An Arizona state lawmaker is accusing Governor Katie Hobbs of planning to spend federal money, that is supposed to be helping “Arizona water security,’ on gimmicks and payoffs.
The Governor has already spent nearly $360 million over budget, and concerns are growing about her administration’s grip on the state’s financial situation.
Representative Lupe Diaz is not just trying to express concerns, he says he is “sounding the alarm.” Diaz claims that Hobbs’ latest budget proposal has “misplaced priorities when it comes to securing Arizona’s water future.”
Hobbs is proposing to use over $60 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars to spend on a variety of projects.
Diaz, Chairman of the House Land, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs Committee, and Member of the House Appropriations Committee, says that the Hobbs plan is “nothing more than a political scheme designed to subsidize the cost of her bad water policies and increase bureaucratic control over the state’s critical groundwater resources.”
Diaz pointed to Hobbs’ proposal to spend $3.45 million for satellite-based surveillance of Arizonans’ water usage rather than for recharge projects that put more water in the ground, “as one of the most alarming.”
According to Diaz, this funding goes toward “monitoring technology” that will track personal groundwater consumption from space. Diaz is concerned that this tracking will give “radical environmentalists and bureaucrats unprecedented access to private well data.”
“For years, Democrats and their out-of-state activist allies have pushed for government metering and monitoring of private wells to open the door for future taxation of private groundwater use,” said Chairman Diaz. “Republicans have fought back against this vast government overreach at every turn. Now, Hobbs wants to circumvent the will of the people and spy on rural Arizonans from space instead of working with the legislature to pass laws that rural communities can support.
“This invasive and widespread surveillance of the Arizona people is an attack on personal privacy and poses a direct threat to Arizona businesses that rely on groundwater for private industry. Such monitoring could expose competitively sensitive trade information about how businesses use and conserve water to produce valuable economic commodities, opening them up to attacks from activist groups and government overreach.”
The Governor’s proposal also includes a $12 million payout to the City of Buckeye to subsidize the cost of a new 25% groundwater tax the city will be subject to, according to Diaz, under the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR)’s “illegal Alternative Designation of 100-year Assured Water Supply (ADAWS) Rule.” The City of Buckeye had previously stated that the tax “places a substantial financial burden on the city” and was not supported by any “study or justification.”
“In 2023, the Governor shut down economic development in one of the fastest-growing and most affordable housing markets in the nation – Buckeye,” Diaz said. “The way the Governor has treated the City of Buckeye since she took office in 2023 has been unfair in comparison to other cities and unsubstantiated by credible groundwater data.”
Diaz argues that Hobbs’ $12 million payout to the city does nothing to address the underlying policy decisions that put Buckeye in this situation in the first place, and that she should roll back the illegal 25% groundwater tax her state agency adopted, or lift the illegal housing moratorium she unilaterally imposed on the fast growing and critical part of the state.
Diaz accuses the Governor of having an agenda and said that “She created the problem, and now she’s throwing money at it to move that agenda.”
In the alternative, Diaz proposes directing the state’s limited funds toward “effective water conservation measures,” proposing on farm irrigation efficiency, market-based agricultural conversion, recharge, reuse, new technologies, and developing the 331 sites that ADWR and the State Land Department identified in 2021 as suitable for stormwater recharge projects that increase local water supplies.
According to Diaz, Hobbs’ Department of Water Resources has spent years claiming Arizona’s groundwater basins are in a perilous condition, even asserting that certain basins are “Priority Basins” that need immediate control. Now, after threatening the designation of Active Management Areas (AMAs) throughout the state and shutting down homebuilding in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area, Hobbs is saying she doesn’t have the information she needs to make critical policy decisions.
“If funding to study groundwater is needed now, then why did the Governor impose and threaten to impose regulatory restrictions on Arizonan communities before she had the facts,” Chairman Diaz asked. “The Governor’s allocation of these dollars to gathering additional information proves that she never had sufficient information to shut down Arizona’s critical homebuilding and agricultural industries in the first place. What we need is actual, peer reviewed science before making critical decisions.”