It’s widely believed that Active Management Areas (AMAs) are too stringent to work in rural Arizona.
The rules are too prescriptive, the argument goes, to work in basins where there is only groundwater and farming is the predominant water use.
There is wide fear that if these areas become AMAs, the state will try to squeeze the square peg of regulation from urban areas into the round hole of rural ones, and it will devolve into an unworkable mess.
I’ve echoed this argument. But now I’m rethinking it.
Turns out, subsequent AMAs have more leeway in state law than the initial AMAs, which were created in 1980.
And that has helped water officials draft a management plan for Arizona’s first subsequent AMA that reflects local conditions and preferences.
This flexibility is crucial because the Douglas groundwater basin — which straddles the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona, and which voters narrowly chose to become an AMA in 2022 — looks nothing like Phoenix or Tucson.
Douglas, like many other rural basins, relies solely on groundwater. It pumps out three times........