|
We've been working on the CAGRD bonding bill and it's starting to get some attention. Here's an article about the bill in the Star.
"Tens of thousands of families from Tucson through Pinal County to Phoenix have been living on borrowed water for years.
Payback time is coming.
The Arizona Legislature is considering a bill that would authorize a little-known agency to sell up to $500 million worth of bonds to buy new water supplies to serve these suburban residents.
The bonds, ultimately, would have to be repaid by residents.
In Pima and southern Pinal counties, they live in suburban areas that include parts of or all of Oro Valley, Green Valley, Sahuarita, SaddleBrooke, SaddleBrooke Ranch, Red Rock and Tucson's southeast side.
One reason the bill is being seriously considered is that most of these homes have no assured, long-term water supply.
They are being served by a short-term supply that could disappear in a few years to a decade from now because legally, it belongs to somebody else.
Issues raised
The debate on the bill has unearthed some long-simmering issues swirling around the three-county Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District.
The district has signed up more current and future housing developments in Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties than it has long-term water supplies for.
By 2025, it will be legally bound to provide more renewable water supplies to its customers than the city of Tucson would be serving.
The legislation has stirred fears that customers in the district will ultimately be subject to "rate shock" once the water supplies are on line and the bills come due.
Today, no one knows for sure when the district would acquire water, where it would come from, what it would cost or what the repayment terms would be.
Among possible sources are farmers along the Colorado River, treated sewage effluent, desalination of seawater or salty, brackish groundwater, or rural areas that have groundwater supplies.
The only thing that's clear is that the cost would be higher than the district's current water supplies from the Central Arizona Project, which uses Colorado River water brought by canal.
But backers of the bill say the measure is aimed at preventing what one critic calls an economic "time bomb" from going off, by spreading the costs of new water over a long repayment period.
law set limit
The need for more water springs from a long-standing problem in enforcing a key measure of the state's pioneering 1980 Groundwater Management Act.
As a way to keep development from sucking away the state's dwindling groundwater reserves, the law required that new growth within state water management areas in Tucson, Phoenix and Pinal County, among other places, prove an assured 100-year water supply. At the time the law passed, it was hailed as the toughest of its kind in the country.
But on closer examination, the assured supply law didn't have that many teeth. It allowed new growth if a developer could show that the 100-year supply didn't cause the water table to drop more than 1,000 feet. Since subsidence - sinking of the ground that can lead to cracks and fissures - can occur before that point, critics immediately took aim at the rules. The Arizona Department of Water Resources announced in the late 1980s that it would toughen them by requiring that new developments provide a renewable supply, such as CAP water.
But developers fought back, arguing that the new rules would shut down growth in the very places where the market was pushing it. Those are suburban areas located too far from the CAP canal to make it economical to tap into it."
There's more if you want to read the rest, click here.
|
A recent spill of raw sewage into Queen Creek Wash is proving to be a complicated mess: About a month and a half has passed since an estimated 10,000 gallons of sewage spewed out of a manhole and flowed into the wash. And there's still no clear path to cleaning it up.