STATE CAPITOL, PHOENIX – The Arizona House has passed legislation to fix the state’s existing groundwater laws to make “Active Management Areas” (“AMAs”) more workable for rural areas. HB2572, sponsored by Representative Gail Griffin, Chairman of the House Natural Resources, Energy & Water Committee, was approved by the House today and now heads to the Senate for consideration. The bill makes necessary changes to the state’s broken AMA framework, allowing local farmers, communities, and county supervisors more flexibility over groundwater management.

“Residents across the state including Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that Active Management Areas don’t work for rural Arizona, yet no one has proposed to fix the existing statutes,” said Chairman Griffin. “This legislation takes the first step to fix what’s broken and ensure that AMAs can be a viable tool for rural areas—which is exactly what the People of Arizona have been asking for.”

Current law treats all AMAs the same, despite the fact that rural areas don’t have access to alternative water supplies like the Central Arizona Project or Salt River Project. Many of the original provisions included in AMAs were designed to incentivize groundwater users to switch to these alternative supplies. This one-size-fits-all framework doesn’t work for rural areas, because these supplies don’t exist in rural Arizona. Forcing these programs on rural areas simply stops new critical housing and economic development, devasting rural economies.

HB2572 fixes these issues by making “subsequent” AMAs more flexible for local communities, including by increasing farmers’ ability to use water more efficiently and giving county supervisors more areas where they can require adequate water supplies for housing. 

“Radical environmental groups claim we need a ‘new tool’ to manage groundwater in rural areas, but what they really want is to adopt something more stringent than an AMA,” Chairman Griffin added. “Arizona House Republicans are standing firm in defense of rural communities and seeking to fix the existing ‘tools’ we have, making them more workable for rural Arizona. If AMAs don’t work for rural communities, then the answer is to fix AMAs—not pile on more bad water policies that would regulate rural Arizona out of existence. Rural Arizona deserves a groundwater management system that works for them, not against them. That’s exactly what HB2572 does.”

Gail Griffin is a Republican member of the Arizona House of Representatives serving Legislative District 19, which includes areas of Greenlee, Graham, Cochise, and eastern Pima and Santa Cruz Counties. She also serves as Chairman of the House Natural Resources, Energy & Water Committee.