TUCSON, Ariz.― Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has asked the Superior Court to dismiss a lawsuit conservation groups brought against her for failing to designate the Upper San Pedro Basin in the Sierra Vista and Benson area an Active Management Area. The designation would curtail rampant groundwater pumping, which threatens the survival of the last free-flowing river in the Southwest.
“Gov. Hobbs’ decision to fight our lawsuit while pretending to be a leader in solving water issues is completely hypocritical,” said Robin Silver, a cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Time to save the San Pedro River is running short. The governor is carrying water for real estate developers when she should be acting on behalf of the plants, animals and people whose livelihoods and futures depend on a flowing river and healthy groundwater aquifer.”
The San Pedro Alliance — a coalition of conservation groups — sued Gov. Hobbs and Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke in August after they ignored a September 2023 petition seeking the creation of the active management area.
The lawsuit says Gov. Hobbs and the water department continue to violate the Arizona law that requires regular monitoring and creation of active management areas if such a designation is “necessary to preserve the existing supply of groundwater for future needs.”
Their inaction comes amid a significant drop in groundwater levels in the area from the historic cumulative pumping of approximately 2 million acre-feet. It also violates an August 2023 court ruling quantifying water rights for the congressionally designated San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.
Under that ruling, minimum water levels must be maintained at nine monitoring wells for federal reserved water rights to be fulfilled. That mandate is already being violated at four of the enforcement monitoring wells.
In Gov. Hobbs' legal filing, she denies responsibility for enforcing Arizona law.
But this claim directly contradicts her own words.
On April 17, 2023, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called out Hobbs’ ADWR Director’s violation of law by stating, “two studies of a single basin in a forty year period does not satisfy the statutory duty to periodically review ‘all areas which are not included with an active management area,’ as A.R.S. § 45-412(C) requires.”
Hobbs responded to Mayes on Sept. 13, 2023, writing: “In the future, I invite you to reach out to me or my staff directly regarding…concerns that you might have about an agency I oversee.”
To assist in her anti-river protection efforts, Hobbs hired Fife Symington Chief of Staff and ADWR Director Rita Pearson McGuire to represent her in the San Pedro lawsuit.
McGuire has a long history of fighting protections for the San Pedro River. On Aug. 10, 1993, a Sierra Vista developer asked ADWR to stop issuing consumer protection warnings regarding the inevitable inadequacy of future water in the Sierra Vista area, saying such warnings “can have a significant impact on the marketability and, thus, value of proposed subdivisions.”
Under McGuire’s leadership, the following month ADWR complied with the developer’s request and stopped issuing consumer warnings. That policy change was widely opposed by hydrologists, including ADWR’s own hydrologists, and the U.S. Department of Interior.
“Hiring McGuire to fight against protections for the San Pedro River would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic,” Silver said. “Benson and Sierra Vista homeowners face water-use reductions, just as predicted by those consumer warnings that were halted under her leadership. Now both the entire ecosystem and the local economy will suffer.”
The San Pedro River is the last free-flowing desert river in the Southwest.
Endangered species that depend on it include southwestern willow flycatchers, Huachuca water umbels, desert pupfish, loach minnows, spikedace, yellow-billed cuckoos, Arizona eryngo and northern Mexican garter snakes.
