“We wanted to make sure Phoenix and Tucson had an opportunity to show some leadership, to set up a basic safety net,” Wilson said. “We wanted to have a little bit of runway to solve those problems; in case shortages hit much sooner and harder than people were expecting it.”
The new program will have three elements:
• A short-term emergency program to provide cities with the small amounts of water that they need immediately. In Tucson, Avery said he envisions that under this program, cities could provide other cities anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 acre-feet of water for limited periods.
• A longer-term program to provide additional water supplies beyond short-term emergency needs to communities facing CAP cuts. But the water-sharing program wouldn’t be leasing the supplies to other entities or making long-term transfers of CAP water rights, Avery said.
• An experimental program to encourage cities and other water-using entities to come up with and share innovative ideas for producing and using water supplies.
“These are experiments, not long-term commitments,” Wilson told the Phoenix City Council in describing this program at a public meeting in late April.
Avery said, “We haven’t got it fully figured out yet. Obviously, we will try to put together a pool of shared water resources, and a pot of money, of federal resources, to mitigate effects of shortages.”
Three outside water experts, one in Tucson and two in Phoenix, praised the water-sharing idea the two cities are working on.
“When you think about all the moves Tucson Water can make, such as do more conservation or do a new water source, it’s one of those tools we can use, but it’s more in the policy partnership space,” said Andrea Gerlak, director of the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for studies in Public Policy. “It’s about making friends with each other, and having arrangements or deals to move water or share water.”