Water-Conscious Arizona Moves to Guard Its Wells

With toxic agricultural and industrial chemicals threatening its treasured desert water supply, the state of Arizona has adopted what may well be the nation’s toughest law to protect underground water.

The law, which places tight restrictions on interests that have long dominated Arizona, reflects a growing environmental consciousness in the state. It was a product of hard politics as well as the harsh realization that the state’s future depends on preserving its underground drinking water supplies.

Some wells already have been lost to chemical wastes. That is an ominous development in a state where 60% of the population depends on ground water, and where one city, Tucson, is described as the largest in the world wholly dependent on underground sources of drinking water.

The new law also marks a fundamental realization that the era of building ever more dams to increase water supplies is at an end.

“For years the emphasis was on development of more surface water supplies--the reclamation mind-set,” Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who will sign the bill into law this week, said in an interview. “Now, there aren’t any more surface water supplies. We must conserve our aquifers for drinking water. Our drinking water must come from our ground water supplies.”

Ticking off key provisions of the legislation, which will require that underground water sources be cleaned up and toxics kept away, the Democratic governor added: “You really have a straitjacket on anybody discharging anything into the ground water.”

“It’s not anti-business,” A. J. (Jack) Pfister, general manager of the Salt River Project, says of the new law, “but it is tough on business.”

“It’s really a landmark statute, stronger than other states,’ ” says Rep. David Bartlett (D-Tucson), who helped press for the regulations.

“It will be a national model of water-quality legislation,” says Rep. Larry Hawke, a Tucson Republican and an important participant in the negotiations that produced the law.

Many people here already equate the law’s significance with that of Arizona’s widely hailed 1980 Groundwater Management Code, which set a course of severe conservation to reduce ground water consumption to the levels at which aquifers are naturally recharged.

Premier Water Code

“The state has implemented a premier state water management code of no drawdown (of aquifers),” Chuck Anders, the state’s assistant director of environmental health services, says of the 1980 legislation. “It’s going to require considerable belt-tightening in water consumption, but it’s important that the water also meets the standards for drinking.

“It’s important those waters be clean.”

The 168-page statute presumes that all aquifers are drinking water sources and must meet purity standards. It requires industries coming into the state to use the best available technology to prevent contamination--regardless of cost. And it empowers the citizens to enforce compliance--a measure that, in the words of one advocate, makes Arizona residents “little attorneys general.”

Anders adds: “I know of a lot of states with ground water laws shooting at one problem or another, one region or another, one activity or another, but I’m not aware of any state that has all of (this law) applying to everybody. That’s very significant. It’s a very strong approach.”

Contamination Concern

Arizona’s law comes at a time of nationwide concern over contamination of ground water and of lawsuits claiming that chemically tainted ground water has caused cancer and other maladies.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 20% of American public water supplies that use ground water carry traces of man-made chemicals.

“Just about every state around has ground water contamination,” says David S. Baron, assistant director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest. “What makes it of concern here is that we don’t have that much water.”

46 Sources Closed Down

The state reported in March that drinking water from 210 wells in Arizona did not meet standards for human consumption because of pesticide, chemical or other contamination. Forty-six of those wells have been shut down, and water from the rest is being blended with purer water.

The state said that the potential contamination threats to ground water range from solvents that can cause cancer, discharged from high-technology industries near Phoenix, to nitrates from fertilizers, which can cause “blue baby disease,” to deadly cyanide, sulfates and metals from mines.

Despite such disclosures over recent years, the Republican-dominated Legislature had refused to crack down. So last summer, a coalition of environmental, public interest, professional, labor and civic groups began pressing an initiative drive for a strong state water-quality law.

Babbitt, who had called for such a law and has been a leader in nationwide efforts to protect ground water supplies, endorsed the initiative and said he would put the “full power and authority of my office” into the battle for passage.

Babbitt is not seeking reelection. State House Majority Leader Burton Barr, who is perhaps the most powerful official in the Legislature, has announced his candidacy to succeed Babbitt as governor--and has joined the effort to draft the water law.

Ducking ‘Dirty Water’ Image

“A year ago, Burton Barr was fighting any tough water quality legislation,” says Baron. “Now this year, he’s running for governor, and he doesn’t want to be painted as the dirty water candidate.”

Such is the political change that reflects the growing awareness of environmental issues in a state that is rapidly losing its agricultural and mining dominance. A recent poll found that “quality of life” ranked second in importance to Maricopa County (Phoenix) residents and first to Pima County (Tucson) residents.

“It would have been unthinkable five years ago--a governor would have been recalled for advocating this,” Babbitt said of tight restrictions the new law places on the use of pesticides and fertilizers. “The political power has been shifting to urban areas.”

“It’s a change that’s part of the fundamental transition of Arizona from a cow town to a sophisticated urban area,” says Pfister of the Salt River Project, a not-for-profit supplier of water and electricity to the metropolitan Phoenix area. Formed 80 years ago to irrigate cropland, the Salt River Project in 1984, for the first time, saw its urban water deliveries exceed its farm deliveries. By the year 2000, it expects to be supplying water exclusively for urban use.

“There’s been this mistaken assumption that agriculture is not interested in clean water,” Pfister says of the agribusiness that eventually came to support the ground water law. “The reality is, the fondest hope of every farmer is that his land gets (sold to developers and) urbanized. That’s not going to occur if water is not fit for human consumption.”

Helped to Draft Bill

Pfister was a member of a committee formed by Babbitt to write the ground water law. He had a difficult role: The Salt River Project has six dams and 248 deep water wells, some of which have been closed because of contamination.

Yet at the same time, the Salt River Project creates industrial pollution at the evaporation ponds of its power plants, and it uses chemical herbicides in irrigation canals.

In intense negotiations directly overseen by Babbitt--he sometimes attended two meetings a day--the committee of environmental and business interests forged the new law. Environmentalists conceded various points. The biggest one is allowing farmers to continue using fertilizer even if the most stringent use of it still results in nitrate contamination of ground water.

“Farmers are being told if they have to pollute to stay in business, it’s OK to pollute,” Baron of the public interest law group said of the compromise. “All other industries--if they can’t operate without violating the standards set for ground water, they’ve got to shut down.”

Battery of Regulations

The new law also:

--Establishes a state Superfund of up to $25 million at any one time to identify, study, design solutions for and clean up past sources of contamination.

--Requires industries to disclose which chemicals are being discharged from their facilities--a so-called “no-disclose, no-discharge” provision that industries had opposed in order, they said, to protect trade secrets.

--Establishes restrictions on the use of pesticides, including buffer zones near schools and subdivisions, and transfers authority over farm workers’ safety from the agribusiness-dominated Board of Pesticide Control to the state Industrial Commission.

--Presumes that all underground aquifers are for drinking water and thus cannot be degraded, and establishes a strong state environmental protection agency to enforce purity standards.

“That’s a concept that has been unacknowledged for generations of industrialists, mining companies, farmers and others who felt no compunction about dumping dangerous chemicals above water tables and into stream beds,” the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson editorialized.

“This desert state’s precious water supply may survive the onslaught of pollution after all.”