A Water Dispute Nears a Boil in Arizona

Cross Posted from Wall Street Journal

Will Seberger for The Wall Street Journal

Like many retirees who have flocked to Sierra Vista in recent years, Judy Sturgeon enjoys the cool temperatures afforded by the southern Arizona city’s high elevation, views of the Huachuca Mountains and regular appearances by migrating cuckoos and warblers on the banks of the San Pedro River.

The San Pedro River flows through property owned by Robin Silver.

But Ms. Sturgeon worries there won’t be enough water to go around if retirees keep coming. That is why she doesn’t want the company that owns her residential community to proceed with a plan to build 7,000 homes for an expected influx of retirees who would fill most of the available development land in the city of about 45,000.

“Hopefully it won’t be in my lifetime,” says Ms. Sturgeon, 73 years old.

The development, planned by Los Angeles real-estate company Castle & Cooke Inc., is at the center of a fight over water rights that pits the federal government against Arizona’s water authority. It is one of thousands of conflicts across the West, where states generally issue water rights on a first-come, first-served basis. As demand grows, states eager for development that could generate economic growth are increasingly granting privileges to newcomers, a move that existing water users say impinges on their rights.

Last year, the Arizona Department of Water Resources approved Castle & Cooke’s plan to pump roughly 3,000 acre-feet of water a year from state land near the San Pedro—the last big, free-flowing river in the Southwest—over the next century to service its new residents. (One acre-foot is generally taken to represent annual water usage of a suburban household.)

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Will Seberger for The Wall Street Journal

But the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, along with landowners and environmental groups, appealed the decision under the Arizona water agency’s review process. They argue the company would be intercepting water that would have otherwise flowed to replenish the river and the surrounding San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, which contains nearly 57,000 acres of federal land. The 40-mile-long stretch of riverfront is home to hundreds of bird, fish, reptile and plant species—including the endangered Huachuca water-umbel, a floweringplant—and is a popular pit stop for birds migrating from Mexico to Canada.

An administrative-court judge will rule on the dispute in coming weeks, though the Arizona water department can choose to ignore the judge’s recommendation, which isn’t binding. If that happens, the federal government says it likely would continue to fight the decision.

The U.S. employs personnel across the country to monitor new water usage that could affect water supply on federal territory. Solar-power plants and hydraulic-fracturing operations, both of which require millions of gallons of water a year, have been among the biggest new contenders for supply lately.

Meanwhile, there have been more disputes over “reserved water rights,” which entitle the federal government to “sufficient” water to serve areas including military bases, Indian reservations and national parks. Some states have refused to honor these vaguely defined rights, while the U.S. has struggled to defend them.

“Even if you do have a federal water right, we don’t know how much you get,” says Bill Wells, a hydrologist with the Bureau of Land Management. In this case, he says, the amount of water the federal government is entitled to in the area is under review in a separate case in Arizona Superior Court—and the state’s water agency should have waited for that court to rule before issuing Castle & Cooke’s permit, he adds.

Rick Coffman, a Castle & Cooke vice president, says population growth in Sierra Vista is inevitable, and planning for it will save more water than letting individuals develop on their own. Under his company’s plan, he says, the town is “thousands of years away” from running out of water. To get the permit, he says the company demonstrated that its additional pumping wouldn’t drop the water table more than 650 feet in 100 years, compared with a state law allowing it to drop 1,000 feet.

“This is an extraordinary bit of overreach [by the federal government] to say they have control of all water in this area,” Mr. Coffman says. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t care about people, we don’t care about communities, we just care about the river.’ ” The Bureau of Land Management says it doesn’t get priority over landowners or other community water suppliers with prior water rights.

Castle & Cooke’s proposed development—nearly 10 times the size of any planned community it has built yet in Sierra Vista—could intercept one-third of the water that would otherwise have replenished the river, says Robin Silver, a co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson environmental group. He took part in the effort to appeal the Arizona agency’s decision, on the grounds that the impact would devalue his own 100-acre riverfront property.

Military officials at Fort Huachuca, the Army base in Sierra Vista, have been trying to reduce water use in recent years with waterless urinals and strict landscaping policies, worried a drying of the river could imperil the base’s future. Fort Huachuca spokeswoman Tanja Linton says that while many resident officers plan to retire in communities owned by Castle & Cooke, there doesn’t appear to be much water to spare.