That doesn’t include most major commercial and industrial developments. The state has paused new certificates and analyses - the mechanisms developers use to grow outside a designated provider’s service area.īut those are only required to plat and sell lots in subdivisions, which are defined in state law as land split into six or more lots. Metro Phoenix’s largest and most established cities still have room in their designations to accommodate growth, though we’ll see how much capacity they have to absorb additional users when designations are renewed in coming years. It also will have limited immediate effect on designated water providers, which comprise a vast portion of the Phoenix AMA and have proven to the state that they have secured enough water to serve an additional amount of use. No one’s tap will be turned off because the model predicted unmet demand.

The pause does not impact existing usersįirst - and we must be clear about this - we’re just talking about future growth in metro Phoenix, not existing users. This is consequential - particularly for areas on the outskirts of the Phoenix Active Management Area like Queen Creek and Buckeye, which exist because they were allowed to grow on groundwater.īut it is far from the worst-case scenario that many had feared for metro Phoenix, particularly given that the adjacent Pinal AMA has roughly 8 million acre-feet of unmet demand to ameliorate.

That means if everything plays out over the next century according to the assumptions in the model, metro Phoenix won’t have enough groundwater to cover 4% of total demand for it.īecause of that imbalance, the state Department of Water Resources will no longer consider new applications for residential developments that would rely heavily on groundwater. Indeed, the model revealed 4.86 million acre-feet in unmet demand over 100 years. That headline will inevitably appear somewhere, now that the governor has released a much anticipated, updated groundwater model.īut that’s not necessarily the case.

So, metro Phoenix has shut down growth, right?

Time in phoenix ax