PHOENIX (CN) - As the Arizona Department of Water Resources works to regulate groundwater pumping in western Arizona, a megafarm responsible for more than 80% of all pumping in a 912-square-mile groundwater basin seeks to stay a public nuisance lawsuit in which it's accused of excessive pumping.
In a state courthouse Wednesday, Fondomonte Arizona LLC argued the ongoing process to designate the Ranegras Plain Basin as an active management area would achieve the same groundwater regulation goals as the lawsuit Attorney General Kris Mayes filed against it in 2024. Rather than move forward with the litigation, Riley Snow of Rose Law Group suggested the court allow the two-year process to play out and address any remaining concerns later.
"We can essentially avoid duplication of effort and allow the agency to do what the legislature intended it to do, which is step in and regulate groundwater," Snow told Maricopa County Judge Scott Minder.
In response to years of land subsidence and fissures enabled by unregulated pumping in most rural regions of Arizona, the Arizona Department of Water Resources declared the Ranegras Plain Basin, situated in La Paz and Yuma counties, the state's eighth active management area. In an active management area, new pumping is largely prohibited, and grandfathered irrigation rights are closely monitored with the goal of reducing overall pumping by 50% in 50 years.
To decide how groundwater pumping should be regulated going forward, the water department will need to study hydrologic modeling, aquifer dynamics, cumulative impacts and water budget modeling, relying on expert opinions to decide what amount of pumping is "reasonable." Snow said those decisions would reflect the exact same expert opinions the judge would have to rely on to declare Fondomonte's pumping "excessive."
"This process will provide a lot of very valuable data that I think both sides would like to have," Snow said.
If the case were to proceed now, Snow said the parties could end up caught between competing court rulings and agency findings relying on different expert opinions or analyses.
The state says waiting two years will leave the parties in the same position they're in now because the active management area designation wouldn't be tailored specifically to Fondomonte's excessive use.
"Fondomonte is single-handedly pimping more water from the Ranegras Plain Basin than all the other users combined," state attorney Clinten Garrett told Minder.
But without a court order declaring Fondomonte's current level of pumping to be excessive and a public nuisance, the megafarm would be eligible to claim grandfathered irrigation rights and continue pumping at the rate it has been.
"We'll have no insight to whether the usage was legal, so ADWR wouldn't be able to apply water use reductions," Garrett said. "Any teeth to limit Fondomonte's usage would depend on the rejection of Fondomonte's irrigation grandfathered rights, and that would depend on whether Fondomonte's usage is legal."
Instead, Garrett said waiting two years to complete the process would get the parties nowhere.
"The plan will predictably not be aimed at Fondomonte, then we will pick this back up," he said.
Snow added that a court declaration that Fondomonte is a public nuisance would help the water department make its conservation decisions. Without that, a department finding reasonableness doesn't carry the same legal weight as a judge finding whether the usage is excessive. The department has taken no steps toward determining whether Fondomonte's use is legal, he said.
In the opposite corner of the state, Arizonans in Cochise County are facing nearly identical issues with dry wells and subsiding land. Mayes celebrated Hobbs' recent move to create an active management area in Cochise County's Willcox Basin, but floated the idea of suing Riverview Dairy, which is similarly blamed for the overpumping of groundwater there, as Fondomonte is in La Paz County.
Source: Courthouse News Service
