Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
Mohave County Supervisors voted to approve a letter from its chairman to Thomas Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, to initiate steps to designate the Hualapai Valley Groundwater Basin an Irrigation Non-Expansion Area (INA).
Mohave County administrators are currently active in protecting the citizen's water rights. Additionally, county officials strongly contest the theory that the increase of large scale agricultural usage is rapidly exhausting the county aquifer.
Manager of the county, Mike Hendrix, said the letter is to protect and preserve county water.
The intent of the county is for Buschatzke, under statute ARS 5-432, to begin the process of designating the Kingman Subarea and the Hualapai Subarea of the Hualapai Valley Groundwater Basin an Irrigation Non-Expansion Area. County leaders say this move will protect and preserve the water supply in Mohave County.
The chairman’s letter said they must take immediate action and states that they can't sit by and wait for farms to run out of water.
“Inaction means Mohave County must wait for our new farms to exhaust our groundwater basin before any action may be taken by the state of Arizona, and then it will be way too late for the residents of Mohave County," Hendrix wrote in the letter.
Hendrix said that the declaration of the areas as "non-expansive areas" is imperative.
“If the director decides to declare the areas irrigation non-expansion areas, with some exceptions, only acres of land which were irrigated at any time during the five years preceding the date of the notice of the initiation of designation procedures may be irrigated,” Hendrix wrote.
The chairman’s letter also cites the conclusions of a December 2019 Arizona Department of Water Resources Report. The report determined there is an insufficient supply of groundwater.
“There is insufficient groundwater to provide a reasonably safe supply for sustained irrigation of cultivated lands in the basin at the current and predicted rates of withdrawal,” Hendrix wrote.
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