TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Robbie Woodhouse’s grandfather began nearly a century of family farming along the Gila River near Yuma in the middle 1920s when he dug up a bunch of mesquite stumps on his land to make way for his barley, wheat, Bermuda seed, cotton and melon fields.
Farming never really took off at the Woodhouse homestead until 1954, when the federal government finished a 75-mile-long concrete canal to bringwater to what’s now known as the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District, which covers about 58,500 acres along the Gila River east of the Colorado.
While all these cities have backup supplies, led by groundwater, to cushion them in the short- to medium-term in the event of river water cuts, their long-term picture is more uncertain because the CAP was extended into Arizona nearly 40 years ago precisely to get them off groundwater. So now, Wellton Mohawk and the other irrigation districts are pushing a plan to cut one acre-foot of water used per acre annually, on 925,000 acres along the Lower Colorado River in Arizona and California. In return, they’re seeking $1,500 an acre-foot in compensation, or a total of $1.387 billion annually.
“Anytime anyone wants to sit down with us and talk about it, we’re more than willing to do so. But no one has been willing to discuss it,” countered Wade Noble, an attorney representing the Yuma-area irrigation districts. “Until we get to that point, our voluntary forbearance of a significant amount of the water we control will remain on the terms we put on the table. We’re not going to negotiate with ourselves.
With no action forthcoming on a deal, some Arizona water users have pulled back on past commitments to leave water in Lake Mead to prop it up. The Tucson City Council, for instance, had pledged earlier this year to leave 30,000 acre-feet in the lake in 2022 and 2023 but has since backed off that pledge and voted to order its full allocation of 144,191 acre-feet for 2023 pending the negotiations’ outcome.
It has stored about 230,000 acre-feet of CAP water and treated sewage effluent in the ground — about 2.5 years worth of its current supply — but town officials don’t want to use it all at once, Baumgardner said. It also gets about 15% of its supply from Salt and Verde River surface supplies, delivered by the quasi-public utility the Salt River Project.
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