Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

CAP funded. Babbitt and Cecil Andrus who was then Secretary of Interior
seemed to have engineered a threat by Interior [against] Arizona—when Babbitt
was Governor, before he was Secretary—that [was] the threat from the outside
you needed to get everybody in Arizona to cut a deal. So we cut a deal to pass
the Groundwater Management Act and essentially its consequence for the first,
about twenty years of its life, was to force development to be hooked up to the
pipes. Even before the Groundwater Management Act it was hard in Arizona to
go outside of the city limits and sink a well and live in sort of splendid isolation
that we think of as being life in the West. One of the ironies of life in the West is
you really can’t be a rugged individualist. You have to get along with your
neighbors well enough to share a water system. So you couldn’t really go out
and dig these wells just whereever you wanted to anyway, but after the
Groundwater Management Act passed you couldn’t legally do that. You had to
have a hundred year assured supply and it couldn’t be a hundred years worth of
groundwater. You had to be hooked up to a renewable supply, SRP or CAP
being a primary renewable supply. That had an impact as we grew and boomed
in the last part of the twentieth century of pushing our cities closer together.
Water has always been kind of a binding agent. It’s been something that drove
the cities in Arizona to be higher density, to grow in a more orderly fashion. Not
so much leapfrogging as you see in parts of the country where you can be on
your own water supply. The reason, when you fly into Phoenix you hit that hard
edge of development and then there is either desert or farmland outside of it, is
what you’re seeing is where the pipes end. That’s where the pipe extensions
Interview with Grady Gammage
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