This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced that he will be working with the state Legislature to provide $1 billion towards securing Arizona’s water future for the next 100 years. The focus of this effort is a new desalination plant to be built in Mexico. However, one key advisor to the Republican governor has said that there is no clear plan for when this plant might become a reality. In fact, funding for the project was not even included in Ducey’s final state of the state address.
Katie Ratlief, one of Ducey’s senior advisors, said, “We’re looking at an investment in a structure that could leverage, in the long-term, big augmentation projects like a desal plant. There are shorter, quicker wins. And so really, the vision is diversifying the state’s water portfolio by a massive investment … big, long-term projects and smaller but significant short-term projects.”
Governor focuses on desalinization plants in talks with House Speaker and Senate President about water package that could be a legacy-maker. Governor touted the technology as a game-changer for Arizona’s major water woes, but it is just one part of the solution.
200,000 acre-feet of water per year would not be enough to cover the cuts in Colorado River deliveries that have already been put into force because of a long-term drought. A state investment of $1 billion would only cover about 20% of the cost of building a new desalinization plant on the Sea of Cortez. The state estimates that the costs for this type of water would be above $2,000 per acre-foot, compared to the $155 per acre-foot charged for municipal and most farm users by the state’s largest water delivery agency, Central Arizona Project.
Arizona is already taking a 512,000 acre-foot cut in yearly Colorado River deliveries due to drought, and another 223,000 acre-feet are expected in voluntary cuts. Desalination will provide a small but new secure reserve to prop up an overtaxed water system – if the funding pool legislators envision can be leveraged to come up with the needed $5 billion to finance it.
Davis said that the goal is to get to a point where they can look to the future and go beyond just a gap of 100,000 acre-feet or 400,000 acre-feet. This will set them up for long-term augmentation projects. However, this isn’t exactly what the governor said in one of his big policy announcements on Monday.
Governor Doug Ducey announced that he and the Speaker of the House have been working on a proposal to invest $1 billion in desalination technology. This would make Arizona a water superpower and solve its water crisis.
