Ok, great. Give us a little slight background. So what uh John Dave asked
me to talk about is just sort of walker stuff in general, which I do a
fair amount of um people misperceive that I am a water lawyer. I am a
lawyer, but I'm not actually a water lawyer. I'm a real estate lawyer. Uh
I mostly do um zoning cases and complicated public, private real estate
projects such as a lot of the buildings that have been built on the Rio
Sola um have been built using complex public private partnership financing
methods. So I can talk about that if you want. Um My guess is you don't,
it's frankly not all that interesting. Um I got into the water biz uh
largely because I had this recognizable name. And so I got recruited by
the city of Phoenix to run for the board of the Central Arizona Project uh
back in the nineties. And at that point, the cap had been sort of uh the
territory of retired governors and other people who didn't have to do very
much. And so the deal was when you vote, it's like it did last. It's the
below state mine inspector, uh, when the only state in the union that
elects the state mine inspector, but somewhere after you vote for that,
you vote for the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board and you
vote for a block of people's nonpartisan office unpaid. And, uh, nobody
ever knows who to vote for. It's changed a little bit. Now, there are
actual campaigns for this, uh, position. Um, not sure why, but there are.
Um and so the city asked me to run because they thought I knew something
about urban development issues and they thought I would get elected just
purely because people see the name and they, oh, I've heard that before.
It's a big pink building in Tempe. Let's vote for that. Uh So I did, I
got elected. I didn't do any campaigning of any kind and that sort of got
me interested in the water business. And I think um pa part of what I
learned in doing that is that water generally has been treated as a very
arcane specialty of engineers, hydrologists and lawyers and the public has
largely been excluded from understanding water issues. Um The people who
deal with it have made it intentionally complex. They speak in weird coded
phrases. They use acronyms that no one can understand. Um A and that's
because um water for a very long time has been treated as sort of a magic
thing in the west. And so as I spent time on the cap board, I got to
thinking about water a lot. Um, and I, I went off the board meeting in
2005, so I haven't been on the board in a long time, but I still talk
about water a lot and write about water a lot, which leads me to the new
book coming out next week. Where's the camera, um, uh, which has got a
chapter on water in it. Um And the real Sola actually is in here a little
bit. Um I, I am a, a fierce defender of the Tempe Town Lake which still
has a lot of critics. Um uh There, I think one of the misunderstandings we
have about water in Arizona is this notion that it should not be used for
anything enjoyable. Um that it is frivolous to do things like use water to
celebrate um pieces of the urban fabric. Um And so you will see a cities
periodically turning off all their fountains to sort of make people suffer
to remind us that we live in a desert. I think that's a really misguided
way of thinking about water. I think water should be thought of as a way
of sort of punctuating the urban fabric and celebrating life in the desert.
That doesn't mean we should waste it, but putting it back in a river bed
, which is what the Tempe Town Lake is, is not wasting water. Um You know
that the from, from the time of John Wesley Powell on and the reclamation
era, there was this presumption that the right thing to do with water in
the West was to take it out of the rivers because flowing water in the, in
, in the arid part of the United States was wasting war. Well, now we're
sort of coming to have a more sophisticated understanding that having
water in rivers is not wasting war. Um that has all kinds of benefits for
uh wildlife, for uh heat mitigation, for aesthetics, for all sorts of
things. So we're now much more um vigorously debating the concept of using
water for things other than simply growing crops, which is what started
out being a deal. So let me back up for a moment. One of the things I I
tell people about water is I think you have to start from the most
fundamental sort of notion that there are four things you need for human
life, you need land, you need air, you need sunshine and you need water.
And basically, that's it. If you got those, you can make everything else,
but you can't make any of those that those are give them to us in one way
or another. Um Well, only one of those things is readily portable water.
The others are kind of where you find them. Um And that portability of
water is the story of the Western US. So you will see, for example, one of
the things I take on in this book is a criticism of cities like Phoenix
because our water comes from far away. Well, this is in my mind, a
mindless and not very thoughtful critique of a place like Phoenix. All
cities are necessarily concentrations of people that draw on a larger area
of resources to support them. That's what a city is, a concentration that
draws on a larger area of resources, that larger area could be food, it
could be concrete, it could be iron or, or whatever it is it's brought to
where people are concentrated and water is just a commodity like any other
commodity. And it's moved to where a city is. The difference is that in
the west, we move at greater distances and there's nothing inherently
wrong with that. Um Phoenix got rated one of the least sustainable cities
in America a few years ago because our water comes from far away. Same
survey rated Tucson as more sustainable than Phoenix because Tucson at the
time was mining groundwater pumping groundwater to support the city. This
is absolutely contrary to 100 years of Arizona water policy. We have been
trying for a long time to get off of groundwater because it's exhaustible.
The reason it's called mining is when you use it up, it's gone and get on
to renewable resources which are flowing streams. So that's an early
effort to make a city sustainable. That was completely misunderstood by a
website called sustain lane.com that got it 180 degrees wrong, just
totally got it wrong. The second thing that I think is interesting about
water is a commodity is economists talk about public use goods and private
use goods. So a private use good is like land, land in our system is owned.
Even if the government treats land, we say the government owns that. Um
there are systems that treat land as more of a common use good. Um Some of
the uh Spanish traditions in the West that had the concept of Eido, which
is the um the commons is a, is a common use. Good. Um uh Air in our system
is a public use good. Nobody owns air. I mean, you have a little tank of
it, maybe a little bit, but basically it's free for the taking. Um,
sunshine is a public use good, free for the taking water is the only one
of those four fundamental things that sometimes is one and sometimes is
the other. Um when uh you have water in a glass, that's your water, you
own that water. Um When you pay for it to come out of the tap and use it
in your backyard or put it in your swimming pool, it's your water. When
you're pumping it up from underneath the ground underneath land, you own.
Uh We think of that as a private use good when water is flowing through
your property, it's not a private use good. It's a public use good. You
can use it but you don't get to own it and keep it. Um, you have to allow
it to leave your property at the same rate at which it entered your
property. That distinction gives rise to one of the complex problems of
Western water law, which is that we treat surface water and groundwater as
different things. We treat groundwater as one of these private commodities
and surface water as if it is a public commodity and that bedevils Arizona
because um if you live up near the upper Verde River and you have uh a
cabin and an acre of land and a pump, you can pump all the groundwater you
want, even if you're sucking it out from under the river, that's changing.
We, we are in a long uh 50 year series of lawsuits about the artificial
hydrological distinction between groundwater and surface water, which
doesn't make any sense. And we're slowly beginning to break down that
barrier and begin to understand um some differences about about the way
water is treated and handled. Um We also treat water as kind of the, the
ultimate tribal commodity. Um People we share water with are us, people
who are trying to take it away, are them. So you all know the apocryphal
story. I I hope about the last time one state in the union brandished arms
against the motor, which was Arizona, California over the waters of the
Colorado River. Um We didn't think California should be entitled to as
much water from the river as they had been allocated by the Boulder Kenyon
Project Act. And so that led to litigating about it. And BB Moore who
lived in a little building right over here in Tempe was the governor at
the time and set the Arizona National Guard out to try to stop California
from building a dam to divert water. And he had like two guys from his
office with rifles and that's the last time one state threatened to shoot
at another state in the history of the union may happen again before too
much longer at the rate we're going, who knows? Um, so, so water's got all
these kind of interesting, different uh, aspects to it. Let me tell you
another two other things about, about water that you need to think of. Big
picture wise. One is that the price of water is really complicated. Um,
and it doesn't have much to do with what water costs, uh, water for the
most part, we, we treat as free. What you're paying for is the cost of
transporting it and treating it to get it to you. And even then we heavily
subsidize it because we for a long time thought of water as being this
thing that should be, you know, it's necessary for life. So it really
should be as close to free as possible. It's gotten a lot more expensive
here in the last few years, those of you who own houses or if your parents
have complained about their water bills, um, it's gotten a lot more
expensive, um, but it isn't even close to what it actually costs. Uh, and
the price has very little to do with reality. It has to do with what you
can get people to pay and how much it costs to move it somewhere. And
there is a fundamental difference between
the price of a bottle of water that you buy and own and the price you pay
for the right to get a set amount of water all the time. So you'll hear
references to the price of water by the gallon or by the acre foot.
Sometimes people are telling you the price of the actual water. Sometimes
they are telling you the price of the right to receive that much water on
an annual basis and it gets very confusing and, and people can't sort of
sort it out. Um Agriculture, for example, pays something like $20 an acre
foot for water. Um at your house, you are paying something like $250 maker
for, for more or more. Uh maybe up into the thousands uh an acre foot for
water. Um an acre foot is an acre of land, a foot deep. Uh It is a
measurement that is used only in the western United States. Nobody else
uses this because it was a measurement adopted by the Bureau of
reclamation. So the next thing you have to understand about water in the
West is that Western water has this doctrine of prior appropriation, which
is probably a phrase you've heard before, which means that it isn't, um,
just whoever wants the water can use it. Nor is it like some places in the
country, whoever has the biggest pump wins. It's whoever got there first.
It's a first in time first in right doctrine. The reason that exists in
the West is that was the doctrine that the legal system sort of invented
to encourage settlement in the West. So water is kind of the ultimate
economic development tool in the West. We wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be
able to live in, in Steger space beyond the 100th meridian. Um Unless we
had a way of capturing and moving more so people could use it. One of the
ways we incentivize the settlement of the West was to create this doctor
of prior appropriation. It's basically says we want to settle the desert.
So if you run out there and find some water, you get to keep it and you,
if you settle there and it's like homesteading only with water. Um And
that's a problem in today's world because it was a doctrine that worked,
it worked really well. And so there's a really lot of people here now and
that, that's putting serious stress on water going into the future. Um
III I mentioned earlier how we have treated water as this sort of magic
commodity that is the province of uh engineers and water lawyers. Um The,
the view of those people tends to be, tell me how much water you need.
Tell me where you want it delivered and leave me alone. I will go get it
and bring it. So, um William Mulholland, the famous guy who dedicated the
Colorado uh the aqueduct uh that brought water to Los Angeles. Um I, I, if
you guys ever seen the movie Chinatown, this is a real tragedy that most
people in your generation don't see the movie China. It's a great movie.
Download it sometimes. That's um Faye Dunway, Jack Meson, Roman Polanski
um uh directed it and it's about uh w Mulholland fictionalized. Uh he's
called Moray um in the movie and sort of the rape of the Owens River
Valley to water the San Fernando Valley. But when he turns the head gate
to flow the water out, he says there it is. Take it, meaning I brought you
the water, you want, you guys fight about what to do with it. We, we, we
tended to keep the public out of water decisions and that's a distinction
that's beginning to break down because as we bump up against an era of
limits where we can't solve our water problems by going and capturing
another river or towing an iceberg or cloud seeding or something else,
we're going to have to start to make tough decisions about water. So, one
of the things about all this that I think is relevant to the Rio Salado
and, and, and interesting in the context of the Rio Salado project is at
the time the project, um, was proposed. And, and I'm really, when I say
that I'm talking about the Tempe Town Lake. Now, at the time that T Town
Lake was proposed, there was this rollicking debate about whether or not
we should actually do it, whether it should be filled with water. The
Timby Town Lake for point of reference is about 6000 acre feet of water.
When I use these acre, there's none in it today. There's not even light
put in there today, but it's about 6000 acres of water. Um We have the
right to 2.8 million acre feet of water from the Colorado River. Um The
solar project can deliver about 850,000 acre feet of water uh on average,
generally year in and year out. So, should we take 6000 acre feet of that
water which could support about each acre foot will support about 10
people at today's usage rates for a year. Um So it would um support, you
know, a lot of people, 100 and 20,000 people or something like that. Um
Should we use it for the leg? Should we use it to grow cotton in Pal
County. Should we use it to entice another 150,000 people to move here and
live and use it in their houses? Um Should we use it for golf courses?
Should we use it for an Intel factory? Which is a heavy water consumptive
use. Um Should we use it for uh data server, server farms hugely water
intensive because of the cooling mechanisms that are needed for though
some of them are using dry cooling today. Um Well, we could do any of
those things we wanted with it or should we put in a lake where, you know
, 100,000 people a day, see it and get the paddle canoes on it or should
we leave it in the river and, and let it flow into the Gulf of Mexico and
sort of replenish the uh the riparian systems of Arizona. Well,
we ought to talk about that. We ought to talk about those competing uses
and how to make those decisions. We don't do that. Uh What we do rather is
sort of allow that decision to get made through a messy combination of
these prior appropriate rights of pricing. Um And of just kind of um a
series of, of a much um less comprehensive conversations and dialogues
about it. Um I think the Timby Town Lake is, is a good thing. I think it's
gonna ultimately uh already is resulting in significant economic benefit
to TP. Um I think it is something that gives character to what is
otherwise a fairly seamless and somewhat uninteresting urban form that we
have in the city of Phoenix. Um, and I think it probably makes more sense
to use 6000 acre feet of water that way than it does using the equivalent
amount of water growing alfalfa in Penal County where we use way more than
6000 acre feet. Um, in the Sun core that is Phoenix Tucson and Penal
County in between. Um about 70% of the water still goes to agriculture.
Um But people look at the Tempe Town Lake and will say, well, you know, in
California, they're having all these terrible water problems and Tempe is
like gonna refill this lake that has no purpose. Um I think it does have a
purpose, but I think there's also a whole bunch of differences between us
and California. Um So if you get in one of these conversations with
friends or visitors from out of state who want to criticize Arizona, they
give you a few ways in which to explain Arizona and Arizona's water
situation. Um We still use, as I said, about 70% of the water in the Sun
quarter still goes to agriculture. The reason we haven't had the problems
California has had with regard to water use is that we have diminished the
long term rights to water that agriculture has in a way that allows us in
times of drought. To shift water from agricultural uses to urban uses. Now
, we can't do that with groundwater, but we can do it with surface water
with cap water and SRP water and that's what's happened. The second thing
is that this over project has urbanized. So most of SRP is now houses, all
of our houses are probably within the, the service territory of the SRP.
Um In, in Arizona, in central Arizona, we tend to grow crops and
subdivisions in the same place. That isn't true in California or Colorado.
In California, people live on the coast. Farming takes place in the
central valleys. And so the farmers in the cities hate each other and
fight all the time and the farmers have locked up all the water and they
won't let it shift to urban uses here as we urbanize, we have converted
farms to urban uses and that diminishes the amount of water being used. I
just finished a zoning case this last year down south of Tucson for a 6000
acre master plan community that is currently a pecan grove. It is the
world's largest pecan grove and it is the largest single groundwater user
in the state of Arizona. When that converts to being 22,000 houses, the
water use of those 6000 acres will go down by between 60 70%. Uh A pecan
tree uses more than a family that's in the course of a year. Um Now I love
pecans. I think pecans are great that pecan growers are my clients over
the long term with pecan growing survive. I, I don't know. Um one of the
challenges of agriculture and this is part of what's gone wrong in
California. California used to be by growing vegetables. It has
increasingly migrated to nut crops like almonds and grapes for wine with
grapes and almonds. You can't take the water away from in times of drought.
The plants will die vegetables. You can plant alfalfa, you can plant. So
alfalfa gets heavily criticized in Arizona because we grow a lot of it and
much of it is shipped to China. But when we hit a water crisis, you can
plant the alfalfa, you can purchase that water from farmers uh and shift
it to higher value. Uses another difference between Arizona and California
is that California didn't regulate groundwater until about a year ago. We
started in 1980. We started limiting the, the use of groundwater and, and
a final difference is in the last 20 years in Arizona, we have been
banking water underground. Nobody else anywhere in the world has done this
to the degree we have. Um There was an article you may have seen a while
back in uh I think it was the L A Times. Uh that said if you think the
water, uh if you think the drought in California is bad, wait until you
see what happens in Arizona. Now, the reason that article says that is
that we're the junior right holder of the Colorado River. That was a
bargain we had to agree to in order to get the cap funded by the federal
government, we were pissed off about it. Yeah. Um Do you all understand
what the cap is and how it's different from SRP?
The Central Arizona project is a canal system that brings water from the
Colorado River to Phoenix And Tucson. The Salt River Project manages the
water of the Salt River through Lake Roosevelt in the Phoenix Metro area,
right? And they're, and they're separate entities. Um SRP goes back to the
early part of the 20th century and the building of Roosevelt ba. Um The
cap open goes back into like the 19, late 19 sixties was when it was
started to get built and the cap is pumps. It, it's coming that water is
flowing uphill to get it here. SRP is not SRP is grounding. Um And, and
like I said, SRP is about a million acre feet. Um We have the right to 2.8
million ft of Colorado River where the cap can deliver about 1.61 0.7 of
that. The rest is used on the river. By the way, when I was talking about
crops and people that's gonna change to get more water to Central Arizona.
We're gonna need to start taking water. That has been the right of
agriculture in Yuma and then we're gonna get more like California. But
what I was, what I was starting to say is the final difference is we've
been banking Colorado river water underground. So when the ce P got built
the idea, it originally was gonna be the farmers would pay for it,
whatever it costs to get it here and then the cities would slowly grow
into using it. Well, this is a big thing built by the federal government.
So it cost a whole lot more than people thought it was gonna cost, it was
supposed to cost like 700 million and it cost more like 4.5 billion. And
so the farmers couldn't afford it with the formulas that were used to
calculate what they were supposed to pay. So when I was on the cap board,
we had to come up with a way of resolving that problem. And the solution
was to have cities buy down the price of water so we could give cap water
to farmers so we could get them off the groundwater pumps, which they were
using um federally subsidized electricity to pump ground water. So the
federal government wanted the farmers off the pumps, but it was selling
them below cost electricity to use the pumps makes no sense. There are
lots of these weird ironies in western water. So the cities were willing
to subsidize water for Arizona agriculture primarily to keep it away from
California because California was using most of Arizona's share of the
water at that point and they have the right to do that if we don't use it.
But if we want to use it, we get to take it first. Well, what we did with
this water then was to bank it in central Arizona using two different
mechanisms. One is what's called direct recharge, which is, you pump the
water here, you flow it out on the desert and you watch it seep into the
ground. That's it. The other is you pump the water. Here, you sell it to a
farmer below cost. He uses it to water his crops. But the water that he
would otherwise have pumped from underneath the ground, you now count as
being in lou recharge. So you treat it as if it was cap water that was
banked underground. And in either case, you build up these huge reserves
of groundwater through the combination of those two mechanisms. We've
banked almost 9,000,008 acre feet of water underground in central Arizona
, nobody else anywhere in the world can even come close to that. Um That's
about if all water input to the Sun Corridor was cut off, it didn't rain
srp could deliver zero cap could deliver zero. If you don't deliver any of
that 9 million acre feed to agriculture, that's about 10 years worth of
urban water supply. Now, you never do that because none of those will ever
go to zero and you wouldn't want to deliver it at that rate and exhausted
in 10 years. But, so when you see this stuff about how the drought is
gonna hit Arizona worse than California, based on the fact that we're the
junior right holder. What really annoys me about that is that gets written
up in the L A Times or the New York Times or somewhere else as if those of
us in Arizona are so stupid. It never occurred to us. We were the junior
right holder. We've known that for a really long time and we've been
trying to protect against that eventuality. Calif the only significant
amount of water. California has banked against the drought. They banked in
Arizona because we did it for them, pay us a lot of money to do that,
which is sort of useful. But, uh, and Nevada has done a ton of that
because they're in much worse shape than we are. Um, so we've actually, it
, it, you know, when you're embarrassed by telling people you're from
Arizona because we're embarrassing about a lot of things. This is the one
thing we've been really good at. We've done this really, really well. Um
Trying to think what else would be of interest to you guys about R a lot
or? Well, I think the distinction between CAP and SRP is really important
and, you know, you, if you think about the Salt River Valley Water Users
Association and how water businesses cropped up in the territorial period.
In the early 20th century, the Users Association became the Salt River
project was associated with the construction of Roosevelt dam of formed
Lake Roosevelt in 1911.
So, Srp and the canal system that brings water to the valley from the Salt
River happened much earlier. Then you have the Colorado River Compact,
which was the first multi state agreement that established water
allocations amongst the Southwester States. And it was very controversial
there, there's a lot of issues about whether they counted the amount of
water correctly that actually flows through the Colorado River. But that
was the first. The answer is they didn't. They thought there was a lot
more than that was. Yeah, they messed up. Yeah, big time. And that started
a basically 40 year process, 45 year process of controversy and little
hassle. Let me, let me give you the numbers on that. So they, they made an
assumption that the Colorado River has an average annual flow of 17.5
million acre feet. Uh That is just completely wrong. It's more like 12 or
13 probably we have now discovered much after the fact. But they took that
17.5 million. They allocated 2.5 million to Mexico and the remaining 15
million, they split 7.5 to the upper basin and 7.5 to the lower basin. The
upper basin is uh Utah. Uh Colorado and New Mexico and a little piece of
Arizona. But the line between upper and lower is Lee's ferry. So slightly
into Arizona, the lower basin is Arizona, Nevada and California,
there was then a further split in the Colorado River compact between
Arizona, Nevada and California that gave California 4.4 million acre feet.
Arizona 2.8 million ft and Nevada 300,000 acre feet.
Arizona felt it got screwed. We thought we should get the same amount of,
of water. California. And our argument for that was, first of all, the
river flows through Arizona for 300 miles before it ever gets to
California and Nevada. Secondly, there is water in the Colorado river that
has flowed out of Arizona. The Bill Williams, um the Salt and the Verde
from the Gila. The Gila is a tributary of the Colorado. The little
Colorado is a tributary of the Colorado. So some of it's our water that,
that the state. Now, the truth is hardly any of it. At the end of the day
, the water that's in the river is from Colorado and Utah, it's from snow
and the Rockies. But, but we thought that was a pretty good argument.
There is not a single tributary of the Colorado river that flows out of
California. Not one, not a stream, there's a little bit of sheep flow,
maybe. So we were like, why should California get all of this? And their
answer was We're California. What are you talking about? Uh, you know,
we've been using it for a long time first in time, first and right, and we
have a way more congressman than you do. You know, this is, this is the 19
fifties. Uh We have like one congressman for when this happened. So we
felt like got screwed when it was split up and we wouldn't ratify the
compact for years. And that's what led to the, the famous lawsuit Arizona
versus California, um which there's a, there's a good book uh came out
about two years ago written by Jack August about Mark Wilmer. Um the
lawyer who ultimately represented Arizona in uh Arizona versus California.
So here's an interesting tidbit, the water in the Timby Town Lake. What
is that, is that solar project water or Central Arizona Project water mix
congregation, right? So legally, it is basically Central Arizona project
water because since that is the river bottom, it didn't have rights to SRP
water. It was never farmed. You couldn't farm in the river bottom. So when
SRP was created, no water rights were assigned to the river. So when it
was time to like fill the Tempe Town lake, everybody scratching their head
, how are we gonna do this? Um I was on the cap board at the time and they
came to us and said, will you, will you cut us a deal to sell us cheap,
cap water for this? And we said, sure, we'll give you cap water to fill it.
So the initial filling of the lake was cap water delivered through the
Sober Project system. The systems are inter t so you can deliver. Then
what happens is when the dam burst or when you let water out of it and
then you capture water flowing down into it. Um That is SRP water, but
legally, it's still treated as cap water because it's replacement for the
water that was spilled. So what happened now is the lake's been empty by
pumping the water in and out and into the cap into the SRP canal system
and it's been delivered to farmers. Um And so then SRP will replace that,
but legally, it's still treated the cap water. You know, another
interesting thing was uh Arizona, California was settled in 64.
And then, then the effort was to fund the Central Arizona project which
happened in 1968. The origin of the project studio for Rio Salado is 6667
waters on everybody's mind. The, the, you know, you can see political
cartoons in our collections from Reg Man and you can, you can see all
these materials and news articles about the negotiate the fight with
California. It was a huge moment in the sixties thinking about our future
and who we were going to be as a state and how much that depended on water.
So clearly, all this effort in Arizona versus California and Cap was a
driver for thinking about this, this river bed and this river. And what
would we do?
What else you guys got questions, anything else you want to ask?
Um Is, is there an effort to remove prior appropriation from the state or
what's the status? Um Anytime you go to like a water or law seminar,
there's a, there's conversations about the need for what a lot of change
and adapt, but that will happen very slowly. Um, it, it, it, the law is
largely intended to make it hard for things to change. The law is a tool
of maintaining the status quo. Um That's why we care about stare decisis.
That's why we use precedent. That's why judicial decisions are very
constrained. That's why we don't like activist judges that are getting
criticized all the time because the law is supposed to protect people's
investments, people's expectations. Uh, business operations are, the law
is supposed to be a break on society changing too quickly and too
dramatically. Um, and that will be one of the hardest things to sort of
slowly break down over time. It, it will change, but it could be 150 years
for that to happen.
There's a, a fabulous water law professor at the law school right now
named Rhett Larson. Any of you wind up going to a su law school where you
see something about Rhett Larson doing a talk. He's really good. Really
cool. Guy,
it's only been here like a year now. There's another interesting aspect
about uh California using our water. Uh It takes a lot of water to run a
power plant. I thinking water to get photo take power, but a power plant,
a lot of water. Uh Calver takes a lot of water. It's the largest nuclear
generating station in the world, I think. But because we make the power
here, they use uh effluent from the city of Phoenix and Tempe and Mesa
that flows down to the 91st Avenue plant, get some treatment and then the
big pipe goes out to P Verde and they make electricity. That's why
California likes that electricity. They're really buying our water when
they get out that, that electricity. So they don't have to make
electricity in California. Metropolitan Phoenix has one of the highest
percentages of water reuse of any city in the world. Um So when you hear
people talking about using more effluent, treated effluent and so on,
we're like close to 100%. Now, the reason is pal Verde, that's where most
of it goes. But it gets used to Paloverde and then it gets put back into
the salt River bed where it is recharged, back into the aquifers. So we
use it twice beyond flushing your toil.
Well, I think that's excellent. All right, nice to meet youall