Colorado River water allocation (Phoenix, Scottsdale: storage, associations, building)

[OUgrad09]

Originally Posted by KurtAZ

That's funny...AZ is historically a retirement haven. That includes numerous golf courses all over the state. Per a 2020 study, Golf Courses use 2% of the overall water in the state and provide a direct economic impact of over $4.2B in wages, tourism and tax revenue. Golf courses for the most part use non-potable water and have been effectively cutting down their water usage through water conservation efforts.

You may not like golf, I know I don't care about it, but it is not the big bad boogie man that people make it out to be. To put that into perspective...Ag contributes about $23.3B/yr for 70% of usage...or $332M per percentage point. Golf contributes $2.1B per percentage point. Thinking Golf is a much better ROI on water usage even though it is a leisure activity vs actively producing crops.

I believe many golf courses also use reclaimed water.

[Greenvalleyfan]

Originally Posted by phetaroi

Arizona is 31st in the country regarding agriculture. I would not describe that as a "top producer".

Arizona is the #4 vegetable producer according to the information I've found

[thedirtman]

Originally Posted by Greenvalleyfan

Arizona is the #4 vegetable producer according to the information I've found

I see that too. Not only does Arizona provide a great deal of vegetables and melons, but timing is critical too. Winter lettuce and other greens come from Yuma Valley, Imperial Valley, and also south of the border too. Mexico supplies the US with green onions and crops that do well in clay soils.

When water was plentiful for agriculture Arizona was a powerhouse in cotton. Arizona soils were producing the greatest yield per acre of cotton in the world. It's the sunshine that makes Arizona wonderful for crops, but as long as the demand for water is so competitive the overall production will be limited. Desalinization in residential LA would bring the competitive demand down. Water lost to the ground in LA cannot be recovered, whereas much of Arizona and Nevada can recover much of their ground water.

[Ponderosa]

Originally Posted by thedirtman

I see that too. Not only does Arizona provide a great deal of vegetables and melons, but timing is critical too. Winter lettuce and other greens come from Yuma Valley, Imperial Valley, and also south of the border too. Mexico supplies the US with green onions and crops that do well in clay soils.

When water was plentiful for agriculture Arizona was a powerhouse in cotton. Arizona soils were producing the greatest yield per acre of cotton in the world. It's the sunshine that makes Arizona wonderful for crops, but as long as the demand for water is so competitive the overall production will be limited. Desalinization in residential LA would bring the competitive demand down. Water lost to the ground in LA cannot be recovered, whereas much of Arizona and Nevada can recover much of their ground water.

It is not water but conversion of farmland to residential that took out much of Arizona's cotton production. That is also the reason that water usage in the Phoenix metro area is actually less than it was a few decades ago in spite of adding hundreds of thousands of homes and millions of new residents.

[thedirtman]

Originally Posted by Ponderosa

It is not water but conversion of farmland to residential that took out much of Arizona's cotton production. That is also the reason that water usage in the Phoenix metro area is actually less than it was a few decades ago in spite of adding hundreds of thousands of homes and millions of new residents.

I remember working with some farming cotton. Their greatest source of income was from sales of their water to residential. Their second greatest source of income was from sales of their land to residential. Their third greatest source of income was from cotton subsidies. They were producing too much cotton and the quality was diminishing.

[NJ Brazen_3133]

A wall street firm called Greenstone bought water rights for the Colorado River in the town of Cibola AZ, and planned to divert it to a development in the PHX area. This happened a few years ago.

How do you even buy "water rights"? Actually at this point how are "water rights" even up for sale? This whole area is a desert. Water should be treated like it is the most precious commodity, and govt must control.

And how they divert it? Are they going to build a pipeline? Is there not private property they have to buy up first? There must be lots of red tape.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/b...er-rights.html

[FlurryCat]

Water is now a commodity for trading and speculation:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...water-scarcity

https://www.commondreams.org/wall-st...do-river-water

Wall Street investment firms "have identified the drought as an opportunity to make money," Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, toldCBS News on Tuesday. "I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They're looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."
Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM), makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in the United States as "the biggest emerging market on Earth" and "a trillion-dollar market opportunity." The company's website declares that "scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful oil defined the last."

Regarding WAM and other hedge funds looking to profit from looming water shortages, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) unveiled legislation last March that would prevent Wall Street from speculating on life-sustaining water resources.
The Future of Water Act, as the congressional Democrats' bicameral legislation is titled, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to affirm that water is a human right to be managed for public benefit—not a commodity to be bought and sold by investment firms. The bill would also prohibit the trading of water rights on futures markets—a recently invented financial ploy widely condemned as "dystopian."

Just a hunch, but I don't think this bill has any chance of passing.

[JGMotorsport64]

Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133

A wall street firm called Greenstone bought water rights for the Colorado River in the town of Cibola AZ, and planned to divert it to a development in the PHX area. This happened a few years ago.

How do you even buy "water rights"? Actually at this point how are "water rights" even up for sale? This whole area is a desert. Water should be treated like it is the most precious commodity, and govt must control.

And how they divert it? Are they going to build a pipeline? Is there not private property they have to buy up first? There must be lots of red tape.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/b...er-rights.html

In Arizona, water rights to the Colorado river are divided between the water that gets sent to Central and Southern AZ via the CAP (mostly agricultural use) and the rights of those on the river. Those that have rights on the river itself have senior priority over CAP and most other rights holders. Those that get CAP water are junior to those on the river and California. There is a lot of water in the former category that does not get used while the latter is taking the brunt of water cuts.

To build a subdivision in many areas of the state the developers have to show a 100 year supply of water to the subdivision. This will start to become commonplace.

As far diverting it; think of it like a bank. Water is fungible. While you buy rights to X amount of water what you’re usually buying is the ability to use ground water while the water you buy gets used as ground water recharge

[Ponderosa]

Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133

A wall street firm called Greenstone bought water rights for the Colorado River in the town of Cibola AZ, and planned to divert it to a development in the PHX area. This happened a few years ago.

How do you even buy "water rights"? Actually at this point how are "water rights" even up for sale? This whole area is a desert. Water should be treated like it is the most precious commodity, and govt must control.

And how they divert it? Are they going to build a pipeline? Is there not private property they have to buy up first? There must be lots of red tape.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/b...er-rights.html

Water rights come from what is called the doctrine of prior appropriation. To make along story short whoever uses the water first has a right to continue to use it in perpetuity. They can use it for any "beneficial" use. It's also use or it lose it, so if someone does not take their water, it can be forfeited. It's been a bone of contention throughout the west and there have been numerous compacts and court decisions that now govern the Colorado River. Fighting over water rights has a long, long history in the west. A colleague of mine from my working days made a very good living as a water rights attorney.

[KurtAZ]

Originally Posted by Ponderosa

Water rights come from what is called the doctrine of prior appropriation. To make along story short whoever uses the water first has a right to continue to use it in perpetuity. They can use it for any "beneficial" use. It's also use or it lose it, so if someone does not take their water, it can be forfeited. It's been a bone of contention throughout the west and there have been numerous compacts and court decisions that now govern the Colorado River. Fighting over water rights has a long, long history in the west. A colleague of mine from my working days made a very good living as a water rights attorney.

This! It is also legal to sell your water rights in AZ. Basically...water rights are worth a LOT. In 2008, an acre-foot was $23.58. Obviously, from the below, that price has gone up substantially (take into account that this sale is a permanent transfer so it would be hard to calculate what the total acre-feet will end up as)

Greenstone, through the affiliated company GSC Farm LLC, in January secured approval from the Arizona Department of Water Resources to permanently sell its annual entitlement of 2,033 acre-feet of Colorado River water, enough to supply more than 6,000 single-family homes in Queen Creek, where local officials say they need the water to reduce reliance on groundwater and support plans for more growth. The sale price: about $21 million.