There’s a saying in politics that a budget is reflective of a body’s values.
The same goes, apparently, for Tucson’s “large water” ordinance that regulates how much of Tucson’s water large industrial projects like data centers can use.
“The large water user ordinance is really about data centers. I mean we know that, right?” Tucsonan Ivy Schwartz told the Tucson City Council Tuesday evening as it debated beefing up the city’s ordinance. “And this discussion is actually about values — values that we hold dear in this community.”
Whether the large water ordinance that the city adopted last year — and is continuing to workshop this year — carries out those values is a point of argument.
That argument wasn’t resolved on Tuesday, when the council narrowly voted to lower the ordinance's water-use threshold by about 15% — a slightly more ambitious version of the rules born in the fallout of the Project Blue fiasco.
Tucsonans packed City Hall last year to oppose the Project Blue data center.
But the reductions the council approved left conservation groups and other advocates fearful that the city isn’t doing enough to protect its water amid historic megadrought and looming cuts to Arizona’s supply of Colorado River water.
Nick Maya, program manager with the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, told the council that the revisions improve transparency and enforcement.
“But they would still allow facilities to use substantial amounts of water without being reviewed as a large user,” he said. “We believe the city should adopt a more precautionary approach.”
Regulating who?
Last year, the Tucson City Council adopted a quick-and-dirty ordinance to regulate large users of municipal water.
Looming in the background was Project Blue, the controversial data center project that was only just emerging from the shadows of nondisclosure agreements and unelected city staff machinations.
The ordinance was explicitly an emergency measure. Members of the public were peeved about Project Blue and demanded action, especially tighter regulations on water use.
So, the council passed the measure without a public hearing, and the city pledged that it would solicit feedback from stakeholders over the next year to develop a more comprehensive law.
It’s now been a year.
Not one developer has proposed a project that would exceed the water use limits in the ordinance.
To put it one way, “that’s great because no big data center has dared try to build in Tucson, and they better not,” as Council Member Kevin Dahl told his colleagues Tuesday.
To put it another way, the council’s emergency measure set such high limits on water use as to not be much of a regulation at all.
“If you look in the past year, there hasn’t been one new application,” Catlow Shipek, a founder and senior program director with the Tucson-based Watershed Management Group (WMG), told us. “And you look at the existing users at that threshold … my understanding is it’s largely golf courses, maybe a prison.”
Who is the public, anyway?
And the ad hoc stakeholder committee that has been meeting over the last year? Its members — which included both environmental groups like WMG as well as industry and business — found themselves at natural loggerheads over all sorts of issues, from where the limit should be to what should happen for those who exceed it.
So when Tucson Water, the utility effectively tasked with implementing the ordinance, introduce its revisions, it didn’t include most of the restrictions the committee discussed.
Watershed Management Group’s Catlow Shipek addressing the Tucson City Council on Tuesday.
Shipek said he felt that a majority of the members had agreed on the need for a system of tighter, tiered limits that prioritized the use of reclaimed water. But Shipek said that because the committee didn’t reach total consensus, Tucson Water rejected those ideas.
Shipek also took issue with the nature of the stakeholder group — an ad hoc, invite-only committee that largely excluded general members of the public.
“They were like, ‘We’re going to have a robust public process, don’t worry,’” he told us. “And all you get is this key select stakeholder group that you could argue may or may not represent the community. And then beyond that, they last-minute opened up today’s meeting as a public forum as their attempt for public process.”
So what’s in the ordinance?
Under the original ordinance, new developments planning to use more than 10,000 centum cubic feet a month had to submit a conservation plan showing how they'd cut water use and waste or switch to reclaimed water.
(A quick note on measurements: The city’s limit measures water in centum cubic feet, or CCF. The original limit, 10,000 CCF, works out to over 7 million gallons. For our hydro nerds: 7 million gallons is about 21.5 acre-feet.)
Violation of the ordinance comes with relatively minor — by the standards of a massive data center development, at least — civil fines, which would be assessed based on how much water is used beyond the limit and how often they push past that limit.
Shipek and other environmentalists wanted the city to be bolder.
They wanted Tucson to shut off water to entities that fall out of compliance with the ordinance, rather than just fine them, and to bring that 10,000 CCF threshold down to just 2,500 CCF.
They also offered language to create a recharge program that would require users who used certain types of water to recharge it into the aquifer or bring new sources of water online.
The mechanics of WMG’s proposed offset program. (Courtesy: WMG)
“We must ask new large water users to also be desert dwellers,” Shipek told the council. “This includes how to care and respect all waters, give back more than one takes, and be aligned with and supporting our community values and stewardship of our water, our rivers and our watershed.”
But, while the council was willing to lower the limits, a majority worried about the economic impact of a hard, 2,500 CCF line.
Would that, council members wondered, include users like hospitals and schools?
Not everyone who uses large volumes of water generates as much ire as data centers.
Tucson’s poverty rate is almost double the state average, and people are looking for jobs, Mayor Regina Romero said.
“I want to make sure that we are not tying our own hands when it comes to creating long-term high-wage jobs in our city,” she said.
And the city must think critically about what kind of industries it welcomes or rejects.
The council’s rejection of Project Blue was a big victory for environmental advocates in the city. But it didn’t kill the data center — rather, Project Blue went around the city entirely — building in unincorporated Pima County with supervisors’ blessing and getting state approval to pump groundwater.
The city’s vote also meant that Tucson didn’t benefit from any of the infrastructural investment that Project Blue developers were promising in response to public outcry.
“We also have to think about, what is it that we want to say yes to?” Romero said. “We said no to data centers. We have been very good as a mayor and council to say no to mines and to other extractive industry in our community. But we need to be able to find industries that we say yes to.”
Dahl recommended a 5,000 CCF-a-month limit. That amendment was substituted by one from Council woman Nikki Lee that brought the limit to 8,500 CCF a month (or about 6.4 million gallons) — still leagues away from the 2,500 CCF limit that Shipek and others asked for.
The council approved that 8,500 CCF limit on a 4-3 vote. Other changes included language preventing large users from skirting the ordinance by counting multiple buildings on the same campus as separate uses. Applications for uses above that 8,500 threshold would require special council approval.
Lee, Romero, Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz and Council Member Selina Barajas voted for the amended measure, while Council Members Miranda Schubert, Dahl and Paul Cunningham voted against it.
The council also voted to return in a few months to consider what specific conservation measures it would put in place for water users who pass the threshold. The council will then vote on possible secondary limits for large users who consume under 8,500 CCF of water a month.
Schubert, one of the council members who voted against the amended ordinance, said she understands the mayor’s concerns about the economic health of the city. But she said the businesses the city should be attracting are the ones that use water responsibly.
“The businesses I want to see here are ones that are willing to make a conservation plan, stand behind it and aren’t afraid to show it to Tucson residents,” Schubert said during the meeting. “All this ordinance is asking is for accountability and a transparent plan for conservation.”
Shipek said he thinks the 8,500 CCF limit is “a positive step.”
“We had a really big ask of the council,” he said Thursday. “I think we’re playing the long game. How do we shift our community to have a hyperlocal, water-sustainable future? I know change happens incrementally.”