If you follow me in my political and even real estate posts, you know that I am ardent in my belief that realtors need to be aggressive advocates for water conservation, groundwater reform and sustainability.
We have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients. How responsible is it to put a home owner in to a 30-year mortgage on a home in a state that may have economy-destroying water issues in the next 15 years if we don’t institute reforms today?
Hyperbole? I think not.
This study from the US Geological Survey is alarming and our legislature and governor need to take the science seriously. We need at least the following changes:
1. Our state government needs to work with our congressional delegation to change incentives in the US Farm Bill so that Arizona farmers can switch to lower water use crops. Have a look at this fascinating article from a few years ago, which details how cotton farmers –even if they wanted to– would find it nearly impossible to stop growing high water-use crops. You should know that cotton and alfalfa use many times more water to grow than Arizona gets naturally from rainfall. As such, farmers are draining aquifers rapidly to keep up with demand.
2. Less than 40% of the state of Arizona is covered by an Active Management Area (meaning required sustainable use of water). We need to re-visit the Groundwater Management Act of 1980 so that the entire state is covered by Active Management Areas, or similar truly-sustainable requirements.
3. The Corporation Commission should encourage more distributed energy sources, such as solar energy on homes, which don’t require the pumping of billions of gallons of water to cool power plants.
Farming is the number one user of water in the state, power production is number two. These are the low-hanging fruits. If we can deploy more solar panels on homes and businesses, and conserve more water in agriculture, then we can continue to live in the desert with no problems.
4. We need to close the loopholes in the Ground Water Act, which allow developers to pretend that we have more water available for new developments than we actually do, as outlined in this great story from the Arizona Republic.
In short, it happened like this: We created the Groundwater Management Act in 1980, which said that a housing development had to demonstrate a 100-year ground water supply in order to build. If you don’t have the water, you can’t build there.
However, within a number of years, home builders (with the help of realtors) carved a massive loophole in the Act.
It said you don’t need the 100-year supply if you can get water from the Central Arizona Project canal (ie., Lake Mead water). Well, we know what’s happening to Lake Mead. It is dangerously low.
So, they built homes in the desert, telling us that the CAP was endless. They were wrong or wreckless.
This endangers those older homes, as well as any that new developers are irresponsibly planning today.
5. My fellow realtors in the Arizona Association of Realtors should be on the forefront of educating and advocating for water conservation, as well as distributed energy on homes.
As I said at the top of this article, we owe it to our clients.
Look, we are not going to “run out of water.” Under the Groundwater Act, if we have shortages, human consumption takes priority. That means that we will restrict agricultural before we restrict human consumption.
But, what would our economy look like if the news is that we are shutting down agriculture because we don’t have the water for our current populations? Who will move here? Who will start a business here?
There are, of course, other things we can do as well to solve the problem. (Oh, and desalination is NOT one of them.)
That is another post for another day.
