The environmentalist’s chant – reduce, reuse, recycle – for more than 30 years has guided the management of water in Arizona where drought is never out of mind, the head of an oversight organization says.
“We must be the best-kept secret around,” Kathleen Ferris, executive director of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, said in a recent telephone interview.
The state’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act provides the scaffolding for a broad set of regulations that govern how 83 percent of the state’s population can use water, said Ferris, who two weeks ago testified before a U.S. Senate committee on supply and demand for Colorado River water.
Arizona has a right to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado, taken from Lake Havasu, through a 1922 multistate compact. The remainder comes from the Salt River Project and reclamation.
Conservation and reuse are central to water consumption in Arizona, Ferris said. Before the 1980 legislation, which is unique in the United States, water was appropriated willy-nilly, resulting in pollution, land subsidence and lawsuits among rival interests, she said.
The Groundwater Management Act requires developers of residential subdivisions in large metro areas (Tucson, Phoenix, Prescott) to prove, based on hydrological studies, that they have a 100-year supply of water. Otherwise, no building permits.
The act also covers agricultural irrigation, drilling of new wells and quantifies the right to water.
Every decade, the stipulations are analyzed and refined, Ferris said.
Association members push water conservation, Ferris said. They limit water loss to less than 10 percent, replacing old equipment and rewarding water savers with favorable rates. They also do residential audits, give rebates for switching to less-thirsty landscaping and train landscape professionals.
Association members reclaim 100 percent of wastewater, reusing it to produce energy, irrigate landscaping, restore environmentally degraded areas and supply Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station with up to 80,000 acre-feet of recycled water annually for cooling purposes, Ferris said.
The proof of success is found in numbers, Ferris said. The population of cities in the association increased 157 percent from 1980 to 2010, but water use went up only 87 percent. Phoenix is an example, she said, citing 83 percent population growth in the same period, while total per capita demand decreased 35 percent.
daler@durangoherald.com
