Arizona: The American West's
Battleground Over Access to Water

Edward J. Dodson

[An unpublished essay, July, 2005]

Americans have been on the move almost from the first. The earliest groups came from Asia and slowly spread out across the land. Others may have made the sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. So far, this is just speculation on the part of some archeologists; the evidence is yet to be firmly established. Thousands of years went by before Europeans ventured in large numbers across the ocean to establish settlements in the Americas. Three centuries of almost continuous warfare ended with nation-states firmly entrenched, the hemisphere divided, its oldest cultures subdued, and new cities arising to absorb ongoing migration and immigration.

In many parts of the Americas, our ingenuity has allowed us to settle in large numbers in places thought by most people a century ago to be inhospitable. Extremes in weather are tempered by modern systems of heating and air-conditioning - enable us to travel, work and live in comfort almost without regard to outside conditions. Our ability to create these artificial environments has been permitted by an abundant supply of fossil fuels and fresh water, the supply of which gradually accumulated below the surface over millions of years. Now, however, our rate of extraction is stressing supplies to the point that our way of life will soon be threatened unless we adopt strong conservation measures.

A test case for how we respond to the challenges of dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and fresh water is now erupting in the Southwest region of the United States. The situation is described in a recent article appearing in The Arizona Republic*:

"Unchecked development threatens to overwhelm rural Arizona's limited water resources, leaving entire communities vulnerable to shortages and rivers at risk of running dry.

Rural Arizona's population, which doubled to more than 1 million people in the past 25 years, is projected to grow by an additional 500,000 in the next 25 years. The result is a soaring thirst for a finite supply of groundwater.

Nine years of drought have exposed how finite that supply is in many areas. But the threat to rural residents arises from a deeper problem: the inability of state and local governments to manage water and growth together and ensure there are dependable water sources for new communities."

The Southwest experiences inconsistent annual rainfall, and some scientists believe the last century or two has been uncharacteristically wet. We could be at the beginning of a prolonged period of dryer and dryer conditions.

Clearly, the failure of communities to rely on the rental value of land for public revenue has been a major factor in the sprawling development in Arizona. Rising land costs have driven developers and home owners into the more rural parts of the state in search of affordable housing. Many home owners rely on individual wells dug deep into aquifers. What might help ration water is to price extraction at an increasing cost per unit extracted. Yet, as The Arizona Republic observes, the expectation is that others will subsidize the cost of bringing water so these new communities do not become ghost towns:

"The impact of this gathering crisis will reach beyond rural areas, into Arizona's cities and even as far as Washington, D.C. Growing demand could severely reduce the flow of the Verde River, an important source of water for metropolitan Phoenix, and will increase pressure on the already overtapped Colorado River.

Importing water to meet rural needs will cost billions of dollars. If rural communities can't foot the bill - and it's hard to see how many will be able to do so - it's likely that state and federal taxpayers will be stuck with the tab. The costs will rise more if the projects are delayed until crises force them to proceed to save communities."

In some respects, the arid West provides an attractive habitat for human settlement. Access to cheap sources of water have turned near-desert lands into valuable population centers. But, now, at last, Arizona is likely to begin to experience a reversal of its more recent growth. In another decade or sooner, land prices in the most water-deprived parts of the state could come crashing down. This is all the more likely in a state that has virtually no mass transit. As the price of gasoline continues to rise, the cost of commuting long distances from home to places of employment will add to the stresses already present. For the moment, however, developers are proceeding as if there is no tomorrow, and homes continue to sell despite the risk that in the not too distant future water might have to be hauled in by truck.

Michelle Harrington, of the environmental advocacy group the Center for Biological Diversity, left the reporter for The Arizona Republic with this thought: "What are we going to leave the next generation? Is our heritage going to be bone-dry streams and rivers and cookie-cutter houses as far as the eye can see? I hope that's not where we're going."

As Equal Rights readers would tell her, that's exactly where you are going unless Arizona's communities adopt two key changes in public policy: first, charging market prices for water usage; and, second, the implementation of an annual tax on land values that captures something close to full rental value.

NOTES

* Shaun McKinnon. "State's rural growth taxing water supplies -- Unregulated building raises question: Will there be enough to go around?" The Arizona Republic, 26 June, 2005.