Legislator addresses old groundwater law

Senate President Warren Petersen wants to change part of the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which requires residential developers to have a 100-year supply of water in the state’s urban areas.

For more on this, we welcomed Kathleen Ferris, a Senior Research Fellow at ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, who argues the 100-year supply has been present in Arizona before the 1980 groundwater law.

The act came about because the state was over-pumping its groundwater supplies in extremely large proportions.

“One-hundred years came from the land fraud days of Ned Warren, Ferris said, “when he was selling worthless land without water from unsuspected buyers from out of state.”

The legislature passed a law in 1973 requiring developers of sub-divisions to go to the Arizona Water Commission, which was the Department of Water Resources then. Developers would show what kind of water supplies they had, but it wasn’t mandatory.

They could still sell their lots but they had to disclose that it was not a 100-year supply.

“This is a measure that has been in our statutes for 50 to 60 years, there’s nothing arbitrary about it,” Ferris said.

Ferris urges that we need to be very careful of consumer protection because of the desert environment. The other side argues that new homes are water efficient and that 100 years is not necessary right now, Ferris mentions that this time period is not enough.

“The reason that the homebuilders are doing these things is because they are required to in order to stretch the water supplies,” Ferris said.