McCann: Completing general stream adjudications a necessary step

Tom McCann

This comment is in response to Grady Gammage's Oct. 1 post:

Here is a framework for looking at the subject that came to me during the first meeting.  I don't know if others will find it useful or not.

If the question is adequacy of water supply (quantity, quality, reliability, etc.), then the answer will necessarily vary from one community/water provider to the next. Arguably, every Arizona community/provider falls into one of three broad categories:

(1)    Areas that have adequate water supplies to meet their needs today and into the reasonably foreseeable future.
(2)    Areas that have adequate water supplies to meet current needs, but not to satisfy projected growth.
(3)    Areas that do not have adequate water supplies to meet current needs, let alone future growth.

(Could there even be a fourth category: areas that have more water than they need for the foreseeable future? If so, it is unlikely that anyone would admit to being in that situation.)

A first step would be to determine which category each community/provider falls into. Much of that work has already been done by ADWR (Strategic Vision, AZ Water Atlas) and the WRDC.

The challenge then is to find a solution to the water supply needs for each community/provider without creating new problems or exacerbating existing problems for other communities/providers—i.e., to avoid picking winners or creating losers.

Potential solutions can include augmentation, conservation, watershed management, transfers (as long as the transfer does not create a problem on the other end), etc. The solution toolkit is generally well known, but not all solutions are applicable or economically feasible for all areas—i.e., it's not one-size-fits-all; individual solution sets will need to be identified for each area.  Virtually all solutions will require substantial funding.

To me, completing the general stream adjudications is not a "solution" per se, but is a necessary step in determining which of the categories above a community/provider falls into.

Help frame the conversation about water

Grady Gammage Jr.

Last week’s discussion was great, and we’d like to thank everyone for such terrific participation.  Obviously, this is difficult stuff.  Our goal at MI has just been to try and find a way to identify the major water issues facing Arizona, and then give those issues some sense of priority.  Figuring out the order in which we should face challenges is, however, not simple.  As we learned last week, it isn’t even easy to decide what an “issue” is, and how to separate issues from one another.

Several people in the meeting had framework ideas that might help all of us think about the structure of our conversation.  We talked about the need to separate “issues to be resolved” from “potential solutions to be explored.”  Steve Seleznow, for example, offered the suggestion that we think about separating our conversation into:  Guiding principles; Adjacent (to guiding) goals; aspirational ideas; out of bounds stuff.  Tom McCann had a different, and potentially useful framework (which I now don’t remember:  TOM—write up your concept for everyone!).

We’ll push out a summary of the meeting, and as we discussed, we’ll try to get everyone to weigh in digitally on potential prioritization of issues so that we can discuss it in the next meeting.  But we’d like all of you to suggest other ways in which we might seek to give some structure to our conversation.  So if you have ideas on how to bring order out of chaos, please submit your framework for everyone to think about.