2018-10-06 Arizona water law destroys rivers
Description
Arizona water laws fundamentally threaten the upper Verde River. There are no existing legal restrictions on groundwater pumping in the Big Chino aquifer, which supplies over 80 percent of the base flow of the upper Verde River.
Current law permits groundwater pumping to threaten Paulden domestic wells and the base flow of the Verde in four ways: expanded agricultural irrigation, groundwater exports such as Prescott’s Big Chino Water Ranch pipeline project, increasing population, and the proposed Big Chino Valley Pumped Storage Project.
To learn more, view a pdf of CWAG's monthly column in the Daily Courier, published October 6, 2018.