Sarah Lapidus
Arizona Republic
Tucson and several Valley communities are entering water-sharing agreements, as future Colorado River water levels continue to worry municipalities.
On Aug. 8, the Tucson City Council passed intergovernmental agreements with Peoria, Scottsdale and Gilbert to store, recover and exchange Central Arizona Project water. The CAP is a 336-mile canal that brings water to many areas around the state.
In the agreement, the communities will store a portion of their CAP water allocation in Tucson’s Southern Avra Valley Storage and Recovery Project facility. In times of water shortages, which could trigger cuts on CAP water allocations, those communities would be able to retrieve a portion of Tucson’s CAP supply.
“All of us are working cooperatively to ensure that the Arizonans in central and southern Arizona have a resilient water supply into the future,” said John Kmiec, director of Tucson Water. “By utilizing access infrastructure already built by the city of Tucson, we’re providing that resiliency to our sister cities up in the Valley.”
