Hobbs should accede on rural groundwater management

The GOP proposal is good enough to give it a chance, and much better than continued stalemate.

Gov. Katie Hobbs announced her proposal to address groundwater overdrafts in rural areas, Senate Bill 1425, with much fanfare and a bit of bravado.

Hobbs proclaimed that she cared about protecting groundwater supplies in rural Arizona, implying that the dirty dog Republicans in the Legislature do not. And that, if legislation providing a bespoke management mechanism for rural areas weren’t passed, she’d continue using the more restrictive approach of declaring new Active Management Areas, as she recently did in Willcox.

The prevailing narrative in political circles is favorable to Hobbs’s description of the state of play. According to the narrative, Hobbs and Democratic legislators want to do something about rural groundwater overdrafts but are thwarted by legislative Republicans, particularly Gail Griffin, chairwoman of House Natural Resources, Energy, and Water Committee.

The prevailing narrative is neither accurate nor fair. The GOP Legislature has a reasonable proposal to address rural groundwater overdrafts, embodied in a bill last session, Senate Bill 1221. The bill was on the cusp of being passed but was sidelined by the absence of two House Republicans at crunch time and an anticipated gubernatorial veto. All legislative Democrats voted against the measure.

There is a great deal of similarity and overlap between Hobbs’s proposal and that of the GOP. Moreover, Hobbs is highly unlikely to prevail over the most important differences. The GOP proposal is good enough that Democrats should allow it to become law and largely accede in the areas of disagreement. That would be substantially better for both the future of rural Arizona and Hobbs’s political prospects. It’s certainly better than continued stalemate, the controversial and sharply contested designations of additional AMAs, or Attorney General Kris Mayes’s ill-advised attempts to muscle in on the policy field through threats and litigation.

Both the Hobbs and GOP approaches would establish a new groundwater management category to address overdrafts in rural areas. In both, a rural overdraft management regimen could be initiated through a determination by the director of the state Department of Water Resources or upon petition by local officials or voters. Both would establish new groundwater pumping rights based upon historical usages. Both would allow those rights to be exchanged or traded in ways that result in a net reduction in groundwater withdrawals. Both establish local councils with a role in drafting and implementing basin-wide management plans. Both allow for mandatory conservation measures over time.

The most important difference is over the role of director of the state Department of Water Resources vis-a-vis the local council. In both proposals, the department is responsible for establishing the new groundwater pumping rights and setting up what amounts to a banking and accounting system to track usages and exchanges.

In the GOP proposal, that’s it for the state department. The management plan, including the adoption of mandatory conservation measures, is the exclusive province of the local council. The state department director is pointedly and explicitly precluded from having anything to say about it, except producing technical studies as input to the local council.

In Hobbs’s proposal, the state department director has the final say regarding the basin management plan. He can modify what the local council adopts. If one is not proffered, he can propound his own.

Set aside the policy question of which is the superior approach. Politically, at this point in time, GOP lawmakers will never agree to give the state director that much authority over rural groundwater pumping, ironically enough because of what the department has done recently in Maricopa County.

The department has effectively declared a moratorium on new home construction in Queen Creek and Buckeye, two of the hottest markets for more affordable homes. I think that was an overreaction to a model showing a 4% shortfall in supply 100 years from now. No model can come even close to predicting usage and technology changes over a century. What model would have predicted, in 1960, that Arizona’s population would increase seven-fold but water consumption would remain constant? Yet that’s what happened.

Regardless of the merits, the housing moratorium has GOP legislators hopping mad. Giving the director ultimate authority over rural groundwater pumping is, politically, a non-starter at the moment.

There is also an element of democratic accountability in the GOP proposal that is missing from Hobbs’s. In both cases, the local council is initially appointed by state officials, some combination of the governor and the ranking legislator from both parties in both chambers.

In the GOP proposal, the council members subsequently stand in a retention election, similar to retention elections for judges. So, if the local polity doesn’t like what council members are doing, voters can get rid of them. No such option exists under Hobbs’s proposal.

There is one point on which Hobbs’s proposal should prevail, but it isn’t an important enough factor to warrant not generally acceding to the GOP proposal. Under Hobbs’s bill, metering of groundwater pumping can be mandated. Under the GOP bill, mandatory metering is forbidden. Metering would seem warranted to ensure accuracy in establishing compliance with pumping rights, exchange requirements, and mandatory conservation measures. The GOP bill instead relies on self-reported usage estimates based on such things as electricity charges for pumping. It’s sort of an honor system.

Hobbs’s bill would also allow greater and quicker mandatory conservation measures. That may prove necessary, but here is what should be the decisive consideration about generally allowing the GOP approach to become law. If it proves inadequate, it can be revisited and made more rigorous. But there would be a mechanism in law that will have produced some results in the interim and can be adapted to do more, if a political consensus develops in support of that.

The Hobbs approach of giving the director of the state Department of Water Resources ultimate authority over rural groundwater pumping is a political bridge too far for GOP legislators at present. The right course of action is for Democrats to support, or at least allow to become law, the GOP approach of instead empowering local councils with at least a modicum of democratic accountability to the local population.

It’s good enough to deserve a chance to see what it can produce. And it is close enough to what the governor has proposed in many of its specifics that everyone can claim a bit of political credit for it, if Hobbs and the Democrats make early, strategic concessions.

Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.