A Rural Arizona Community May Soon Have a State Government Fix For Its Drying Wells

Lisa Glenn has seen what happens when a rural desert community’s groundwater aquifer is pushed past its breaking point. 

For 57 years, she’s lived in Willcox, Arizona, where farms dot the landscape. But over the past decade, as new industrial farming operations moving into the area drove a surge in groundwater pumping, her neighbors’ wells have run dry. Others have seen their land sink as the underground water supplies shrank.

“I know one woman whose house is basically split in two by subsidence,” she said.

For decades, she’s watched groups try to protect the aquifer by going to the legislature and advocating for laws that safeguard the water supplies of rural communities like hers. But time and again, they failed.

Other people concerned about the future of the community have moved away.

“How can we have ignored this?” she asked. “To watch neighbors and acquaintances’ businesses be so harmed by what is going on, and their future be harmed, because we have allowed just a few big players to pump all they wanted—it’s been wrong from the get-go.”

But finally, change may be coming. The Arizona Department of Water Resources announced Wednesday that, for the first time ever, it was beginning the process of creating an Active Management Area within the boundaries of the Willcox groundwater basin, setting the stage to finally regulate groundwater in the region where dozens of wells have run dry over the past decade. “It’s a chance to fix it, to move us into a place where we can assure that this basin will thrive for generations to come,” Glenn said. “I am very hopeful.”

It’s a significant attempt by the state to rein in the overconsumption of groundwater that has plagued rural Arizona for decades and that, in the face of climate-driven drought, is becoming harder to ignore. AMAs are the one tool the state currently has to deal with water shortages in rural Arizona.

In more developed parts of the state, like Phoenix, groundwater is strictly regulated, with aquifers managed to prevent more water from being pumped out than can be replenished by rain and surface water each year. But in rural stretches of Arizona where agriculture thrives—and uses most of the state’s water supply—there are often no rules even to require monitoring of groundwater pumping, let alone the amount of water being taken out of an aquifer. 

In the drought-stricken state, the Willcox area east of Tucson has perhaps best defined the water woes. 

“Willcox is at the epicenter of the crisis and it is in a state where they’re desperate for action,” said Haley Paul, Arizona policy director for the National Audubon Society, who also serves on the governor’s water council. “I think it’s encouraging to see the department using its existing authorities to protect and manage groundwater in this region because we know it is one of the most severely impacted places in Arizona.”

Over the past decade, Willcox residents have seen large-scale agricultural operations move into the area, where no groundwater regulations exist, allowing unlimited quantities of water to be pumped for free, but at the cost of their aquifer. 

Dozens of residential wells have run dry as the aquifer has been drawn down 400 feet below the average well depth so that most wells no longer reach the water table. Fissures have cracked open the earth, the land subsiding by nearly three inches a year as the underground water supporting it was pumped out. Between 1940 and 2015, 5.7 million acre feet of water has been sucked from the ground, nearly double the amount that the state gets from the Colorado River in wet years and enough for nearly 15 million homes. In 2022, the basin saw a deficit of 108,428-acre feet more water being pumped out of the aquifer than was replenished by rain or other sources, about the same amount of water Tucson uses each year. 

Nearly all of the water is used by industrial agricultural and dairy operations that moved to the basin in the past 10 years. In 2015, Riverview LLP, a Minnesota-based dairy company, moved into the area, which residents say was a major turning point for the basin, though wells had already begun to run dry and the decline of the aquifer began to accelerate in 2005. 

“If all pumping stopped today, it would take over 280 years for the aquifer to recover,” said Ryan Mitchell, the state water department’s chief hydrologist in a recent presentation on the condition of the groundwater. 

Since Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, took office, she’s made addressing Arizona’s water challenges a top priority, stopping new groundwater pumping in the Phoenix metropolitan area and forming a bipartisan Water Policy Council to come up with plans to update the state’s groundwater management, which requires the state legislature to pass new laws. At the time, Hobbs said if the legislature wouldn’t act, she would. 

Her water council came up with a plan, but legislation to implement it stalled, with state Republicans in the Arizona legislature preventing the bills from even being heard in committee. The state legislature passed some water bills that the governor signed into law this year, but she vetoed others, arguing they would cause more harm than good. That’s left rural Arizona with no new path for groundwater regulation, despite the pleas of local leaders, residents, water experts and environmentalists. The only way forward was for the state water department’s director to begin the process to create a new Active Management Area, which is outlined in the original 1980 law and has now begun.

“For too long, politicians have stuck their heads in the sand and refused to take action to fix the problems Arizonans face,” Hobbs said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) regarding the water department’s announcement. “I won’t.”

Though Republicans in the legislature have failed to move the needle, experts, advocates and Willcox residents said, local leaders in rural communities have been advocating for change. In a statement in response to the announcement, Willcox Mayor Mike Laws said that “while there are a range of views on the AMA, the urgency of addressing our water challenges cannot be overstated” and “with no legislative solutions in place, the Governor and the Arizona Department of Water Resources have acted with the tools available to them.”

“We recognize the concerns many residents and stakeholders have raised, and we are committed to ensuring that our community’s voice is heard throughout this process,” Laws said. “Our focus remains on securing a sustainable future for our water supply and ensuring the long-term economic vitality of our region.”

Under Arizona’s current laws, 80 percent of the state has no regulations overseeing aquifers, leading agriculture operations to pump unlimited amounts of water. That’s left some communities like Willcox vulnerable to unsustainable groundwater use, experts say.

In the most populated parts of the state, the 1980 Groundwater Management Act created Active Management Areas to achieve sustainable yields from aquifers those areas depend on, meaning no more water could be pumped out than flowed in. Under the law, groundwater in the five AMAs is monitored and all new developments need to have the water department certify that they have enough water to supply the new homes for 100 years, though some exemptions exist. In some rural parts of the state, Irrigation Non-Expansion Areas (INAs) require the reporting of groundwater pumping and restrict the development of new users of irrigated water, like farms. 

However, creating new active management areas is rare. Voters in Douglas, which neighbors Willcox, voted to create an AMA in 2022. A similar proposal for Willcox at the time failed, but locals there continued to push for some kind of groundwater management. 

“This is long overdue, but better now than never,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, who previously directed the Arizona Department of Water Resources when the state’s groundwater laws were passed in 1980. “It is really important that the Department of Water Resources takes these actions because we need to protect these groundwater supplies.”

The Arizona Department of Water Resources will have a public hearing on November 22 “to present factual data and receive comments and evidence on whether the Director should designate an active management area” in Willcox, the department announced in a press release. Ferris said after that, the department’s director, Tom Buschatzke, will have 30 days to release the department’s findings from that process and make a decision on whether to create the new AMA. During that time, no new land or plots that have sat idle in the past five years can be put into production for agriculture.

The department’s designation of an AMA limits future pumping and establishes mandatory conservation requirements for the area, but would establish grandfathered groundwater rights for current users and can be appealed.

Locals like Glenn are optimistic the process will finally lead to regulation of the area’s scarce water resources. The legislature has failed them, Glenn said, and the only path forward—for now—is creating an AMA for Willcox. She hopes the process will pave the way to stopping the overuse of groundwater across Arizona.

“The whole state is in crisis,” she said.