By agreeing to purchase 500,000 acre feet of water from a group of landowners and farmers in Maricopa and La Paz counties for $30 million, Queen Creek has taken the following steps toward its goal of achieving water independence: I took a step forward.

The seller is a member of the Haakahala Valley Water Association in the area west of Phoenix.

“We have signed a contract to purchase 5,000 acre feet of Hulkuahala water for the next 100 years,” said Paul Gardner, the town’s utility director. “So the gross volume is he’s 500,000 acre-feet.”

On average, one acre-foot of water serves the needs of about 3.5 households per year.

Gardner said Queen Creek has been supplying groundwater for 100 years, and the purchase of water rights from Haak Ahara, like the recent $21 million purchase from GSC Farms in Cibola, will help protect the aquifer. It is said that it is useful.

“This is one of the next steps,” Gardner said.

For Queen Creek, water independence means having enough water from a variety of sources, and the town simply uses the underground aquifer as a water storage system rather than for daily use.

Getting water from Harquahala to Queen Creek is very easy, moving and moving through the canal system of the Central Arizona Project.

Aquifer farmland is on the south side of Interstate 10, about 60 miles west of Phoenix and north of the CAP Canal.

“The canal actually passes right next to Hulk Ahara,” said Gardner. “If you can imagine this canal north of the valley. There’s a series of wells that already exist.

“And all they’re going to do is have the well pumped into a big pipe and go about seven miles north to the canal. Then it gets hard tight and comes down to Queen Creek.”

There, it is stored in a series of large reservoirs that eventually seep into the ground and mix with the 100-year-old aquifer of Queen Creek.

Despite the race for water independence in Arizona and the measures communities are taking to achieve it, restrictions are in place to maintain law and order.

But it wasn’t always.

Arizona has a long history of people fighting over water, but now weathered ranchers and farmers are negotiating in courts and legislatures rather than taking matters into their own hands on the banks of the river. is a lobbyist in a suit.

As cities sprawled and continued to grow without limit, communities did what it took to prove they had 100 years of water supply before the state mandated development in 1980. .

“Cities are moving into rural Arizona, buying farmland, pointing to it and telling governments and people, ‘This is our 100 year supply of water, it’s over there, build it today. ‘It became an unacceptable political problem. It’s been going on since the late 1980s until it was resolved,” said former state legislator-turned-lobbyist Harquahala Valley Water Association. said Stan Barnes, representing

The problem was resolved in 1991 when Burns enacted a law prohibiting the transfer of rural groundwater to urban areas. Three large aquifers were the exception, most notably Harukahara.

“These three basins are the only basins where groundwater can be pumped and transported elsewhere,” says Gardner. “These reservoirs were set aside in the late 1980s and early 1990s to store water in the CAP when it was abundant. can do.”

These downstream locations include the Phoenix metropolitan area and Pinal and Pima counties.

“So the day has finally come when there is a demand for water by growth areas in Arizona like Queen Creek, and the economy needs water security to meet some of its security needs. It kind of makes sense for a growing town to use groundwater that is currently being used to grow alfalfa or possibly cotton in the Hulkuajara Valley, and use it where it is more advanced and more appropriately available. And it’s in the big city of Phoenix,” Barnes said.

Another loophole in the 1991 law states that Hulkuahala water must be used only for “local purposes.”

But it doesn’t define exactly what it means. It is unclear whether this law was intended to address the needs of urban sprawl, but it may have been to keep California at bay.

“I think the idea of ​​local use was to stop someone from moving that water out of state or doing anything with that water that had nothing to do with Arizona,” Barnes said. I got

“It was believed that the growing areas of Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal counties would one day need the water that exists in the Hulkahala Valley. It was intentional to be used for

For decades, critics have opposed the idea of ​​purchasing local groundwater and transporting it to thriving metropolitan areas.

Following Queen Creek’s recent purchase of water rights from GSC Farms in Cibola, Republican La Paz County Rep. Regina Cobb said: “I feel like the state has abandoned the river community.”

Cobb and others have been vocal in their opposition to urban and rural groundwater transfers, saying they are setting a bad precedent and transferring wealth to more populated areas.

Sandy Burr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon chapter, told Congress last year, “We should see more of conservation and living within our means, and basically in some areas. We should not allow large-scale groundwater pumping to drive development in another area,” said lawmakers addressing Arizona’s critical water problem.

City officials and other advocates of moving rural water to growing urban areas point to Arizona’s history as evidence that the idea is not new.

“Arizona has always moved water where there are people. They have never moved people where there is water,” Gardner said.

“The places people want to find are the places that have always moved water,” he said. “That’s why you have the Salt River Project. That’s why we have Lake Mead and Lake Powell. I moved it to another location.”

About 72% of Arizona’s water is currently used for agricultural purposes, according to the State Department of Natural Resources.

As people continue to migrate to Arizona and see rapid double-digit population growth in places such as Queen Creek, their water use shifts from water-intensive agricultural uses to requiring less water. and will switch to residential use.

Queen Creek has the option to purchase an additional 500,000 acre feet of water from the Harquahala Valley in the future, depending on how much the Arizona Department of Water Resources says the aquifer actually has. Estimates range from seven to eight million acre-feet that could be brokered over the next 100 years.

“That’s the first thing you have to decide. If you think about it, we’re buying half a million acre feet of water,” says Gardner. “From Hulk Ahara he could own a million acre feet of water. It depends on what the department says it can come back and remove.”

After the Department of Water Resources determines how much water the aquifer actually contains, infrastructure work must be done and government contracts signed.

However, a contract between Queen Creek and the Harquahala Valley Water Association has been signed, and subject to other paperwork, the first drop of water from this contract will likely reach Queen Creek in early 2024. .

Gardner said the town remains aggressive in diversifying its portfolio and will continue to look for other water sources while staying true to its 100-year-old groundwater supply.

Between Harquahala and GSC Farm water purchases, Queen Creek has pledged more than $51 million in the past two weeks alone.