Joanna Allhands: Arizona is not doomed
The Arizona Republic’s opinions editor argues for practical solutions to Arizona’s daunting water problems.
Editor and writer Joanna Allhands describes herself as a “pretty darn practical person”. In almost all of her articles, whether about state elections, education policy, or water, she brushes aside the drama and urges people towards pragmatism.
On Arizona’s water issues, Allhands is usually looking for realistic solutions – “what works”. Allhands likes to get under the hood and focus on the mechanics of state water policy. She says it’s not terribly hard to identify solutions; the hard part is finding the political will to implement them.
After six years of writing on water, Allhands considers herself a “total water nerd”. In 2017, after becoming the Arizona Republic’s Opinions editor, she received an opinion article from the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources regarding negotiations over a drought contingency plan on the Colorado River. The article piqued her interest, so she started researching Arizona’s water struggles out of personal curiosity.
“I just started making some calls, and ended up writing a piece about that, and then started making some more calls, and some more calls, and, you know, very quickly realized: this is the most important issue facing Arizona.”
Now, Allhands writes roughly five opinion articles per month about Arizona’s water politics. Because she’s an opinion writer, she can punch up her articles with tough takes and criticism. Most of her criticism is impersonal, directed at Arizona’s water policies, or its lack thereof. But sometimes, she holds politicians accountable, urging them to take necessary steps towards a sustainable water future in Arizona.
To Allhands, the “Rio Verde Foothills situation” is a perfect example of Arizona’s water woes. For decades, more than a thousand residents in Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated community outside of Scottsdale, lived under the false assumption that Scottsdale would always sell them water. But with the West experiencing a historic megadrought, Scottsdale ended the sales at the beginning of this year. Once the deliveries stopped, 500 homes in Rio Verde Foothills went dry. Residents began flushing their toilets with rainwater, skipping showers, and eating off paper plates, conserving what little water they had left in their cisterns. And they still haven’t found a permanent solution.
To Allhands, Rio Verde Foothills was a disaster for Arizona’s image. The media ate up the story and blew it out of proportion. The community’s woes made national news, stoking the idea that Arizona was descending into an apocalyptic water shortage. One headline even read, “Phoenix Runs Out of Water”.
And to make matters worse, the state of Arizona didn’t move to prevent the debacle from ever happening again. In most of Arizona’s urban areas, a developer cannot build a new housing development without proving they have a reliable hundred-year supply of water for its residents. But Rio Verde Foothills did not have that guarantee, and it was constructed anyway. Allhands says a legal loophole allowed the homebuilders to skirt the water-supply restrictions by “wildcatting” their lots, or subdividing properties into fewer than six parcels.
Allhands says this unfortunate loophole is one of the simplest fixes in Arizona water management, and yet, the legislature hasn’t done anything about it.
“The whole Rio Verde Foothills situation has been an utter black eye on the state, and seriously, of all the water issues that we have, this is really the one that's easiest to solve, and it hasn't been solved because of petty politics, which just drives me nuts.”
Arizona’s population is ballooning, and its water sources are thinning. In 2021, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metro area, experienced the most population growth of any county in the country. The economy is growing – new factories are going in, new houses are going up, and the state is still reasonably affordable.
The state uses a varied portfolio of water sources to sustain this growth. Around 40% of the state’s water use comes from groundwater, often fossil aquifers filled over thousands of years by natural processes. Another 5% comes from reused water, and another 18% from in-state rivers. The remaining 35% comes from the dwindling Colorado River.
Nearly all these resources are probably going to shrink in the long run.
“You can't just grow solely on groundwater, you know. You're gonna have to have some kind of renewable source. And we thought, oh, well, we'll just have all this excess Colorado River water that we can use to replenish that. Well, that doesn't work, either.”
Amid a historic megadrought on the Colorado River, Arizona has taken heavy federally-mandated cuts in its share of the river’s water, and it can expect those cuts to worsen, as the drought is projected to persist.
But rather than demonizing transplants or developers, Allhands would prefer to focus on root issues in state policy. There is a widespread temptation to halt all growth, Allhands says. But growth is necessary for the state:
“You still need to have an economic engine, you still need to have people who can come here and invest here and spend their money here. You can't just shut the door and be like, well, we'll just do everything on this tax base that we have right here.”
Allhands sees a middle path forward, where growth can continue, but under smarter, fairer regulation.
Arizonans and Westerners generally like to point fingers at various water users, and uses, and demonize them, Allhands says, but that’s not really productive. For example, it’s common for people to assert that Saudi Arabia is draining the state’s aquifers so it can grow alfalfa, which it then exports out of the country. But in a recent article, Allhands shows that the Saudi company people are referring to (called Fondomonte), which owns a farming operation in La Paz County, is only a small component of Arizona’s alfalfa production, 90% of which remains in the state. The real problem with Fondomonte is not the company itself, or its goals, but the fact that there are no regulations requiring it to report its water use or control its pumping. Allhands is also quick to point out that even though agriculture uses a huge portion of Arizona’s water, it also provides the state, and the country, with winter vegetables and dairy products. Arizonans would surely suffer from any price hikes on those two products.
Rather than blaming a single user, Allhands looks to smart policy. Arizona’s growth shouldn’t stop, but it will definitely have to change. And policies will have to change, too. Fixing legal loopholes, updating regulations, and tweaking policy are all better solutions than litigation and infighting. By enacting smart laws, she says, Allhands wants to put everyone on a “level playing field”.
Loopholes and antiquated regulations allow some water users to benefit over others. In urban areas, factories, wildcatters, and “build-to-rent” housing developments exploit existing loopholes in groundwater management laws. Right now, a new Nestle factory is lobbying to receive special treatment under state groundwater laws, carving itself out of the broader management system. In rural areas, there are almost no regulations on groundwater pumping. As a result, rural Arizonans are watching their wells run dry while big neighbors, like Fondomonte, suck unregulated amounts of water out from under them. “There have to be some ground rules out there,” Allhands says, “I mean, ‘he who has the deepest well wins’ should not be dictating groundwater use in rural Arizona.”
Creating a more fair, proactive system of water management will require action from state legislators. Allhands keeps a sharp eye on the state legislature, even though she “totally hate[s] politics”. Allhands acknowledges that the Arizona legislature is malwieldy tool for water reform, but it is necessary for future change. “You need to have fair ground rules, and that's something that needs to come from the legislature. DWR (Department of Water Resources) can only do what DWR has spelled out in law …The cities, the farmers, the irrigation districts, they can't create that framework, they can't create the wider picture.”
Unfortunately, Allhands says the legislature is stuck on the “status quo”, and change is hard to come by. She applauds Governor Hobbs’s attention to the issue, but she doesn’t know if that attention will turn into real change. In the meantime, she says a single legislator, Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee Rep. Gail Griffin, has been strangling efforts at legislative water reform for years, and continues to do so.
Allhands says that inaction will not only jeopardize Arizona’s water future, but also harm its reputation. Allhands likes to say that when it comes to water, “perception is reality”, in that people’s perception of water politics informs how they act on it. Too many people think that Arizonans are filling pools and watering lawns with reckless abandon, she says. No one is properly highlighting Arizona’s efforts to conserve water and prepare for the future. Phoenix recycles about 90% of its wastewater for secondary uses, and water managers have stored a “non-rainy day fund” of underground water, enough to serve Phoenix for thirty years in case of future emergency. Overall, even as Arizona’s population has grown since the 1950s, its overall water consumption has shrunk slightly – evidence of effective reform and conservation.
Nonetheless, she says, Las Vegas is winning the “perception war”, and Arizona is losing. Vegas has a reputation for being proactive and conservative with its water use, avoiding the negative connotations that come along with its spewing fountains. When it comes to the Colorado River, these kinds of perceptions matter. If people view you as wasteful, you will receive less sympathy when negotiating over water. Regarding Arizona, Alllhands says the state needs to do more to address its negative reputation.
Allhands says she hopes her writing will push lawmakers to take action, but sometimes she is just speaking for the record. “Over time, it’s that drumbeat of like, ‘this isn't good enough, this isn't good enough, we need to do more, we need to sacrifice,’ … Sometimes I feel like I might be whistling in the dark on some things. But, you know, if it's important, I guess, just keep whistling in the dark.”
Altogether, Allhands sees a path forward for Arizona. Maybe Phoenix will start to grow up, rather than out, and maybe stronger, more connected systems will make the state’s water use more efficient. At some point, something is going to have to give, she says, because the problem is not going away. Ultimately, water issues will force people to make tough decisions.
She hopes it never comes to that. She would rather make a small sacrifice now and avoid a huge one later on.
“The definition of sacrifice is giving up something you love for something you love more … If we don't have water, we don't live here, you know, and I say that all the time to people. I like living here. So that’s why I do what I do.”