Gould, who represents the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, said the homebuilders support water conservation, and, before filing this lawsuit, met “for months” with ADWR officials to try to work out a compromise for the program.
“They support the mission of ADWR, but only when it’s consistent with the law,” Gould said. “If ADWR thinks that its statutory authority needs to be changed, they need to go to the Legislature and address it.”
At the heart of the lawsuit is the 1980 Groundwater Code.
It created “active management areas” where groundwater supply is a concern. That, in turn, led to the requirement that developers show they have a 100-year supply.
Most developers can obtain that simply by having a contract with a municipal or private water company that has its own certificate of an assured water supply. But that doesn’t work in areas where that is not an option, meaning developers have had to provide their own proof.
In 2023, ADWR released a study, based on its computer modeling, showing that the broader Phoenix area lacks enough groundwater to meet all demands expected to occur over the next 100 years.
That resulted in a moratorium on new state certificates for new subdivisions in areas where developers depended on them to be able to build. It didn’t affect other parts of the Phoenix area where cities and private water companies had already been formally designated by ADWR as having an assured supply.
That ruling shut down development in large swaths of Maricopa County that had been expected to see hundreds of thousands of new homes built over the coming decades. The resulting protests from developers led the state agency, under pressure from the governor, to come up with rules for an “alternative designation of a 100-year water supply.” It allows affected cities and private water companies to get designations of an assured water supply.