The Arizona Water Banking Authority told city utilities around the Valley that it will use its stored water to make them whole in the event of cutbacks to their supplies from the Colorado River. The policy, which will be in effect for a year, comes after cities publicly asked the Water Bank for clarity on how much water they could expect to get during times of shortage.
The cities and the Water Bank had been going back and forth about how much water should be distributed. Now, with Colorado River cuts imminent, there’s an answer.
Since the late-1990s, taxpayers have been funding a program to store excess Colorado River water underground, with the idea that it could be used as a backup in times of shortage. Now, that shortage is here. The Colorado River does not have enough water to fully meet demand across the seven states that use it.
A new federal plan, which is expected to be unveiled next week, will likely attempt to rein in demand by cutting back on the amount of water that flows to the Central Arizona Project. The CAP is a 336-mile canal system that brings Colorado River water to the Valley. A certain subset of the water in that canal is classified as “Municipal and Industrial.” Water from that category is often a major part of the supply for cities in the Phoenix metro area.
In recent meetings, the agency and the cities laid out two different interpretations of the Water Bank’s legal responsibility to utilities that hold rights to Municipal and Industrial water.
Cities argued that the Water Bank must promptly give them access to exactly as much stored water as they had lost to mandatory Colorado River cutbacks — essentially, provide a one-to-one replacement for the water they lost.
The Water Bank argued that it had the right and responsibility to stretch out those supplies and preserve them long into the future. To do that, the Water Bank would have given cities some water, but not 100% of the amount they had lost to cutbacks.
After some public back-and-forth, the utilities seem to have gotten their way, at least for a year.
EPCOR, a private utility company that provides water to a number of communities around the Valley, supported the Water Bank’s policy.
“I don't think it was ever envisioned to be a super long-term water supply that would be here for many, many, many years,” said Doug Dunham, associate director of water resources for EPCOR USA. “It's going to be a temporary bridge, and we need to make the most judicious use of that as possible.”
Dunham said the yearlong time frame will give water providers in the area some time to come up with longer-term plans for withstanding a drier future.
“It'll provide the bridge supply as we work on larger concepts, larger plans for more permanent alternative supplies to to cover any future Colorado River shortages,” he said.
Dunham specifically mentioned the SWAP program, a new effort by Phoenix and Tucson to help cities looking to buy water find entities that are looking to sell it. Water transfers and sharing deals may be a big part of utilities’ strategies going forward.
Max Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix and one of the designers of the SWAP program, said that the Water Bank’s one-year policy would bring some predictability to cities trying to plan their water portfolios going forward.
“Obviously, a one-year extension is only a one-year extension, and it remains to be seen what the policy will be moving forward after that,” he said. “But I would say going into 2027, extending this policy for one year should give everybody who lives in the three-county service area peace of mind.”
Meanwhile, others said the Water Bank should give out less of its water to ensure that its stored supplies can last into the future.
Terri Sue Rossi is vice president of water resources for the Arizona Water Company, a private utility that serves about 300,000 people across the state. She described her perspective as “unique,” as she has worked for city utilities, private water providers, and spent about seven years employed by the Water Bank itself.
Rossi said “there was never a requirement” that the Water Bank needed to distribute all of its water access to utilities in “one fell swoop.” Instead, she said, access to water was intended to be distributed “judiciously over time.”
“I liken the bank credits more to an insurance policy against shortages in the Colorado River,” Rossi said. “I don't look at it as an IRA, I don't look at it as a social security check or a pension check. It really has always been intended to protect us and to mitigate — to a degree — shortages.”
The bank, she said, would be within its legal rights to do so.
“The bank has the discretion to decide how many credits it will distribute,” Rossi said. “Whether that's nothing, 15%, 20% or 100%. It has the authority to do that. It doesn't need a policy to tell it to do that.”
A similar debate over the Water Bank’s rights and responsibilities may get stirred up again when the current policy expires in a year, but the bank and the utilities will likely have more time and space to discuss their differences without the imminent threat of to-be-announced water cutbacks hanging over them.
The future will also likely bring discussion of a second policy proposed, but not formalized, by the Water Bank. Under that policy, utilities that voluntarily give up water as part of a cutback plan put forth by Arizona, California and Nevada, would be given some water from the Water Bank to offset some of the supplies they left behind in Lake Mead. Rossi and Dunham both told KJZZ they supported the policy.