Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

the most important constituent group for the Central Arizona Project. And most
of them were sophisticated enough to understand and get it. Some of the
farming interests were allies, but many of them were not. There was a feeling
that our demand that they give up their long term water allocations in exchange
for being relieved from their long term “take or pay” obligations... Seemed to us
made sense, you can’t afford to pay for it, give it back. If we have extra we’ll sell
it to you. And we’ll sell it to you every year but we’ll tell you like five years in
advance how much we think we’re going to have, but you don’t have any
permanent right to it. The benefit, the larger societal management benefit of that
is, and this is why I came to feel keeping agriculture in business is so important,
agriculture is a buffer. In times of drought if you don’t have enough water you
take it back from the farmers and you deliver it to the cities. In times of plenty if
you have extra water give it to the farmers and let them plant some crops. So it
becomes a mechanism to move water in and out of a use. That doesn’t exist in
Nevada for example, they can’t do that. They can’t do that in Southern California
really anymore. They can start now moving water in California from the Central
Valley to the Coast. California has a big problem. People live and farm in
different places. In Arizona we live and farm in essentially the same place, this
corridor between Phoenix and Tucson, is where we use the CAP water. So
we’re urbanizing the area we’re farming. Well if we keep some farming in
business in that area then we can use that agricultural water use as a buffer.
And that’s in fact exactly what we’ve done in the last few years of this drought.
That’s why you can still wash your car any day of the week you want and you
Interview with Grady Gammage
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