The first real crack has opened in the logjam that halted construction of nearly half a million Phoenix-area houses: The water company EPCOR won the right to build up to 60,000 new homes in parts of the already-booming cities of Buckeye and Surprise, Arizona, as well as in other areas of Maricopa County, perennially listed as one of the nation’s fastest-growing counties.
This marks the first time in over two years that the Arizona Department of Water Resources has lifted even a portion of a moratorium banning the construction of new subdivisions that rely on groundwater. The ADWR issued the moratorium in June 2023 after concluding that the Phoenix area’s long-depleted aquifer no longer had enough water to serve all the developments planned for the region for 100 years as required by the 1980 Groundwater Management Act. Reporting by High Country News found that thousands more houses were stopped by the moratorium than previously acknowledged.
Earlier this month, EPCOR acquired the right to move forward with housing through a newly created legal process that created an “alternative designation,” which allows new groundwater-using subdivisions to be built as long as they agree to bring in outside renewable water supplies. Once that water arrives, they have to shave their groundwater use by 25%. Other public and private water providers in the Phoenix area are expected to eventually follow EPCOR’s example and gain the new designation.
Developers and Republican legislators are still challenging the alternative designation process in the courts, but Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, hailed the new rules. “We are again demonstrating that Arizona can, and will, continue to grow our economy, while protecting our water,” she said.
Kathleen Ferris, a former ADWR director turned water researcher, also praised the new state regulatory scheme, telling Phoenix public radio station KJZZ that “it’s an incremental approach to weaning water providers away from groundwater onto renewable water supplies.”
An eastward aerial view of houses under construction in the Festival Ranch neighborhood in Buckeye, Arizona. The Central Arizona Project canal runs southwest and abuts undeveloped desert. Credit: Caitlin O’Hara / High Country News
But while Ferris said she believes the new state rules will force water providers to find more creative ways to supply future developments with water, she told KJZZ that the new rules will never be able to allow the construction of all the homes that were stopped by the moratorium. That’s because so many of them lie too far outside the boundaries of any of the existing service areas of water providers, including the city of Buckeye.
“We will as a state, I believe, at some point have to have a vision for our long-term future. And that vision may not include having everybody get to do what they want to do,” Ferris told KJZZ.
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