Updated January 16, 2023 at 10:00 am EST|Posted January 16, 2023 at 8:24 am EST
Horseback riding at Miller Ranch in the Rio Verde Foothills. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post) Comment on this story
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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The survival, or at least the basic sustenance, of hundreds in a desert community among the horse ranches and golf courses outside Phoenix now rests on a 54-year-old man with a plastic bucket of quarters.
John Hornewer took a quarter and put it in the slot. The lone water hose at a remote public service station sprang to life and splashed 73 gallons into the steel tank of Hornewer’s water truck. After two minutes, it stopped. Hornewer, one of two major suppliers responsible for supplying water to a community of more than 2,000 homes known as the Rio Verde Foothills, fished another quarter.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” Hornewer said.
Some who live here amid the cacti and creosote bushes see it as the first domino to fall as the Colorado River goes into crisis. On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets most of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their reservoirs run dry in the coming weeks, with a bitter political feud affecting possible solutions.
Officials fear a “doomsday scenario” for the drought-stricken Colorado River
The city’s decision, and the failure to find a reliable alternative, has forced water haulers like Hornewer to travel to distant cities to find any available gallons. About a quarter of the homes in the Rio Verde Foothills, a checkerboard of one-acre lots connected by dirt roads in an unincorporated part of Maricopa County, rely on piped water municipal transported by trucks. Since the cut, water prices have nearly tripled. The others have wells, although many of them have dried up because the water table has dropped hundreds of feet in some places after years of drought.
“This is a very hard slap in the face for everybody,” said Hornewer, who has been bringing water to his neighbors for more than two decades. “It is not sustainable. We’re not going to have a summer like this.”
Prolonged drought and shrinking reservoirs have already led to unprecedented restrictions on the use of the Colorado River, and the federal government is now pushing seven states to cut another 2 to 4 million acre-feet, up to 30 percent cent of the average annual flow of the river. The heavy rains and snow that hit California haven’t had much of an impact on the Colorado River Basin, and major reservoirs in Lake Powell and Lake Mead have dropped to dangerous levels.
That grim forecast led Scottsdale to warn the Rio Verde Foothills more than a year ago that its water supply would be cut off. City officials emphasized that their priority was their own residents and cast Rio Verde Foothills as a boomtown of irresponsible development, fueled by noisy water trucks that rumble the city’s streets. “The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community, especially given its unregulated and unfettered growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.
Scottsdale Mayor David Ortega wasn’t thrilled when his Rio Verde Foothills neighbors cried foul.
“There is no Santa Claus,” he said in a statement last month. “The mega-drought tells us everything: water is not a game of compassion.”
With growing urgency, residents of the Rio Verde Foothills have sought two main alternatives to finding a new water source, even as bitter disagreements over the best solution have divided the community and pitted neighbors against each other.
In recent years, some residents have tried to form their own water district that would allow the community to buy water from elsewhere in the state and import what they need, more than 100 acre-feet of water per year. Another group prefers to hire a private Canadian utility company, Epcor, to supply the community, as it does with neighboring areas. But political disputes have so far thwarted both approaches.
The water district’s plan, which supporters say would give them long-term access to a reliable water source, was rejected in August by Maricopa County supervisors. Area Supervisor Thomas Galvin said he was opposed to adding a new layer of government to a community that values its freedom, especially one run by neighbors with authority to condemn property to build infrastructure.
Galvin preferred Epcor, a utility that, if approved, would be regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission.
The water district “would be subject to the whims of five local laymen who serve on its board. Whereas Epcor can’t evaluate any of these people unless the corporate commission approves,” Galvin said in an interview. “To me, it was just a sensible plan.”
Scottsdale officials didn’t see it that way. To avoid a service interruption to the Rio Verde Foothills, Epcor needed Scottsdale to agree to treat the water it would provide, but the city has not agreed to do so.
Mayor Ortega’s office said he was not available for an interview.
This has left Rio Verde Foothills with no clear path to solving their water problem. Some homeowners have sued to challenge Maricopa County’s decision to block the water district. And a larger group of residents filed a lawsuit Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court seeking an injunction against Scottsdale to force the city to reopen its taps.
“What Scottsdale has done is inhumane. Dangerous. They’ve left us without fire protection. They’ve left us without water for families,” said Christy Jackman, a resident who helped lead an effort to raise thousands of dollars for pay lawyers to seek the injunction. “Mostly what we have now is palpable fear.”
Two days before the outage, Stephen Coniaris, a retired emergency room physician, had his 5,000-gallon underground storage tank. His solar-powered home overlooking the McDowell Mountains was already well equipped to survive the worst drought in a millennium. I had a low volume dishwasher; a toilet that used only 0.9 gallons per flush.
But this new dilemma has pushed Coniaris and his people woman, Donna Rice, into more extreme territory. They joined a gym in Scottsdale to shower. They take dirty clothes to friends’ houses or to a laundromat. Plastic buckets in the backyard catch the rare rainwater that falls from the roof spouts. This is included in 3.5 gallon plastic jugs located in the bathroom for flushing the toilet, although now they usually make other arrangements.
“We pee outside,” Coniaris said, eating his grilled chicken lunch on paper plates to avoid doing dishes.
These measures have brought the couple’s average water consumption down from 200 liters a day last year to 30 liters a day in the first week of January as they anxiously await a solution for their community. As the deadline approached last year, some residents sold their homes and others saw property values decline.
Rice said they weren’t planning to sell, but he couldn’t imagine much demand under any circumstances.
“It would be crazy to buy our house at this point,” she said.
But staying will be increasingly burdened as the Rio Verde foothills must rely on distant sources of transported water.
Cody Reim, who works for a company that installs metal roofs, typically pays $380 a month for the roughly 10,000 gallons a month he uses along with his wife and four young children. If her family continues to use water at the same rate, the new prices will put her next bill at $1,340 a month, she said. almost as much as your mortgage payment.
“This is a life-changing amount of money for me,” he said.
Reim has called or emailed all of his state and federal representatives, most of whom ignored his inquiries, he said, and visited the state legislature last month to try to speak with the former Arizona governor. On Tuesday, she attended a protest at city hall in Scottsdale, the city where her children go to school, where her family does most of its shopping, to call for water for her community.
“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let the taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.
“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there will be help.”
– Do you fill all this with water?
Helping, for now, is Hornewer and the other water carriers that serve the Rio Verde Foothills.
Until this year, the six trucks in his family business depended on the nearby Scottsdale service station. It took about 15 minutes, he said, to fill his 6,000-gallon tank, quickly entering a code into the automated system and receiving his stream of water.
On Saturday, he spent an hour driving 45 miles to Apache Junction, one of the few surrounding towns with an available gas station, a small cinder block house with a single hose. It now takes 85 quarts (and almost three hours) to fill.
“I will do what I have to do for my people,” he said. “But come on, this is getting stupid.”
As Hornewer waited, other people with trailer-loaded personal water tanks drove by, eyeing their commercial hauler impatiently. One of those riding behind him, a man in a cowboy hat and plaid shirt, finally got out of his truck and approached. He rapped his knuckles on Hornewer’s tank.
“Do you fill all this with water?” he asked. “Really?”
The tedious process has reduced the number of potential water loads Hornewer’s can make by 75 percent. Driving here in a truck that uses a gallon of gas every 3.5 miles has dramatically increased your costs. During the heat…