Water chief: Time to bite the bullet on water supply

By: Andrea Wilson, Cronkite News Service

01/30/2009



	Cronkite News Service Herb Guenther, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, is shown in this 2007 mugshot.

PHOENIX - Tapping the ocean and seeding clouds hold promise as ways to bring more water to Arizona, but the state needs to make tough choices to ensure a sustainable supply, the state's top water official told lawmakers Jan. 22.

"We are spoiled by cheap, readily available water supplies, and we're going to have to start biting the bullet because we're going to run out of those supplies," Herb Guenther, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said while briefing the House Committee on Water and Energy.

     Guenther said Arizona has plenty of water at present, but it isn't necessarily where it's needed. That's left areas such as Mohave County, the Verde Valley, the Mogollon Rim and the Coconino Plateau in northern Arizona and the upper San Pedro region in southern Arizona needing to import water to have sustainable supplies, he said.
     Even in Active Management Areas, which include the Phoenix-to-Tucson corridor and some rural areas, the required assurance of 100-year water supplies for developments isn't necessarily sustainable because property owners are allowed to mine groundwater down to 1,000 feet, Guenther said.
     "The problem, obviously, is if you mine water to 1,000 feet eventually you're going to have significant subsidence," Guenther said. "Plus the fact that when you get to 1,000 feet after 100 years, what are you going to do then? Somebody's got to replace that water."
     Without addressing that, Guenther said, Arizona has taken only "a baby step" toward addressing its water challenges. "Sooner or later, you folks will be charged with determining how we're going to deal with the rest of it," he said.
     Guenther said more than 3,000 square miles across Arizona have subsided because of groundwater pumping, including a 100-square-mile area of Pinal County that sank 7 feet between 1952 and 1977.
     Options to increase the water supply include desalination of ocean water, something Guenther called an effective but highly expensive method.
     Techniques to increase precipitation are another option; however, the storm systems common to Arizona are too limited to support most of those, Guenther said.
     "The only sustainable water supply available to the interior western United States, and actually the world, is the ocean," Guenther said. "And desalination is eventually going to be that."
     Guenther told the panel that he was pleased that Cochise and Yuma counties, as well as a growing number of municipalities, have taken advantage of an opportunity, made possible under a 2007 law, to adopt the same assured-water-supply standards required in Active Management Areas. He said he is optimistic that more will follow. "It is the best way for them to protect their water supply," he said.