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Recently it was announced that Verde River water was being
emptied from Horseshoe Reservoir into Bartlett Reservoir to
prevent flooding the habitat of the federally endangered
Southwestern Willow Flycatchers nesting there. Some newspaper
writers recently claimed Arizonans would face a water crisis
as a result of the Endangered Species Act and the Horseshoe
releases.
It turned out no water was lost because the winter’s rains
were insufficient to flood the bird’s habitat in Horseshoe.
Besides, the reservoir is usually empty in the area by the
start of the flycatcher’s late May/June nesting season.
Even if it had been a very wet year, and the reservoir had
remained partially filled, the bird’s willow lined riparian
nesting habitat there represents an infinitesimal fraction of
Arizona’s 6.8 million acre-foot (MAF) annual water budget.
In dry years the Salt River Project (SRP) and valley cities
(Phoenix, not SRP, “owns” the upper end of Horseshoe) can
obtain CAP water or groundwater. There is such a surplus of
CAP water that homeowners’ property taxes here are being
raided so it can be pumped 1100 ft. uphill from the Colorado
River and sold at giveaway prices to Arizona agribusiness.
This enables Arizona to use its huge CAP entitlement. Even
now, in drought times, CAP surplus is being recharged into the
ground. Ironically, Frank Welsh, author of “How to Create a
Water Crisis” points out that groundwater levels are so high
in parts of Phoenix that skyscrapers’ basements are flooded.
Currently agribusiness uses 78% of Arizona’s water but
produces less than 2% of Arizona’s income. Most of
Arizona’s water is used to grow crops that are surplus,
glut-on-the-market crops or grown by natural rainfall
elsewhere. Water for feed grains and cotton (which are
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federally subsidized surplus crops) and alfalfa (the great
water glutton) are extravagantly squandered on some two-thirds
of that 78%.
Forty percent of Arizona’s annual water budget comes from
pumped groundwater. Agribusiness and certain cities like
Sierra Vista and Prescott extract huge, river-killing amounts
of groundwater under Arizona’s river aquifers. Barely
flowing fragments of Arizona’s rivers remain, including the
San Pedro, Gila, Salt, Verde, Bill Williams, and Santa Maria.
SRP takes their profits from selling electricity to
homeowners and valley municipal users to provide subsidized,
below-market priced water for growing primarily surplus and
water-wasting crops. The reason for this is that the
tax-exempt, federally subsidized SRP is operated and
controlled by agribusiness.
Welsh’s book points out that if you make any resource
artificially cheap, it discourages the market forces which
make efficient use of that resource. If gasoline was federally
subsidized and sold at 50 cents a gallon, it would defy
conservation, and increase pollution and commuting distances.
Water costs less to municipal, industrial and agricultural
users here in the arid Southwest than in rustbelt cities such
as Chicago and New York due to the myriad of federal water and
power subsidies here. We surround ourselves with a panoply of
artificial lakes, golf courses and Bermuda lawns using our
underpriced water.
Our state’s streams (including the Colorado
River and CAP) provide 3.6 MAF. This is enough to support at
least 15 million people and doesn’t count the 2.7 MAF of
groundwater being pumped here. With conservation we could cram
in even
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