Romeo Junior R. Cristal

UNVR 195A-003

April 18, 2004

“Whiskey’s for Drinking, Water’s for Fighting”

Water is for fighting? Mr. Brad Despain who is the Director of the Town of Marana Water Utility said that “People will fight for water more than anything else, because it is so essential to life.” Mr. Despain has been part of the Water Utility of the Town of Marana since 1977 and he is trying to solve many of the water issues occurring in the area. One of the issues occurring in the Town of Marana is the utilization of water. Marana’s water consumption has been dramatically increasing due to urbanization development. It has already increased by seven hundred percent last year and may even double this year due to the increasing population according to Mr. Despain.

Marana currently encompasses seventy-five square miles and is about to use up ten thousand acres of farm land to build houses and subdivisions. As the population grows the water volume consumption increases. The Town of Marana is one of the fastest growing towns in the State of Arizona and in the whole country. Marana uses nine hundred acre feet of water a year and is going to need twenty thousand acre-feet of water either from effluent, a waste water discharged into the Santa Cruz River, or from the Central Arizona Project (CAP) water to supply their needs. One Municipality cannot serve water within another town's boundaries without an agreement between the two Municipalities.

To ensure the water supply the Town of Marana joined the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGWRD) in 1997 and in this manner attained a designation of assured water supply that they have proven up to have a hundred year water adequacy. The primary source of water of the Town of Marana comes from groundwater wells. The water which is flowing in the Santa Cruz River at Ina Road totals about seventy thousand acre-feet annually. Marana owns a small amount of it at this time and the City of Tucson and the Secretary of Interior owns the rights to most of the water except twenty-nine thousand acre-feet, which was awarded to the Tohono O’odham Nation by the United States Department of the Interior. The Law states that if the effluent is not put to beneficial use while on your property it can be appropriated by others down stream.

The Town of Marana has access to a limited amount of CAP water and that amount is forty-seven acre-feet per year. The town needs more and is purchasing water directly or leasing from others who have sub contract rights to the CAP water. Using CAP water may be more popular with the citizens of the Town of Marana than treating effluent to meet drinking water standards, because it is cleaner and it is psychologically easier to accept as drinking water.

Another benefactor for the Town of Marana is the managed recharge. Managed recharge is the ability to obtain fifty percent credits for water in the river that percolates into the ground and to the aquifer, underground bed or layer yielding ground water for wells, springs, etc. Water that does so recharges the water in the aquifer and if a utility can get credit for this recharge then it can receive credits from the Arizona Department of Water resources that it can withdraw an equal amount of water from the aquifer. One of the strange parts of this law is that water can be taken out anywhere within the Active Management Area even in areas where the water withdrawn is not from the same aquifer to where the water is added via recharge.

Another oddity in the law is that a utility can get credit for only half of the water that recharges within the river channel. However, if they can take it out of the channel by any means and take it to a site away from the river and recharge it there, they can get credit for one hundred percent of the water recharged (Constructed Recharge).

The City of Tucson has a managed recharge project between the sewage treatment plants north to Ina Road. Also, a group of entities including the Town of Marana participate in a managed recharge project from Ina Road north to Trico Road according to Mr. Despain. He also stated that the Town of Marana is making plans to recharge effluent from the Santa Cruz River outside the channel so that they can get credit for one hundred percent of the recharged water.

He pointed out that the banks of the Santa Cruz have been stabilized through the area where most Marana residents live to protect them from flooding. He said that this is expensive about two million dollars per mile for one side of the river bank.