Officials with the City of Phoenix Water Services Department met Wednesday morning with a sustainability subcommittee to discuss the grave situation facing the Colorado River and the city’s lack of infrastructure to tap into water-storing aquifers.
“Phoenix has been planning for shortage for thirty years,” Kathryn Sorensen, the city’s Water Services director, said while addressing the Water, Wastewater, Infrastructure and Sustainability subcommittee. The city “has enough water to withstand even worst-case situations on the Colorado River.”
For decades, Phoenix has been diverting some of the water it receives from the Colorado River and banking it in reservoirs for future use. This, coupled with the vast aquifer under the city, ensures there will be enough water to survive shortages. However, when the city decided forty years ago to rely on a renewable surface water supply system and save groundwater, many wells were abandoned. Phoenix’s ability to physically access banked groundwater grew extremely limited.
“What we lack at this moment in time is the infrastructure to get that water, those alternative supplies, where they need to go,” Sorenson said. “That is the basis of our plans moving forward.”
Officials described the situation at the Colorado River in dire terms. Phoenix is in its 18th year of drought and too many entities have rights to the water in the Colorado River. The water levels at Lake Mead, which feeds the Colorado River, are dropping dangerously low.
“Our very best estimates are now saying that (a shortage) is not only possible and plausible, but likely,” Dave White, Director of the Decision Center for a Desert City, a sustainability research unit at Arizona State University, said.
He said the city must now plan for extremes that fall below the category of shortage and into uncharted territory, what he called a “failure or collapse of the Colorado River system.” He said this is increasingly becoming a possibility. During this worst-case scenario, it would only take four years for Lake Mead to reach “dead pool,” meaning that no water at all would come out of the dam.
However, water usage within the city has made progress. Phoenix now serves 400,000 more people than it did 20 years ago, while using almost the same amount of water. The city has been able to separate population growth from water usage, Sorensen said. But because the city currently relies on surface water availability to meet demands, shortages will be inevitable if infrastructure to tap into the aquifers is not implemented.
Another challenge Phoenix faces is the aging pipe infrastructure in place. There is still a vast system of original metal pipes in place from the first decades of the 20th century, and many of these pipes are in better shape than plastic pipes placed in the 1980s.
The financial plan put forth at the meeting calls for increasing the Water Service Department’s budget to $1.5 billion, about $800 million more than the last budget in 2015. Of that $1.5 billion, $500 million will go toward developing new infrastructure to access water supplies, $525 million for repairing and replacing aging pipelines, and $185 million for the rehabilitation of surface water treatment plants.
The Water Services Department also recommended a 6 percent rate hike in February 2019, followed by another 6 percent increase in February 2020, according to Chief Financial Officer Denise Olson. This will help to pay for the demands of the water system and ensure the department will not have to drastically shrink its infrastructure goals. An average single-family household may expect an increase of $2.35 per month, which would not apply for low-income families, Sorensen said. The City Council will make a final vote on these measures in December 2018.
Even with complete funding, these improvements will take years to implement.
“If we don’t do this now, we won’t have time to do it later,” Sorensen warned.
Contact the reporter at bsimons2@asu.edu.
