The Daily Courier
It’s been more than eight years since the City of Prescott and the Town of Prescott Valley decided to buy the former JWK ranch in the hopes of pumping water to the two towns, water that would satisfy the needs of the tens of thousands of folks who would one day call this area home.
Back then, the municipalities, and Prescott in particular, took what can either be characterized as a legally sound while aggressive stance against those who argued with the viability and propriety of the project, or as a short-sighted adventure in heavy-handed politics. In doing so, those leaders exacerbated an us-against-them situation, pitting the western and eastern portions of Yavapai County against one another. Indeed, one needn’t live in the Verde Valley to question the contention that ripping hundreds of acre-feet of water from the earth at a location near the headwaters of the Verde River would have no effect on the flow of one of Arizona’s few remaining wild rivers.
Now, without blinking an eye, the leaders, some of whom are the same and some of whom have changed, have decided that, in order to avoid incredibly expensive lawsuits they could very easily lose, they will drop another couple of million dollars into this ill-fated project in order to gauge and monitor the levels in the Big Chino.
