Hobbs Visits Southern Arizona to Learn About Groundwater Use

WILLCOX — Residents and city officials have no legal tools to stop the intensive groundwater extraction that is drying up their wells and depleting the aquifer, and even with an active state management area, they fear it won’t be enough to stop the overexploitation.

They delivered that message to Gov. Katie Hobbs, who traveled through the community Thursday to visit with water users in southeastern Arizona. Hobbs pushed lawmakers to address the groundwater crisis earlier this year, but despite months of negotiations, no deal was reached by the end of the session.

Meanwhile, wells are drying up across the basin, to the dismay of residents who must haul water or spend tens of thousands of dollars — an alternative few can afford — to drill new ones, they told Hobbs. In May, the main well in the town of Willcox, which serves nearly 4,000 residents, went dry.

“This part of Arizona is kind of like the Wild West, where people can pump as much water as they want and there are no restrictions,” Michael Resare, deputy city manager, told The Arizona Republic. The city now monitors well water levels monthly, instead of annually.

City officials believe the Willcox well was immediately affected by pumping from a nearby commercial well operated by Klump Materials. The company sells water to the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project, a giant power line that stretches from New Mexico to Arizona. The materials company was transporting nearly 100,000 gallons a day, the city estimated.

While commercial wells like these can have an immediate impact on nearby wells, groundwater depletion has accelerated throughout the basin with the growth of large-scale agricultural operations. The largest water users are Riverview Dairy and pecan farms owned by out-of-state investors.

According to estimates from the Arizona Department of Water Resources, between 2005 and 2022, the water storage capacity in the Willcox Basin has declined by more than 2.2 million acre-feet. That’s a loss of 133,141 acre-feet per year, enough to supply the city of Willcox for about 65 years.

Hobbs, who was on a daylong visit to meet with city officials, homeowners and farmers, pledged to take executive action if there is no legislative agreement. She did not say how long she would wait, but said her team resumed meetings with lawmakers last week.

“The people we spoke to today whose wells are going dry don’t have time to wait for more studies. They need these large commercial farms to reduce their water use by more than 15 percent over 20 years,” she said, referring to the terms of Senate Bill 1221, which failed to pass this session.

She added that alternative groundwater protection tools need to be available for more than the three groundwater basins considered in SB1221.

“That was one of our big issues,” she said. “Under my leadership, we’re going to go beyond that. We need more flexibility and we can’t wait for basins as disrupted as Willcox to recover.”

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Some damage is irreversible

Groundwater exploitation has caused land subsidence in the basin. 15 miles north of Willcox, the ground level is 11 feet lower than it was in the 1970s because of subsidence. In some areas, it is sinking half a foot each year.

Fine-grained soils clump together and compact over time as water is sucked up from below. This process also reduces the storage space for groundwater, says Brian Conway, a senior hydrogeologist with the state water agency. That groundwater storage is lost forever.

The subsidence is irreversible, and even if groundwater pumping slows or stops altogether, the ground would continue to sink for years, if not decades, he told Hobbs when she visited an earth fissure near Kansas Settlement that is 20 feet deep.

“People need to be aware that the subsidence is going to continue,” Conway said.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources has been monitoring land subsidence for nearly three decades. Cochise County, where it began monitoring subsidence in 2008, and Graham County have the highest subsidence rates in the state.

When the ground subsidence, it can damage homes, roads, canals and other infrastructure.

“Subsidence can also wreak havoc on wells. They’ll twist and compact the well casing. That’s another costly component,” Conway told the Republic in an interview.

Ground cracks, a linear opening in the soil, are also the result of subsidence. They begin to form as hairline cracks below the surface and experts believe they reach hundreds of feet deep, Conway said. As water moves down into the ground, it erodes materials around the crack until it becomes visible above ground.

The cracks can extend for miles and cause millions of dollars in damage. One crack about 10 miles north of the one Hobbs visited ruptured a gas line. The Arizona Geological Survey has documented more than 100 miles of earth cracks in Cochise County. This man-made geological hazard has no known solution.

“You could go back in with a dump truck, a bulldozer and a front-end loader and fill that void. And there’s a good chance the site would reopen again,” Conway said.

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“We’re just trying to live”

At a home in Pearce, south of Willcox, Hobbs met with about a dozen residents affected by falling groundwater levels. One arranged with his neighbor to spend about $30,000 to drill deeper. The dairy offered to cover the cost of deepening another resident’s well to 750 feet. The well owner knows that if it goes dry again, he won’t be able to deepen it and said he can’t afford to move elsewhere. Others have seen their wells’ capacity diminish.

They all saw their neighbors carrying water.

“It’s very different seeing it with your own eyes than hearing it on Capitol Hill,” Hobbs said.

The situation is urgent, the governor said. “We are studying all the administrative tools at our disposal.”

Active management zones, as outlined in state groundwater laws, are the most important tool, but they have problems, some residents said. Hobbs acknowledged the need for flexibility to treat each basin differently, which is why she sees the legislative route as essential to creating new tools.

“The Willcox Basin aquifer is our Colorado River,” said Cheryl Knott, a Pearce resident who led the signature-gathering effort to put on the ballot the creation of active management zones in the Willcox and Douglas basins.

Nearly all of her neighbors have had to drill a new well in recent years, she said. They can’t afford to dig deeper for water and shouldn’t be forced to make the same sacrifices as the bigger players.

“The dairy is an industrial operation,” she said of Riverview, noting that the town has hundreds of wells, some more than 2,000 feet deep. “Whatever happens here, it would be a total injustice and inequity to expect everyone to do the same thing.”

Under an AMA, farms are granted vested rights to water. Their rights depend on their water use over the last five years before the area was declared. Both low and high water users must make reductions in line with the AMA management objective, but their starting point is different.

That’s one of the most vocal criticisms, from Ed Curry, a prominent pepper grower and member of the Hobbs Water Policy Council. He grows low-water-use crops, but his farm’s water conservation goals would be nearly the same as those of higher-water-use crops.

It took many years to secure contracts for his high-priced, low-water crops and was “a lot of networking,” said the owner of Curry Seed & Chile Company, who gave Hobbs a tour of his farm and factory. “It took a lot of effort.”

Hobbs told The Republic she doesn’t have a specific policy on crop change, but she will look for ways to encourage farmers to do whatever they can to reduce their water use.

Willcox City Manager Caleb Blaschke told Hobbs that many producers in the basin irrigate their land, even if it’s not planted, to ensure they have water rights if an AMA is implemented. Farmers who didn’t plant a portion of their land five years before Douglas’ AMA went into effect lost their irrigation rights.

“I think the message that’s been received is, ‘Drill and install new wells as quickly as possible before the regulations come into place, so you can grandfather in,'” he said. Most farmers he’s spoken to still support groundwater regulations.

Sharon Hill Hubbard, who lives north of Willcox, said she recently decided to sell all the animals in her yard. The water level started dropping rapidly about a decade ago, her neighbors’ well dried up and her own family decided to change their lifestyle, hoping the same thing wouldn’t happen to them. She scoffs at the thought of big farms like Riverview cutting their water use by 10 or 14 percent.

“We’ve already reduced our consumption by 70 percent,” she told The Republic before the meeting with the governor. “And we’re just trying to live.”

Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send your tips or questions to [email protected].