Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Nick Brown: Good afternoon, and welcome to GIOS. I am Nick Brown. I’m the Director for Sustainability Practices here at ASU. I’m excited this afternoon to introduce to you Grady Gammage, who is the valley’s own foremost expert on water resources.

Grady Gammage: Nearly everything.

Nick Brown: Nearly everything.

Audience: [Laughter]

Grady Gammage: Not everything.

Nick Brown: I was about to say that.

Grady Gammage: No, actually, that’s not even true. What you were about to say isn’t even true.

Nick Brown: Well, he’s a part-time academic, a part-time realtor, a part-time lawyer, a full-time professor. He’s a man of many talents. In his academic role here, he teaches at ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, and also at the College of Law in the Herberger Institute for Design & Arts. As a lawyer, he’s represented a number of real estate projects here in the Valley, from master planned communities to sprawling subdivisions, I think.

Grady Gammage: Mm-hmm, fair enough.

Nick Brown: He served on the Central Arizona Project Board of Directors, ultimately becoming the President of the Board of Directors. If I’m correct, I think that’s about when CAP sued the federal government.

Grady Gammage: Yes, and they sued us back.

Nick Brown: They sued you back, and that was because everything cost more than everyone had ever imagined it might, and that certainly hasn’t changed now. As a real estate developer, he’s developed some of Tempe’s most exciting multiuse projects, multiuse developments.

Grady Gammage: Project; there was really only one.

Nick Brown: Only one.

Gammage: Yeah.

Nick Brown: One big one, and that’s the City of Tempe.

Audience: [Laughter]

Grady Gammage: [Laughter] Okay, hurry it up, Nick. That’s enough.

Nick Brown: He’s the author of Phoenix in Perspective. He’s the coauthor of Watering the Sun Corridor. That’s what’s he’s gonna talk about today, about our water resources in Central Arizona. I’m proud to introduce you to Grady Gammage, Jr.

Audience: [Applause]

Grady Gammage: Well, hi, guys. About half of you either worked on this report or have already heard this at various times, and several of you were in the class I taught last semester in this room, and heard bits and pieces of this, so it may seem a tad repetitive. I’m gonna do some things that when I go out in the community doing this presentation, I don’t typically do, and that involves commenting a bit on the task of putting this report together, which was a colossal pain.

I really begin this exercise out of frustration; frustration that I don’t think we have done a very good job of explaining our water situation, either to people who live in Arizona, and certainly not to people who live outside of Arizona. What I didn’t really fully appreciate was the extent of which that lack of clear explanation has been quite by design. There are some of you in the room who, like me, may characterize yourself as a water buffalo. That is what we call people who make water policy in Arizona, and I sort of came at this from having been elected to the CAP Board.

The CAP Board is sort of dead last on the ballot. It’s something nobody pays much attention to or cares about very much. There didn’t used to be any campaigning for it. When I ran, I did absolutely nothing; didn’t shake a hand, didn’t make a speech, didn’t kiss a baby, didn’t spend a dime. That’s changed a little bit, but I got elected to the Board, nevertheless, on the strength of the fact that I have the same name as a big pink building on the ASU campus, which is, of course, presumptively a good way to choose people to make public policy, is vote for someone who has the same name as a building.

When I got there, I realized that having spent at that point something like 25 years working on growth and development issues in the Valley from a land perspective, I was looking out at a sea of people who were making water policy, and I didn’t know any of them, because water has tended to be the province of a relatively closed set of water buffalos, most of whom are engineers and have an engineering perspective, which is to say, “Tell me what you need and I will build you something to get it there.”

I remember when William Mulholland dedicated the canal. This is the stuff of Chinatown, the great movie, Roman Polanski’s movie. He turned the gates and flowed the water into the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, and he said, “There it is; take it.” That is emblematic of the attitude of a water engineer. “Tell me what you need. I’ll figure out the size of the dam, the location of the dam, the size of the canal, the amount of water we can move, whether or not we need pumps, whether or not it can be gravity fed. I will get it to where you tell me you want it, and then it’s up to you to fight about what you’re going to do with it and how you’re going to use it.”

That I think is carried over in attitude from the Bureau of Reclamation, whom we sort of inherited Western water policy from, and who had very much an engineering perspective on Western water policy. The water buffalo community doesn’t really want to be embroiled in political controversy. The contrast I found when I got there, between what I was used to on heated zoning battles, where I’m in hearings late at night, where there’s people in the audience and they’re wearing stickers for and against a case. They’re bussed in, and “Not in my back yard,” and they’re being picketed. I’ve had nails put into the tires of my car over high rises in downtown Phoenix. It’s a very charged, very political atmosphere.

The water stuff, by contrast, is done in the afternoon. It’s done in a room way up where the CAP headquarters is, which is near Deer Valley Airport, behind a sliding fence of chain link and concertina wire. You feel as though you’re making an assault on the lair of a James Bond villain when you go the CAP headquarters. The people in the audience speak in hushed tones and they all get along fine and they talk in code.

Everything is an acronym. Everything is about varying kinds of complexity, because it’s about protecting turf as much as anything. I don’t think this is conscious or evil on any of their parts, but the attitude of most people in the water community is, “We know what we’re doing. We’ve done a good job. Just keep the public out of it and we’ll take care of the problem.” They’re very reluctant to tell the public either there’s enough water or there’s not enough water, because they wanna be able to tell the public either one of those whenever they need something.

If you’re an engineer who deals with water in Arizona and you wanna build something; a new canal, a new pumping station, a new recharge site, you will create, if need be, a crisis or a concern. Come on, you can take the front row, it’ll work. On the other hand, if you’re afraid that you are suddenly gonna be mixed up in a debate or a dispute about whether or not there’s enough water to continue developing, then you wanna tell everyone, “Don’t worry about it. We’ve got plenty. There’s not a problem.”

When I started doing this, I put together sort of a group of water buffalos to assist me in coming up with statistics and a methodology on which we could agree, to talk about the big picture of water in the Sun Corridor, and I never got there. I never got agreement from everyone in the room as to how we should think about this problem, because they didn’t want to agree. It isn’t beneficial to agree. Clarity is not useful to most of those people. Lack of clarity is useful, so to the extent I was trying to create clarity, I was threatening. I really didn’t get that when I started this. I did not understand that was gonna be a problem.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in doing this was to try to put a framework on this big picture question: Is there enough water? Not just for Phoenix, but for the Sun Corridor, which I’m gonna talk about in a minute, and yes, I am eventually gonna advance the slides. Many of you know I hate PowerPoint. I have to use it on this thing, cuz there’s so much stuff, but I’d rather just talk, cuz that way I’m unconstrained by a linear flow, which is cumbersome in my view.

I wanted to try to get a document that could be given to the average citizen or public person, for them to read, for them to understand the big picture of the water situation of the Sun Corridor. I don’t know whether I succeeded or not. You can all download the document. You can get hard copies of it at the Morrison Institute downtown. You can decide whether or not that was a success.

The second goal I had here was to try to answer some of the relentless barrage of criticism that one hears about the future of Phoenix and whether or not Phoenix is sustainable, and whether or not Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away because there’s no water there. This began for me in 2006. I’m driving around in my car listening to NPR, as I am inclined to do, and since you are all here on the ASU campus, I know you all listen to NPR, because academics and NPR would be overlapping demographics.

There was a guy named Simon Winchester speaking, who had written a book at that point, this ’06, called A Crack at the Edge of the World, which is about the San Francisco earthquake. At the end of this talk, he sort of goes off script and says, “Well, there are three American cities which should never have been built: San Francisco, New Orleans and Phoenix.” Well, everybody got New Orleans. It was just after Katrina, but to Phoenix, he says, “and Phoenix, because there’s no water there.”

Subsequently, I saw him on PBS on television, and he had dropped Phoenix and inserted Tucson at that point, which is the other end of the Sun Corridor, so one way or another, we are a giant demographic mistake in a place that never should have existed, in the minds of many people. It isn’t just Simon Winchester. You all, I am sure, know Andrew Ross’s most recent book, which I hope you will all read.

One of the things, if anybody has any spare money sitting around, Sapna Gupta and I, who’s sitting right there, are trying to write a sort of relatively scholarly response to this notion that Phoenix is the world’s least sustainable place. Ross doesn’t really attempt to make the case, though it is the subtitle of the book, “Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” he doesn’t really try to argue that Phoenix is the least sustainable city. Indeed, he says, “It’s not a title worth arguing over, so why should we worry? Surely, Phoenix is one of the world’s least sustainable places.” Well, I’m not sure I buy that, but it is, again, emblematic of this sort of view that a lot of people have that Phoenix just doesn’t make any sense to them.

I want to talk about a couple of specific reports we were trying to deal with. This is a report that came out I think in ’08, by NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council, a famous public interest law firm, who commissioned a consulting firm called Tetra Tech, to examine–excuse me, this is 2010. There was one in ’08. I’ll come back and tell you about it in a minute. This came out in 2010 and purported to examine the sustainability of every county in the United States from the standpoint of climate change. The conclusion, which hit the front page of The Arizona Republic after the report came out, was that Maricopa County was one of the four or five least sustainable counties in the United States.

I got a copy of the report. Here’s the metric. Here’s how they did it. It’s based on one set of statistics. They looked, county by county in the U.S.–and that’s a huge task. Texas has 400 counties. Ohio, I think, has 90 counties or something like that. We’re the anomaly here, cuz we have gigundo counties, but they looked county by county in the U.S. at the amount of water that is used in a county and the amount of rain that falls in that county.

Guess what? The delta in Maricopa County is huge, and if you then make any kind of reasonable assumption for the effects of climate change, the delta gets out of control, really huge. Well, that gap, that delta between the amount of water used and the amount of rain that falls has been big in Maricopa County for 1,500 years. The Hohokam brought water from outside of Maricopa County in order to survive in Maricopa County, and I fail to understand why anyone thinks that is a rational metric for measuring the sustainability of a city.

Before this, in ’08, there was a report done by sustainlane.com, a website that some of you may have seen, that rates the sustainability of cities, and it again, hit the front page of The Arizona Republic. Phoenix was rated one of the least sustainable cities in the United States. That resulted purely from a water sustainability standpoint, and by their ratings, Phoenix was less sustainable than Tucson or Las Vegas or Los Angeles or San Diego. The reason they reached that conclusion is that the water coming to Phoenix comes from farther away than did the water going to Tucson, because Tucson was still using primarily mined groundwater at that point.

I hope all of you know that Arizona water policy is very clear on this point. Mined groundwater is not a good resource on which to build a city. We have been trying to cut off the use of groundwater mining for about 25 years, ever since the CAP was funded; ever since Cecil Andrus extorted that promise from Bruce Babbitt when he was governor. We have been trying to get off of groundwater mining because it’s an exhaustible resource. Surface water is a renewable resource. One would think moving to a renewal resource would be viewed as a more sustainable act, but not to sustainlane.com, because water’s coming from too far away.

I just want to talk about that metric for one moment. The dilemma of that is it holds water up to a standard that isn’t applied to any other resource. No city generates all its own electricity within the city limits. No city gets enough concrete to build everything in the city by sand and gravel mines from within the city limits. On any resource scale, cities draw for their resources on a larger geographic area. That’s sort of the definition of a city.

Water is just another resource, but underlying all of this stuff that I’m talking about, there is this sort of Eurocentric presumption, I think, that people should only live in a place where it’s drizzly and dreary and damp and dank, because otherwise, it just isn’t a natural thing. Moving water is somehow different than moving concrete or electricity or steel or any other kind of resource.

This was a result of this report. This report by Ceres, purported to evaluate municipal bond risk from water bonds throughout the United States, and Phoenix was rated as being at extreme risk of defaulting on municipal bonds for water projects. Now, I deal a lot with the City of Phoenix. I have done that for about nearly 40 years now.

The City of Phoenix has about the most solid municipal bond rating in the United States. Typically, cities that grow, have good municipal bond ratings. Cities that shrink have bad municipal bond ratings. Phoenix is fairly conservative. It has repeatedly won awards for being the best managed city in America, all that kind of stuff.

Why would this be the case? Well, the reason is, this entire report was based on this report, the report that was looking county by county at how much rain was falling places, and based on the fact that Maricopa County was very challenged and that Phoenix has a lot of bonds out for water projects, because we do move water around a lot, Phoenix must be at high risk in the municipal bond market.

There are a bunch of other ones of these. There was one in here somewhere. I don’t know if I put a picture. Oh, yeah, this one is by SEI, the Stockholm Environmental Institute. This one comes up to the conclusion that Phoenix is very unsustainable for any population growth, because it takes a snapshot look at water use in central Arizona. We are currently–and I will tell you this as part of this report–we are currently using more water than we can sustainable support, but more than half of our water is going to agriculture.

Our official policy is agriculture’s going out of business over time, as water moves to higher value uses. Somehow, they didn’t get that. They assumed that the agricultural use would continue, and that population growth would quickly outstrip the amount of water currently being used by urban Arizona, and when you took the full component of current agricultural use and layered on top of it a full component of the expected urban growth, you got a bad problem.

Nobody in Arizona thinks it works that way. Absolutely no one in Arizona thinks that we can continue to support rapid urban growth without diminishing the use of agricultural water. That’s the way we’ve always done it. How long can we do it? That’s what I was trying to get at in this report.

Okay, so I have done nothing so far except introduce the report. Now, I will talk a little bit about the Sun Corridor and the predicates to this. I realize it is really not interesting to look at a table of contents. I can’t stand people who use PowerPoint to put words on the screen. I think one should never do that, it should only be images, but I’m showing you this for a reason.

I was trying in this report to impress on everyone a similar way of thinking about water supply and water demand. This was one of the hardest things I had, but first, I’m gonna tell you about the Sun Corridor. Then I’m gonna tell you about water sources, water inputs to the Sun Corridor. The way I’m going to talk about this is not the way it’s ever been talked about in the past, so I want you to sort of get that, that what I’m dealing with here are the raw water inputs to the Sun Corridor’s water system that are presumptively sustainable to some degree. Okay?

A lake is not a water supply. A lake is a management tool, because our lakes are reservoirs, they’re not natural. Now if we were in Chicago, a lake would be a water supply. It’s a really big lake. Our lakes are not that big, and our lakes were created by man in order to smooth out a highly variable water supply. They are just a tool of managing water supply.

Similarly, effluent reuse, which is often cited as being the next bucket of water or the next source of water. It’s not a source of water. That’s just managing demand, okay? It’s the same water. We’re just using it more efficiently over and over. Reusing effluent is just like ratcheting down your GPCD, your gallons per capita per day in consumption. It’s a conservation device. It’s not a new supply. That’s what I was trying to get across here. Then we’re gonna talk about demand a little bit, and the concepts of supply stationarity and variability.

Okay, so this was the original report we did. This is why you got confused, Nick. This report isn’t about water at all. This report is about the emergence of the Sun Corridor, which is the demographic merger of Phoenix and Tucson into one statistically aggregated megapolitan unit.

If you’ve seen the new book that the American Planning Association put out, called Megapolitan, by Chris Nelson and Rob Lang, they were the originators of this concept of aggregating statistics on a bigger base than the standard metropolitan statistical area. The methodology that’s used is about commuting patterns, that results in these few huge megapolitan areas in the United States.

Now the dilemma, again, is everybody always wants to use counties. When you’re doing it here, you can draw a fairly precise definition of how those counties merge together economically. When you have counties the size of ours, it’s tough.

This report said by 2040, the Sun Corridor will be a continuous single economic unit from Chino Valley, Southern Yavapai County, to Sierra Vista and Santa Cruz County. We had pieces of five counties were in the Sun Corridor for purposes of this report. We’re not gonna do that today. Today, we’re only talking about three counties, cuz there just isn’t enough data on those outlying counties, and frankly, nobody really sort of believed that they were gonna be part of the Sun Corridor. It’s really Maricopa, Pinal and Pima that everybody talks about.

When we did the Sun Corridor report in 2008, the population projections in the year 2040–these were the ‘08 projections–were 10.1 million for the Sun Corridor, as most likely, and 8.9 as low. By the time we got around to this report, it was clear that’s not what’s happening. We have stopped the growth.

It probably will start up again. It may already be starting up again, but this projection, which is from Marshall Vest at the U of A, turned the low projection from ’08 for the 2040 population to the most likely projection in 2010. We’re talking about a projection of around 9,000,000 people. Is there enough water for 9,000,000? That’s sort of the ultimate question I’m trying to get to here. This is just showing you the downturn, how dramatic it’s been.

Okay, I mentioned before that what I’m trying to do is to pin down the sort of water that’s coming into the Sun Corridor from various sources. We talk about that as the supply concept. Supply is water that comes into, flows into, or is moved into the Sun Corridor on a relatively reliable basis. Stationarity is this concept that you can predict the future by looking at the range of amplitude of what’s gone on in the past, and with some degree of reliability, assume that that can be projected out into the future.

It is the way water managers have thought about water supply for generations, ever since the Bureau of Reclamation. Some of you may have read the seminal article Stationarity is Dead. I don’t know if it’s dead or it’s just comatose. It is clearly highly challenged. Stationarity does not assume dramatic shifts because of climate change. It assumes the sort of normal fluctuation that has been the case over the last record period, which in this case, is about 100 years of water supply that we have.

Variability is the thing that separates Phoenix. When you hear people say, “Phoenix has the greatest water challenge of anywhere in the United States,” the thing they are missing is that we have a water system built on variability. Desert water supply is highly variable. It pours rain sometimes and those washes flow, and then for years, nothing happens. That degree of variability which we thought was predicted by a stationarity assumption, is an amplitude that’s swinging like this. We have built water systems to manage that amplitude of variability, and that’s part of what I’m trying to explain in one of the sections of this report.

It is highly likely that the amplitude of that variability is gonna increase because of climate change, but you’re going from an assumed significant amplitude of variability to a somewhat greater amplitude of variability. If you’re in Atlanta, you don’t assume an amplitude of variability at all. You assume it’s always gonna rain plenty.

A couple of years ago, three years ago now, I guess, Atlanta’s water supply was down to 28 days. They had in storage enough water to supply the City of Atlanta for 28 days, and they started to get worried at that point, cuz it wasn’t raining very much. Well, we fairly routinely keep in storage between four and five years’ worth of water supply.

Now that doesn’t mean you should use it all up, but the question is very much the same as the question of, “How much should your family have in savings against bad times?” The answer is, “It all depends.” The answer is, “What assumptions do you wanna make? How bad do I assume it’s gonna be? How long is the downturn gonna last?”

It’s all the same set of assumptions here, but we’re probably starting from a better base, because of the variability we know that has existed in our system. Let me show you that a little bit. A pretty picture, cuz that makes PowerPoint more interesting; Red Mountain near the Granite Reef Diversion Dam. Here’s the annual rainfall throughout the Sun Corridor; highly variable, and each of these is highly variable. One year, Marana will have 5 inches, and the next year, it’ll have 20 inches. It isn’t a closely predictable number.

This is the inflows to the SRP system, basically, from 1913 to 2008. You can see the enormous degree of variability in that system. The amplitude of variability here is swinging anywhere from about 300,000 acre feet coming into the Salt and the Verde and Tonto Creek, flowing into where Roosevelt Dam is, up beyond 4,000,000 acre feet. Well, that’s the point; right there is the point. That is a problem, but that’s a problem we’ve done a pretty good job of dealing with.

This is CAP deliveries. Now CAP is different in terms of water supply than SRP. SRP, you have to look at those inputs to the system. CAP, even if there’s huge inputs to the system, we’re capped as to how much water we can get. You all probably know we’re the junior right holder on the Colorado, so that theoretically makes us the most at risk.

Anybody read Bill deBuys’ A Great Aridness? Another book you should all read. This is a book that is almost entirely about water and climate change, and it’s not just an indictment of Phoenix, although there’s plenty of that in it. It’s about the entire Southwest, and how the southwestern part of the United States, deBuys believes, is the most challenged part of the United States, from climate change assumptions, because it could get so dry.

He goes way beyond just water supply issues into talking about forest health and forest fires and all those kind of things. Again, it’s a very good book. It’s very readable. It’s kind of bleak. It’ll get you depressed. Ross’s book actually ends on a much more upbeat note that Bill deBuys’ book does, but one of deBuys’ points is that the challenge to the Colorado River is theoretically visited most severely on Arizona.

That’s right, although I don’t lose too much sleep over that. We’ll come back to that, but this shows various kinds of CAP deliveries from when the canal was declared complete and deliveries began up through the present. Our total right of water from the Colorado River for the State of Arizona is 2.8 million acre feet. We use about 1,000,000 acre feet on the river. The canal was built at a little over a million, 1.5 million acre feet. We can boost it to get about 1.7 or 1.8 million, just through management principals, sort up pumping more water through the canal system.

Okay, so this is my summary, and this is a chart no one has ever been willing to produce before, believe it or not. Carl Koloff and Dave Robertson of SRP got close in a Law Review article they wrote, but seriously, this is the chart no one wants me to show and that I couldn’t get people to agree on.

The Salt and Verde system; these are averages. Averages are highly dangerous when you’re dealing with a great degree of variability, obviously, but on average, I concluded we could assume about 800,000 acre feet a year from the Salt and Verde System. There’s probably about 250,000 other acre feet of water that can supply the Sun Corridor. That includes the Santa Cruz and the rivers in southern Arizona, and also more here.

This is a number that came from DWR. The question is, how much groundwater can you take out every year and assume that it will be naturally recharged on average by rainfall of 260,000 feet a year? Then I assumed that the CAP can deliver its 1.5 million that it was designed for on average, generally, year-in and year-out. These assumptions are before making an assumption about climate change, okay? This is based on standard thinking of water buffalos.

I get up to about 2.8 million acre feet a year. That’s a lot of water. When we get to the demand side, we’ll talk about how much it is. Just for comparison sake, the entire State of Nevada has the right to 300,000 acre feet of water from the Colorado. We have the right to 2.8 million out of the Colorado. This is not a Colorado number. This is an input to the Sun Corridor number.

Okay, so what do you do about climate change? You’ve gotta make some kind of assumption. Again, nobody wants to make an assumption, because we don’t know a lot, but there are numbers floating around out there, and if you’re trying to do this, you’ve gotta do something. NOAA says a 10 to 20 percent reduction. The latest BOR projections at the time I did this were a nine percent decline my mid-century. I just put 15 percent in.

Take 15 percent off the top from my numbers for what is the sort of reliable inputs off of the 2.8 million acre feet. We did this two weeks ago down at the Water Resources Research Center–it’s probably a month ago now–in Tucson. You were there, weren’t you, Dave? Anybody else there?

Well, I really pressed Jim Buizer, who many of you know, to tell me, “How do you feel about this? Is this an okay assumption or should I make it bigger?” Again, he didn’t wanna do it. He finally said, “Yeah, you ought to up it to 25. I don’t know, take your pick. You know as much as I do about what assumption should be made.”

That would cut the number of 2.4 million acre feet, so that’s the number I’m gonna use going forward in this report as being a fairly reliable set of assumptions for how much water there is in the Sun Corridor that we can use, year-in and year-out, is somewhere around 2.4 million acre feet.

Now this is about sort of management to get there. Is that 2.4 million really reliable? If those are just input numbers, are we storing enough, that in bad times, we know we can shore up to that number, to that 2.4 million number? Obviously, there’s SRP, which has a bunch of lakes which store the waters of central Arizona, the Gila and Salt, the 800,000 acre feet a year.

Here’s an example of how these management techniques have worked so well for Arizona. This is hard to see. These are those bar charts basically from the other graph I showed you. This is water flowing into the SRP system. Now this is a shorter period of time, because you can’t go back to 1913, cuz in 1913, there was only one dam. Now there’s six, seven, whatever it is. This is from the completion of Horseshoe Dam which is like 1960 or something like that, which was the last of the dams built to the present.

The bars are how much water SRP has delivered in every one of those years. What’s happening is the lakes and reservoirs are being used to smooth out these wild swings, so when you see the lakes being drawn down, that’s what’s happening. We’re smoothing out the water supply.

In this case, SRP is also doing the same thing with groundwater. They have lots of wells. They can turn those wells on and pump groundwater. They used to do so routinely. Now they do so when they need it to deliver the firm supplies. Are we banking as much water as SRP pumps in sometimes? Probably not.

We are banking more water underground than anywhere else in the world. In the last decade, we’re put 4,000,000 acre feet of water underground. Nobody else is even close to that. Some of you’ve heard me tell the story of, I went to Texas to do a water talk, when I was President of CAP, and I talked about water banking. Water banking, I got to dedicate a recharge site, the Avra Valley recharge site.

What you do is you turn a head gate. All right, you don’t cut a ribbon, you turn a head gate, and you flow water out into the desert. That’s it. That’s how you bank groundwater. You flow the water out into the desert, and then it sinks into the ground, and there are berms where around you’re flowing it out, and it gets to be three or four feet deep, and then it drips into the ground.

I’m standing there having done this, and this guy next to me–and it could have been your husband; I don’t actually remember–says to me, “Isn’t this the most exciting thing you’ve ever seen?” We’re watching water seep into the desert. I wouldn’t rate that. I said, “You, sir, could only be a hydrologist.” No one would think this was exciting.

Audience: [Laughter]

Grady Gammage: I tell this story in Texas, about the groundwater banking we do in Arizona, and this woman comes up to me after the talk, and she says, “Oh, Mr. Gammage, Mr. Gammage, that was so exciting, when I heard about that groundwater banking. Can I come out and see one of those sites?” I said, “Were you not listening? It’s just flat desert. You flow water out. It seeps into the ground.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah; can I come out?” So I arranged–she and her husband fly out. They bring some other people with them and they do a tour of a recharge site, and they sit on the bank of the recharge site watching water seep into the ground.

I remember when we did that saying, “I don’t know if this what Carl Haden thought when he fought all those years in Congress for the CAP canal, that we would pump water 300 miles uphill, nearly 3,000 feet uphill to get it to Tucson, for the purpose of flowing it out onto the desert and letting it seep into the ground. The CAP is not allowed to deliver water to any farmer unless he has fully lined irrigation ditches, so we don’t lose any water to seepage.

The ironies of Western water are huge, but this is one of the ironies. We have a fully lined concrete canal so we don’t lose any water to seepage, we can’t deliver it to a farmer, because it might seep into the ground, but we take a ton of that water and intentionally put it out on the desert and let it seep into the ground, because it goes back into the aquifer, and that’s groundwater banking.

This is deBuys’ point about Arizona being the most at risk from shortages on the Colorado. Shortages on the Colorado are not about reality, they’re about politics. We’ve had theoretical shortages on the Colorado for quite some time, but the Secretary of the Interior has been declaring surpluses. Why? Because California needed the water, and they have a lot of congressmen from California.

I don’t think Phoenix’s water is gonna be cut off in deference to Las Vegas or to San Diego. Water flows toward money, and at the end of the day, no matter what the water rights are, it will sort itself out to where people are not living in their houses and unable to turn on the tap, but there’ll be some real choices that have to be made.

This is a graph that shows the comparison between Colorado River flows and the Salt and Verde flows. We used to be very smug in Arizona about the notion that we got our water from two disconnected hydrologic systems, the Mogollon Rim and the Rockies, and that the likelihood of simultaneous drought in those two systems was relatively small. That was wrong. That was just wrong, and the likelihood of drought in both systems simultaneously is fairly high, and that’s what’s been happening in the last few years. The smugness, we need to wash out of our thinking here a lot.

This is a change since the Groundwater Management Act, in the amount of groundwater withdrawal. You will hear that the Groundwater Management Act has been a huge failure. It’ hasn’t. It hasn’t been the unbridled success people wanted, and it’s not like we’ve reached safe yield, although Maricopa County, the Phoenix AMA has bumped up close to safe yield several times. It has been very successful in getting pumping of groundwater to decline, which was its main intent.

The big continuing issue, obviously, is Pinal County, where it hasn’t declined nearly as much as it has in Phoenix. The reason it’s declined so much in Maricopa County; development. Farming has gone away and given in to subdivisions, and so we’re pumping a lot less groundwater.

Demand; where does the water go? There are a couple of new statistics that came out in the course of doing this report. One is this: We have tended to use GPCD, gallons per capita per day, as a proxy for all urban water use. That’s not right. I didn’t know this when I started this report. This shows you, again, this is success.

This is major success in Arizona water policy, and this shows you how the declines, in Phoenix, we’ve gone from 246 down to 216. Tucson has been relatively flat because it was so efficient to begin with in terms of GPCD, and Pinal has gone down as well. This is the result of the Groundwater Management Act. This is a result of limitations on pumping, limitations on landscaping, low water use fixtures in houses, and all those kinds of things.

It has been a significant success for Arizona, without any of the kind of Draconian measures they’ve needed to use in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has now spent nearly $200,000,000 paying people to rip out grass. Knock on the door of your house, “We’ll give you two bucks a foot to rip out every square foot of grass you have.” You’ll do it. You take it out, and they have managed to bring their per capita consumption down fairly close to this in a shorter period of time.

They’re still higher than we are. Phoenix and Tucson are never gonna get to be in the same place, just for all kinds of historical reasons. Tucson is a desert city. Phoenix is an oasis city. Phoenix is a farming town. Tucson is a mining town. Tucsonans like to live in scruffy houses. I don’t know.

Audience: [Laughter]

Grady Gammage: It’s just different. It is just a different ethic. What we discovered in the course of doing this report is, we have tended to think of this as urban water use, and we’ve tended to take these per capita figures and take the amount of acre feet we have, and do a calculation that says, “Oh, we can have 12 or 15 million people.”

There is urban water use that is not captured by GPCD. GPCD only captures water that is delivered by municipal utilities. It could either be a city, it could be a private utility, but it’s a municipal type utility that is delivering to houses. There’s a bunch of things in there that are urban water use that are not being captured.

These are things like flood irrigation in downtown Tempe or in Arcadia. That uses a lot more water than you might think, even though there are not a lot of people who get it anymore. The ASU campus gets flood irrigation in some parts. It uses a significant amount of water. It’s delivered directly by SRP. It’s not captured in GPCD. Water that’s used for mining; in the Tucson area, huge amounts of water are used for mining.

Now is mining an urban use? It’s not there because there’s a city there, it’s there because there’s ore there, but it’s not a use like commercial agriculture, that can go out of business. It’s gonna stay there, as long as the price of copper is high and the ore bodies are there, so it’s not a use of planned depletion or obsolescence, going out of business.

Intel plants that have their own wells; golf courses that have their own wells; Phoenix Country Club is on its own wells. Those are not captured in here. Sand and gravel mining, which is a mining operation, that does pretty much track urban populations. The more construction, the more sand and gravel mining. It’s directly related, so there’s a bunch of stuff not in here that diminishes the number of people we can support with the amount of water we have.

This is water use profiles for the three counties. Another thing that happens a lot, is people get lost in the distinction between industrial and municipal water uses. A factory that gets its water from a city is a municipal water use. A golf course that has its own well is an industrial water use. It’s kind of a meaningless distinction that exists in the Groundwater Management Act, so what I was trying to get to was commercial agriculture and urban. Those two uses are what really matter, what drive this equation.

Okay, so this is looking at this non-GPCD use. The GPCD uses in the Sun Corridor at the time of this report are about 1.12 million acre feet. That’s an ’08 number. It didn’t change a lot between ’08 and ’10, as our urban water use has not been going up significantly, even as population has been increasing, because the GPCD’s been going down.

I told you that in the Sun Corridor, my assumption is, you can have about 2.4 million acre feet, even making a climate change assumption. We’re using about 1.1 million acre feet for all those urban uses in GPCD. There’s about another 175 to 200,000 acre feet in non-GPCD but urban uses, so the urban uses are about 1,295,000 out of 2.4, so that’s the big headline that gives you comfort that we’re not running out of water anytime soon.

If you take that last chart is this much, okay? This is the total amount of water we used in the Sun Corridor, and this is a blend of ’06 and ’08 numbers, cuz you just can’t get the same statistics, but it’s not all that much different. We use about 3.2 or 3.3 million acre feet of water in the Sun Corridor, against a sustainable number of 2.4 million, okay?

I have another presentation that’s not in here that puts the sustainable line in here, and you can see we’re well above it, but all of that that is agricultural use. Sun Corridor-wide, we’re still using something like 65 percent of our water for agriculture, and a lot of it’s very low value crops. The question of whether or not we should sustain agriculture is one of the big questions, I think, going forward.

If you take the water supply number–and here I made another cut, okay? Instead of 2.4 million acre feet, I took it to 2.2 million at the upper end and 1.8 million on the lower end, and at a per capita rate of 200, which is about the current Sun Corridor-wide average, and includes, I built in this non-GPCD number in here too, as well. These are the kinds of population numbers you can get.

At the high end, yeah, maybe we can support 12,000,000 people. At the low end, 8,000,000. We’re currently at five and a half. There’s still a fair amount of room to grow, even at the low end. There is clearly no cause for panic, in my view, but the next part of the report is, what kind of choices do we have to start making?

If you want to preserve agriculture, which I think you should, on a meaningful scale, you probably have to pull something like half a million acre feet out of these numbers. Well, if you do that, and you’re down here at the low end, you’re down to about 7,000,000 people, and we’re at five and a half. There’s not a whole lot of room left to grow, and the projection was by 2040, we’re gonna be about in the 9,000,000 range. We’re clearly beginning to bump up against some kind of limits here.

These are the big questions, I think, that confront us. One is, do we preserve agriculture? We have, unlike most states that have agricultural preservation policies, we have none. Now the reason those states have agricultural preservation policies, is it’s about land. One of the reasons that Oregon drew urban growth boundaries was to preserve the Willamette Valley, which is some of the richest farmland in America.

A lot of states’ agricultural preservation is about lifestyle preservation. It’s about the bucolic Jeffersonian small villages and farmers and wanting to preserve that lifestyle. It’s about preserving the small rural villages of Vermont, which relate to open space and to land conservation issues.

We’re not gonna run out of land anytime soon. Our problem is a water issue, and the reason that maybe we should preserve agriculture–I think there are a couple of reasons. One is it mitigates the heat island.

Two is, it’s the only reason we’re here. I mean, there is a point in this criticism of Phoenix, as being a fairly improbable place for this many people. The reason there are this many people here, is it’s a good place to grow crops. That’s how this place got started. That’s why we’ve lived here all this time. I think some deference to that historical reality is beneficial to understanding the place.

The third and biggest reason I think we should preserve agriculture, is agriculture gives you water management flexibility that you lose. If you grow your urban population to consume your whole water supply, you get Las Vegas, and then when you get in a shortage, you have to pay people to rip out grass, or you have to tell them they can’t wash their cars, or you have to tell them they can only water their lawn every third Tuesday. You have to come up with these very heavy-handed regulatory schemes to limit the amount of water.

We’ve never done any of that, because we just take water back from farmers. In one form or another, we’ve gotten through the drought because agricultural water use has gone down and those things have swung to urban. That gives you continuing flexibility, because an agricultural demand, if it’s for annual crops, is not a hardened demand. You can just not plant those crops next year and use that water somewhere else, so I think we should preserve agriculture, but absolutely nobody’s talking about that.

This is another interesting chart, which is sort of the point of, how should we price water? Now lots of you, I know, think your water bill is really high and really egregious. These numbers are ranks, ranks of cities, from one being the cheapest water in the United States, to 50 being the highest priced water in the United States in big cities.

Phoenix, you will see, is right in the 20’s, and it’s relatively flat, no matter how much water you use in a month. Tucson, on the other hand, goes up dramatically. Tucson has what is called aggressive block pricing, so each gallon of water gets much more expensive as you get into these higher ranges. That’s worked well for Tucson.

If you instituted Tucson’s block pricing in Phoenix, most of you would let your trees die. It would devastate the existing urban landscape of Phoenix. I don’t think that’s a good idea, but a lot of people do. A lot of people think we should be more like Tucson, and that we should look more like Tucson, and that we should let all those trees die. It would make it hotter here. It would make it more uncomfortable to live here. I think there is benefit to some of the grass and trees. I don’t think we should encourage it in new development areas, but I think preserving it in the historic areas has a point.

There’s all kinds of interesting stuff in here. You will see that the most expensive water in the United States is Seattle. Now that seems weird. It’s actually not, if you think about it. You don’t water your lawn and your trees in Seattle. You don’t use water outside, so you use very little water. Because you use very little water, each gallon of it you use has to be really expensive, cuz you still have to pay for the pumps and the pipes and the treatment and the delivery system, and all of those things. What you’re doing here is you’re amortizing infrastructure on a very small amount of water per capita, because it rains so much.

You probably will not be surprised to find that some of the cheapest water in the United States is Chicago. They do have a giant lake right next to them. This is weird: Denver, number five. It doesn’t rain that much more in Denver than it rains in Phoenix, frankly. I don’t know what explains that. It is historical, I think, because Denver, like Phoenix, is a city from the Midwest, sort of moved beyond the hundredth meridian. It’s got Midwestern style houses and grass and trees, and all those kinds of things, even though it might not genuinely make sense.

Okay, so how should we choose to live? You’ve got Phoenix on the left and Tucson on the right. Now both of those are gross exaggerations. A lot of Phoenix houses have much less grass than this, and a lot of Tucson houses have absolutely nothing planted in front of them, and don’t have flowers. This is actually Civano, which many of you may know. It’s sort of an eco-community that was developed down there several years ago.

Clearly, there’s a big difference here in these lifestyles. This is sort of a Mediterranean plant palate and schlocky stucco and tile house. I’m sorry, I just insulted someone’s house. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sure it’s lovely. I’m sure you like your house. This has this more indigenous Tucsonan feel, but this is the big question.

The big choice we face going forward is, what do you want? Do you wanna continue to have grass and trees, or do you wanna take that away so a whole lot more people can live here? When you think about it that way, most people would vote for the grass and trees, frankly, we discovered at the thing down in Tucson. It’s not like you ever get to really make that stark choice, “Well, I’ll take out my grass so another 200,000 people can live here,” but that is ultimately what you wind up bumping up against.

There is another one in here, that’s later. Second question: densities. The densities we live at consume a lot of water, because we have backyards, we have front yards, we have swimming pools, we have landscaping. That’s the way this place has developed. That’s the way we kinda like it. That’s how virtually all of you out there live. Some of you may live in condos, but most people who live in condos in Phoenix aspire to a single-family home or have graduated from a single-family home. It’s not considered a permanent lifestyle, generally, here, but if we were willing to live at significantly higher densities, water use goes down dramatically.

This was produced by DCDC, Ray Quay and Pat Gober. It’s sort of a log showing decreasing water use. Ray Quay is suspicious of some of this, and the reason is this kind of thing. There is a big difference in multifamily use. This is higher density than this is, but boy does this use a lot of water.

It is gorgeous. This is David Hovey’s Camelview, just north of Camelback on Scottsdale Road, all those hanging garden things. It just astounds me they can keep that stuff alive. I give them enormous credit. Anybody live there? I really wanna know what the homeowner dues are in this place to take care of those plants. It’s beautiful; I mean, it’s just spectacular, but I’m not sure you’re using a whole lot less water per capita than we are in some of the single-family homes, if you get in that kinda thing, but again, a choice you have to make.

Density landscaping; the lifestyle of affluence. The proxy I use for this is a swimming pool. In Tucson, there was a vote by the audience that I should be required to give up my swimming pool, because I made a ringing endorsement of swimming pools. The truth is I hardly ever use my swimming pool, and I would give it up, if it wouldn’t make my backyard look bad; because of the way it’s designed, it sort of fits in.

We are gonna face a point at which the continued development of individual private swimming pools is just not justifiable, so how are we gonna deal with that? Price? Regulation? I don’t know. That’s gonna be a question we’re gonna face.

Agriculture we talked about; aesthetics in the urban environment. Another issue that you can’t do is talk about water in Tempe, Arizona without talking about the Tempe Town Lake. I think the Tempe Town Lake is fine. I will defend the Tempe Town Lake to any of you. That, to me, is not a bad use of water.

In an urban area like this, where it is ungodly hot and uncomfortable, and it tends to be an unpunctuated urban fabric of beige stucco and big box retail and franchise food, using water in fountains and things like the Tempe Town Lake, where lots of people gather and celebrate is a good use of water. That’s something we should do with water, but other people feel very differently and think that we should wear our aridness like a hair shirt and make it uncomfortable to be anywhere in the Valley.

Finally, one of the biggest and most neglected aspects of our water situation is, what about the natural environment? Should we leave any of this actually in the rivers where it used to flow? Well, of course, we’re all products of the Bureau of Reclamation, to whom an undammed stream was like heresy, the worst possible thing one could have; that any water flowing was an opportunity, not something to appreciate. Going forward, we’re gonna have to start thinking about that differently.

Okay, I got this far without mentioning golf courses. I’ve represented lots of golf courses, but I do not play golf. There are probably twice as many golf courses as there should be in Maricopa County, and somehow, half of them are going to have to go away.

Any of you who are gonna go to law school, and you wanna find a specialty for your career for the next 20 or 30 years, how to get rid of a golf course will be a growth industry, because it is one of the hardest things. They’re all covered by deed restrictions. They’ve all been sold to the houses around them; paid premiums to look out on the golf course. They’re gonna get too expensive to water and there’s gonna be nobody playing them. What are you gonna do? I don’t know the answer to that. That’s very tough.

Okay, so that’s watering the Sun Corridor. Since the report came out, I’ve done a lot of these presentations, including this one at the Water Resources Research Center, which is the premier water conference in Arizona every year, and I really expected to get a lot of engagement by people quarreling with my numbers, quarreling with my assumptions, quarreling with my methodology, and so far, I’ve gotten virtually zero of that. I don’t know whether it’s because people agree–I doubt it–or whether they just aren’t willing to debate the assumptions.

What I have gotten a lot of, is a lot of dialog about these choices, about, okay, what should we do with the water? The message here is, we’re not running out of water. This is not a reason to believe that Phoenix is unsustainable, and it’s not a reason even to believe that we can’t continue to grow in the Sun Corridor, but we are within sight of some serious limiting factors.

If we are willing to live quite differently, we can blow right past that 9,000,000 population number, but it will require living quite differently. It will require not having so many detached single-family homes. It will require not having so much grass and trees. It will require not having private swimming pools, and those are tradeoffs we may have to make if we want to continue to have an economy that is essentially driven by a growth machine and not very much else.

These are things we ought to start debating and thinking about. We did some voting at the WRRC thing, about how did people value these varying choices. Not surprisingly, I think, to me, but somewhat surprisingly to others, the natural environment got the highest rating of what we should be worrying about. Now, it was at the U of A. It was a lot of college students and professors. The vote here would be the same.

You would all vote for the natural environment, but the skeptics, the water buffalo community, are like, “Yeah, yeah, sure, that’s what all the students and faculty say, but real people don’t think that.” I don’t know that I think that’s true. I think real people do think that. Despite what the attitude of the Arizona Legislature is about the environment, I think the people feel differently about it.

We got very–this was surprising to me–strong support for retaining agriculture in some form. A lot of that, I think, is people worrying about food security and local food, and things that are becoming more top of mind to people today than they used to be.

We got a fairly broad willingness to regulate swimming pools, especially mine. They were going after my swimming pool, cuz I confessed to not using it very much, but liking the way it looked. I guess, it’s a fairly wasteful use of water.

I find it hard to believe that a place as anti-regulation as Arizona would leap on the bandwagon easily of regulating that people could not have private swimming pools. I think we’re more likely to have market function operating, and the price of water is much like the price of gas. People get extremely agitated about it, even though you may be intellectually able to get people to understand that water is too cheap; it should cost more, and making it cost more is the best way to modify behavior in a beneficial way.

That’s even more true of gasoline than of water. Gasoline’s way too cheap in the United States, but listen to the news every night, and the President is to blame. He’s made gas too expensive. People apparently believe the President gets to set the price of gasoline.

Audience: [Laughter]

Grady Gammage: There are just a lot of misconceptions and people don’t want to pay a lot for water. There is still, I think, a weird somewhat socialistic ethic about water in the United States in general, and certainly in the West, that water should basically be free. Water is kinda like air. It should just be there for the taking. It is a common use good, not a private good, and that we shouldn’t have to pay much of anything for it, and whatever pay is more than we should be paying. It is special; it is magic; it is unlike other commodities.

Every time you get in a conference and you hear people hear the commoditization of water and water pricing as being the solution, you have to realize the public by and large doesn’t feel that way. No matter how much of a capitalist someone is, if you press them on it, they don’t really think of water as a capitalist good, which surprised me a little bit when I got on the CAP Board.

So I’m glad to answer any questions you have about it.

[End of Audio]

The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.