Arizona Water Initiative

It is along the wide, flat desert stretches of the McMullen Valley and the Ranegras Plain west of Phoenix that some of the state’s biggest land-use changes – and most hotly debated water-related controversies – are playing out.

But it is what is happening below the scorching desert’s surface that really matters out here in the sparsely populated “West Basins” region of west-central Arizona.

It takes planning to do planning.

This is not redundant. Planners at the Arizona Department of Water Resources have been charged by Gov. Ducey work with the 22 different “planning areas” around Arizona – regions that have been carved out in some cases because of the locally unique water issues they face -- to refine water-use demand information and work with stakeholders to develop consensus-driven solution sets for future demand and supply imbalances.  

It is a cool, breezy-to-windy morning as Paul Ivanich departs west from Phoenix toward the vast “Ranegras Plain” and the hundreds of water wells dotting its sun-parched landscape.

Ivanich and other Water Resources hydrologists and field staff are conducting a “basin sweep,” measuring and analyzing the groundwater levels in wells located in exotic and remote sectors of the Ranegras Plain. Areas known to Water Resources planners by names like “Utting.” And “East of Utting.”