Mohave County’s elected leaders want Arizona water regulators to step in and prohibit the expansion of irrigated farmlands in areas where groundwater levels are dropping.

The county’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to ask the Arizona Department of Water Resources to form an “irrigation non-expansion area,” or INA, which would bar landowners from irrigating additional land in parts of the county and would require owners of large wells to report how much water they’re pumping. 

State officials previously rejected a similar request in 2016, citing limitations in Arizona’s groundwater law. But Mohave County supervisors urged state officials to reconsider, pointing to a new study that predicts some of the desert aquifers in the Kingman area could fall to critical lows within 60 or 70 years.

“It’s of immediate concern,” Supervisor Gary Watson said. “If we don’t act on this now, in just a few short years we may be paying one heck of a big price to try to cure the problem.”

The county supervisors made their request to ADWR Director Tom Buschatzke in a letter after their Feb. 3 vote.

The five-member board urged Buschatzke to create a new irrigation non-expansion area in two parts of the Hualapai Valley groundwater basin in northwestern Arizona — the Kingman subarea and the Hualapai subarea. They wrote that “inaction means Mohave County must wait for our new farms to exhaust our groundwater basin before any action may be taken by the State of Arizona, and then it will be way too late for the residents of Mohave County.”

The supervisors added: “The residents of Mohave County cannot wait.”

They pointed to the findings of a state-commissioned study that was released in December. In preparing the assessment, researchers with the firm Matrix New World Engineering examined two scenarios of water use and projected that the average depth to water in the Kingman subarea could drop from less than 800 feet currently to 1,200 feet by around 2080.

They projected the average depth to water in the Hualapai subarea could drop from a current level of less than 500 feet to 1,200 feet sometime between 2090 and 2100.

The county supervisors pointed out in their letter that the study predicts groundwater declines of 6.6 to 6.8 feet per year in the Kingman subarea, and 8.8 to 9.7 feet per year in the Hualapai subarea.

The findings “indicate there is insufficient groundwater to provide a reasonably safe supply for sustained irrigation of cultivated lands in the Basin at the current and predicted rates of withdrawal,” the supervisors said in the letter, which was signed by board chair Jean Bishop. They said unsustainable groundwater pumping for irrigation will “endanger” the well-being of communities that get all their water from wells, including the city of Kingman.

The county supervisors said they are “critically concerned about resolving our water crisis in the Hualapai Valley Groundwater Basin.” They said forming a new irrigation non-expansion area would be the best approach because “large-scale agricultural use is rapidly depleting the aquifer, and there is a real potential for that use to further expand in the future.”

Mohave County water levels falling

The proposal by Mohave County follows an investigation by The Arizona Republic that examined declining groundwater levels in unregulated rural areas of Arizona, where there are no rules limiting pumping and where the state doesn’t require well owners to report their water use.

The Republic’s investigation focused partly on Mohave as one of several regions that have become hot spots where groundwater is being quickly depleted.

Over the past decade, farms have sprung up in the desert near Kingman and have expanded rapidly, generating concerns among residents and public officials about the growing strains on the underground water supply.

Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act created “active management areas” with limits on pumping and well-drilling in Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Pinal County.

Other parts of the state have since been left mostly unregulated, with the exception of irrigation non-expansion areas that were established in three areas: Joseph City, Douglas and the Harquahala Valley. 

If a new managed area were established in Mohave County, it would be the fourth in the state and the first to be created since 1981. The state would then prohibit the expansion of irrigation to new lands, while allowing groundwater pumping to continue on existing farmlands and lands where a “substantial capital investment” was made to begin farming during the preceding five years.

Owners of wells that pump more than 35 gallons per minute would be required to measure their pumping and file annual reports on their water use.

The director of ADWR has the authority to create new irrigation non-expansion areas but has rejected three recent efforts to create new managed areas, one in San Simon near Willcox and two requested by leaders in Mohave County. State officials said in those cases that water levels weren’t dropping rapidly enough to create a new managed area, and that under the existing law they couldn’t take into account potential future increases in pumping.

When Buschatzke turned down the previous request by Mohave County supervisors in 2016, he said he could only look at the current rate of water use and that the decline rate at the time wasn’t enough to warrant designating the area as an irrigation non-expansion area.

In their new request, the county supervisors urged the department’s officials to reconsider this stance and “consider in the ‘current rates of withdrawal’ the lands currently owned by the new farms just arrived in Mohave County after 2010.”

Shauna Evans, a spokesperson for ADWR, said on Friday that the department hadn’t yet received Mohave County’s request and could not comment on it.

Lawmakers mull changes in state law

In 2017, the ADWR proposed new legislation that would have given the agency the ability to project water availability decades into the future when making decisions on limiting irrigation. But at that time, the department couldn’t get any legislators to take up the bills.

This year, legislators have introduced several proposals to reform the state’s groundwater rules. Both Republicans and Democrats are backing measures in the Legislature that would enable Arizona to start measuring how much groundwater is pumped in unregulated rural areas where aquifers have been declining.

Special Report: Arizona’s Next Water Crisis

Lawmakers are also set to consider a bill that would give state regulators the ability to consider projected future water use in deciding whether to create a new irrigation non-expansion area. That measure was introduced by Rep. Kirsten Engel, D-Tucson, and cosponsored by Republican Rep. Regina Cobb and Sen. Lisa Otondo, D-Yuma.

Cobb, who represents the Kingman area, said she plans to introduce a separate bill that would include other changes and would enable the director of ADWR to consider “credible evidence that indicates likely future changes to rates of withdrawal.”

Cobb is also preparing to introduce a bill that would enable county supervisors to create a new “rural management area,” in which an advisory council appointed by the governor would be charged with setting local management goals and laying out measures to achieve them. She said she views the proposal as a continuation of what the 1980 groundwater law was intended to do.

In the meantime, Cobb said she supports the county’s request to form a new INA.

“I’m hoping that it does some good this time around,” she said. But she also said she doesn’t think forming an INA would be enough, and that’s why she wants to lay out a new avenue for establishing managed areas in Mohave and other parts of the state.

“We have to look at groundwater in the rural areas,” Cobb said. “We have to.”

‘We’re going to end up with nothing’

The latest Mohave groundwater study gives validity to these concerns by showing that the area’s water levels could drop to 1,200 feet underground in less than a hundred years, Cobb said.

“We haven’t stopped the farms from putting in more wells or from them taking on more water,” Cobb said. “So, I think we’re in dire straits. If we don’t stop it, we’re going to end up with nothing in those areas.”

Watson said he and other supervisors also plan to expand the county’s efforts to increase natural recharge into the aquifers by building more retention basins to capture stormwater in key areas, enabling that water to seep down into the ground.   

“If we can get a great deal of recharge, we’ll never correct the problem, but we can extend the life of the aquifers,” Watson said. “We’re doing everything that we can to make sure that those aquifers can generate the water that is going to be required in the next century.”

Watson said he sees some flaws in the latest groundwater study and that its estimates of water use appear larger than what the area’s farms are actually using.

In the early 2010s, farms were expanding and planting fields of alfalfa, which consumes large amounts of water. But Watson pointed out that the alfalfa operations have largely ceased in the area. Some growers have turned to other less water-intensive crops such as potatoes and garlic, he said. Other fields that used to be green with alfalfa now sit dry with their center-pivot systems standing among weeds.

One growing farm is owned by Peacock Nut Co., a consortium that has planted pistachio trees on more than 850 acres and plans to expand to a maximum of 4,500 acres. Peacock Nut Co. has touted its water-saving technology, including drip irrigation and moisture sensors throughout the property.

“We’re getting great cooperation from the farms,” Watson said.

He said the area’s farm managers understand the importance of conserving and have made significant efforts.

“They’ve made multimillion-dollar investments and they don’t want to be here for a short term either,” Watson said. “We’re all trying to work together on this.”

Have a tip to share? Reach reporter Ian James at [email protected] or 602-444-8246. Follow him on Twitter: @ByIanJames

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Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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