Smart Water: A Comparative Study of Urban Water UseEfficiency Across the Southwest (Boulder, CO: Western Resource Advocates, 2003),66.

72. Groundwater overdraft was 360,019 acre-feet in 1995 and under “current use”conditions and trends, that will increase to 471,085 acre-feet in 2025. ADWR, “Table11-2: Current Use Scenario Demand and Supply, 1995-2025 Phoenix ActiveManagement Area,” Third Management Plan, 11, 20-21.

73. Arizona Office of the Auditor General, Performance Audit: Arizona Department ofWater Resources, i-ii, 9-17.

74. Avery et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences,” 342.75. Quote is from Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” 62. See also Avery

et al., 343.76. Quote is from Eden and Megdal, “Water and Growth,” 97.77. Two illuminating and critical appraisals of CAGRD published in Arizona law review

journals are: Avery et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences”; and JackVincent, “What Lies Beneath: The Inherent Dangers of the Central ArizonaGroundwater Replenishment District,” Arizona State Law Journal (forthcoming 2008).


78. Vincent details the hydrological and infrastructural risks from aquifer overdraftpermitted by CAGRD in the section of his article titled “Problems with Geology andGeography.”

79. Avery et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences,” 348-50. Also, Sharon B.Megdal, “Arizona’s Recharge and Recovery Programs,” in Arizona Water Policy:Management Innovations in an Urbanizing, Arid Region ed. Bonnie G. Colby andKatherine L. Jacobs (Washington D.C.: Resources for the Future, 2007), 197; CAGRD,Plan of Operation: Submitted Draft (November 2004) available online: http://www.cagrd.com/.

80. For historic CAGRD replenishment obligations and projected future obligations, seehttp://www.cagrd.com/ and click “replenishment obligations.”

81. Avery et al., “Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences,” 359.82. Vincent, “What Lies Beneath,” Part VI, “Is There a Solution?”83. Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” quotations in consecutive order

are found on 52, 64, & 53.84. Ibid, 63.85. ADWR, Third Management Plan, Phoenix AMA (1999), 10-17.86. Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” 58.87. Eden and Megdal, “Water and Growth, 95, 97.88. The Arizona Water Settlements Act finalized the amount of money Arizona owes

the federal government in repayment for the construction of the CAP and awardedthe Gila River Indian community with substantial water rights (653,500 acre-feetannually). President George W. Bush signed it into law in December 2004. Jack L.August, Jr. and Grady Gammage, Jr., “Shaped by Water: An Arizona HistoricalPerspective,” in Arizona Water Policy: Management Innovations in an Urbanizing,Arid Region edited by Bonnie G. Colby and Katherine L. Jacobs (Washington D.C.:Resources for the Future, 2007), 21.

89. Jacobs and Holway, “Managing for Sustainability,” 59, 62-63.90. John Stearns, “Desert Tourism Meccas Thrive-Cities Play up Best Features to Woo

Visitors” Arizona Republic, 29 May 2005; accessible at http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0529rivals-main0.html. For images used in the“Desert is a Myth” promotional campaign, consult the website for the GreaterPhoenix Convention and Visitor Bureau: http://www.visitphoenix.com/.

91. Chris Kahn, “Desert-dry Mesa OKs Huge New Water Park,” Arizona Republic,November 20, 2007: D1. Naturally, this article was front page news in the Businesssection.

92. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking,2005).

93. Michael Bartlett, Thomas Kolaz, and David Gregory, Archaeology In The City: AHohokam Village In Phoenix, Arizona (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press,1986); David R. Abbott, ed. Centuries of Decline during the Hohokam Classic Periodat Pueblo Grande (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2003).

94. Edward H. Peplow, Jr., ed. The Taming of the Salt (Phoenix: Salt River ProjectCommunity Relations Department, 1970).

95. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1980). Jared Diamond discusses a similar theme inCollapse.

96. Craig Childs, “Phoenix Falling?” High Country News 39 (April 2007): 10-16.97. On Cecil Andrus, see Wiley and Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun, 61. On Dan Beard, see

the feature article in High Country News, March 20, 1995, in which Beard is quotingsaying: “[T]he Bureau’s future isn’t in dams. The era of dams is over. I say that to


my employees every chance I get.” http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=874. The National Research Council acknowledged in its 2007report cited above that “prospects for constructing additional large dams in theColorado River basin have diminished,” 5.

98. Walter Prescott Webb, “The American West: Perpetual Mirage,” Harper’sMagazine214 (May 1957): 25-31, quote on 29.

99. Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 293.100. Ibid., 294-96.

THE MIRAGE IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN

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