[applause]

Professor Robert J. Glennon:
Thanks Jack and… …good morning everyone. It's good to see everyone here. I'm enormously flattered to be part of this year's speaker series that has included such people as Justice O'Connor. She was down at the College…excuse me, College of Law just the last couple of weeks teaching a mini course, so she's an extraordinary woman and… …to be in her company is very, very flattering. I'm also flattered that you're here to listen to a talk about ground water… …most people, even my friends, when they find out that I've written a book about ground water respond with something like, “Do you think the Suns can win the title?”

[laughter]

…But I want to convince you that ground water is very, very important. And this first slide shows some basics about ground water use in the United States . Our ground water use has sky rocketed. The part that j ps off the page to me is the italicized word about five…five bullets down. That in the year 2000 we used an astonishing 30 trillion gallons of ground water. It was once thought that ground water was as ubiquitous as the air that we breath. Vast, underground lakes. Great lakes , but underground. But now, we've come to learn from the science of hydrology that nothing could be further from the truth… …you'll note that almost one – really, one quarter of the United States'… …supply of water comes from ground water and over half of us in the United States use ground water for our potable supply and this next graph shows exactly that and here in Arizona, about three-fifths, 60% of us in Arizona drink ground water for our…our potable supply.

I'd like to do a little bit about water law. Not much, just a little primer because my first message is that…is that there's a disconnect between law and science, so let's do a littler overview of water law. In the…American East, we have what's called riparianism. And if you own property on a lake or a stream, you are a riparian property owner and you automatically have rights to use that body of water. You share that use, that right, with everyone else who owns property on that stream. The rights aren't quantified. They're contingent. They're variable depending on the needs of everyone on that river or lake. But in the American West, we developed something very different – the Prior Appropriation Doctrine. And under that doctrine for surface water, the first person to divert water from a lake or a river has the senior right to it. First in time is first in right. The origin of this is kind of interesting. It came out of the Gold Rush days of the…of California in 1840's. The minors came in and as they started to extract the gold, they realized that it took a lot of water to… …remove the…the ore and they realized that there were conflicts that were developing. And, what I like best about this is if you think about those minors, they were thieves. They were stealing gold… …we can quibble about whether they were stealing gold from federal lands, native lands, Spanish-speaking people's lands, but it sure wasn't their land. And the lawyer in me loves the thought that the first thing that these thieves did was to set up a system of legal rules to figure out which thief had the right to which water.

[laughter]

Now, the problem is that when we go from surface water to ground water, that the rules change. There are a few states in the American West, Arizona not among them, that has a priority system for ground water, but for the most part, that's not the case. For the most part, the rules are either a right of catcher which is a curious right. That's a right that's kind of like a wild animal, like a deer in the woods. The first person to…to… …shoot it gets the right to it, or a reasonable use doctrine. Now, the reasonable use doctrine is an oxymoron. Because what it allows is, you can take as much water as you want, as long as it's for a beneficial use. What's a beneficial use? Anything.

[laughter]

So, this is a recipe for disaster…and…and what I'd like you to think about is an aquifer is a – imagine a giant milkshake glass. And now imagine each well as a straw in the glass. And what the reasonable use and right of capture doctrines permit is a limitless n ber of straws in the same glass. Well, that's a recipe for disaster. That's the epitome of what's been called the “tragedy of the commons.” Limitless access to a finite resource. Now, you might say well how did this come to be? Because this makes lawyers look kind of stupid, doesn't it? Well, it does. And…and I must say that when I first…started talking about this, I found myself surprised to be invited repeatedly to come before groups of hydrologists and to talk to them about this strange dichotomy. And my speech only made lawyers look silly and that's when I realized that's why they kept inviting me back.

[laughter]

This was sort of their idea of the world's longest lawyer joke… …

[laughter]

…put the suit in the front of the room and just be entertained for awhile. Well, it's not that lawyers were that d b, it's that the science of hydrology frankly, in the 19 th Century was so primitive. And in the mid 19 th Century, judges faced with the question of who gets right to ground water, not knowing how ground water moved threw up their hands and said, “Well, it you can get it out of the ground, it's yours.” Now, I'd like to address some of the problems of the system of the tragedy of the commons. First is, of course, that you can eventually exhaust the supply. And the poster child for that is… …is the Ogalala Aquifer. And this slide illustrates that…that aquifer. The Ogalala stretches from the Dakotas in the north down to the panhandle of Texas in the south. It's been described as the world's…the nation's food basket, an immensely productive agricultural region, but they're p ping and p ping and p ping and the water table keeps dropping and dropping and dropping and the colors on that slide, the reds and the oranges show you just how far the water has dropped. There are other problems with using so much ground water. One is increased energy costs. That's a major problem for farmers. Water is heavy. Those of you who hike know that every time you take that day pack and you put that _____ bottle in it, you're adding two pounds for every quart of water. But in the American West, we don't talk about water in terms of gallons or quarts, we talk about it in terms of an acre foot. The amount of water needed to fill an acre of land to a depth of 12 inches. That's a lot of water. About 325,000 gallons. That weighs 13,058 tons. So, if you're a farmer and you're looking at p ping from 500 feet below the surface of the land, you're facing multi thousand dollar electric bills every well -- or for every month for every well. Given that many farmers are on…on the financial edge, that's enough to drive them under. Then there's a decrease in water quality. This comes from the earth's internal temperature allowing things to go into solution that wouldn't go into solution at…at lower levels because the…it's not as warm. Some of the stuff, fluoride, arsenic, radon, is not so…not so…not so hot. Then there's salt water intrusion. And I have been shocked as I've been going around speaking to discover that there is no place on the coast of the United States that doesn't have this problem. The problem's a simple one to state, you p p the water out and the sea water migrates laterally contaminating the potable supply. And from the coast of Maine all the way over to islands off of the Washington coast, we have this problem. And then there's subsidence. And subsidence is a major problem here in Arizona . …Driving up from Tucson this morning, there was a report of a sink hole in Chandler that went all the way across Pecos Road . The…the photo in the middle of the slide and the photo on the right are from… …the Pital – Pinal County area. I rather prefer, though, the photo on the left. And if you look at the top of that, you'll see that there's a…a figure that says 1925…now that's where the land was as of 1925. And then the…at the bottom…at the fellow's feet it says 1977. That's how much the land has fallen. Well, how does this happen? Well, think of it this way. You go to the Safeway and you buy a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. And you come home and you open up the box and the first thing you think is, Kellogg's ripped me off.

[laughter]

It's already a third gone and you haven't had a bowl of cereal. Where did the…if Kellogg's had been kind enough to have added two cups of milk to the box of corn flakes, the flakes would still have been up to the top of the box, but they didn't. That's subsidence. Now, I want to go elsewhere. Because other people have talked about subsidence. My book “Water Follies” is the first book ever published, however, to focus on the impact of ground water p ping on the environment. And it is profound. And in the next few minutes, I'd like to share some stories with you… …about this impact.

Let's first start in Tucson . And… … Tucson , of course, is a wonderful place. We attract all kinds of visitors, but the visitors come in and they…they have a kind of universal experience. They drive west on Speedway Blvd. They come to a sign. The sign says Santa Cruz River and they look…and…and they think, these Arizonans, they have a sense of h or.

[laughter]

Definitely, definitely do. Well, it wasn't always like that. There was once a San… Santa Cruz River . And this slide is a photograph from 1942 that shows the Santa Cruz and on the…the right side just above the…the type script, there's water flowing. The whole picture is full of riparian forest, of cottonwood and willow trees and then in the very foreground, you'll see an odd shaped boulder. And now you move forward to 1989 and that's the Santa Cruz that we know and love. Where'd it go? The trees are all dead. The water's all gone. That's a function of ground water p ping. So, a little bit on the hydrologic cycle and this graph shows exactly that. My…my point here is a simple one. Water only moves by the force of energy. Now, the energy can come from that big yellow ball evaporating water off the surface of the oceans or lakes. It can come from the force of wind, energy moving the water over land. Energy in the form of gravity moving water in the form of snow or rain. Energy in the form of gravity as it runs off the land or gravity as it percolates into the ground and, and this is the critical part, on this slide, you'll see that water is migrating laterally beneath the surface of the earth and I ask this riddle. Where does water in a river come from if it hasn't rained recently? And the answer it is comes from the ground. It comes from water moving sideways subsurface to provide flows to our rivers, our lakes, our wetlands, and our streams. This…this slide illustrates exactly the point. In the top slide, you have a health river with a water table that is above the flow in the river and gravity brings water to the river. But the bottom slide shows that when the water table drops for whatever reason, well, gravity still works. Only now the flow is away from the river rather than to the river. When you introduce ground water p ping, you're introducing a new phenomena. What ground water p ping does it intercept water that was going toward a water course, but now will not get to the water course.

I want to tell one more quick story about Arizona and then offer some illustrations from around the country and that's…the…the San Pedro River . Any of you birders? Enjoy birding? Yeah? Well, then you'd know the San Pedro River . It's a…a jewel of a river…a…this…a jewel…a jewel of a river… …in southeast Arizona . It's a favorite of birders because it's the northernmost stopping point for many Central and South American birds. It's the southernmost stopping point for many Canadian and northern U.S. birds, but it's a river in trouble. It's a river in trouble. Growth is out of control down in the Sierra Vista area and in Cochise County generally. The growth is 100% dependent on ground water. That ground water is connected to the river and unfortunately for the first time in recorded history, the San Pedro River went dry in the year 2005. Well, since October we've had only a trace of rain. It's not very promising. But it's not just the drought. The drought is part of it. But it's the increase in ground water p ping.

Now I'd like to go elsewhere because my message this morning is…is not just about Arizona , though it is, and it's not just about the arid West, though it is. It's really about the entire country. World problems too. But I'm going to focus on the U.S. So, first let's go to the Midwest, to Wisconsin . And… …anyone from Wisconsin ? Originally? All right. A great state… …a state with extraordinary natural resources. They have 15,000 lakes. They have 8,000 miles of rivers and they have a citizenry that cares about the resources. The old spirit of La Follette progressivism is alive and well in Wisconsin . The story I tell her is about bottled water. Think about bottled water. What a phenomena. No one used to drink bottled water in the United States . I mean, maybe you'd have the Hinkley and Schmidt water cooler in the office. Or…or if you went to an effete Italian restaurant…maybe in Berkeley .

[laughter]

You know, with…you know, in the…in the Hinterland? No, no, we didn't…we didn't drink bottled water. And now bottled water is ubiquitous. I mean, in my law school classroom, beside every student's laptop is a bottle of water. You go to the gym and everyone's on the Stairmaster, they've got a bottle of water. They even make the Stairmaster now so that there's a place to put your bottle of water. …You go to the movie theater and, have you noticed the price of bottled water at the movie theater? It's more expensive than the popcorn. Bottled water now sells for more money than milk, oil, gasoline or things made with water like Coca-Cola.

[laughter]

How'd you like to be Coke? You're sitting there in Atlanta . You've got the secret formula for this gooey syrup. And someone else comes along and says, “I have a better idea. I'm going to put water in a bottle.”

[laughter]

Now the story I tell is about Nestle. And Perrier. Perrier, you mean the little green bottles of spring water from France, right? Yes, I do. But Nestle's been bought up by…sorry, Perrier's been bought up by Nestle, the Swiss based food giant. And they are the largest bottler of water in the United States . But you wouldn't know it. Because they sell it under different brands. Arrowhead, Calistoga, Iron Mountain , Zephyr Hill , Poland Spring, Osarca. All these regional brands of water. And the marketing strategy that Nestle has is to sell spring water on the theory that we Americans will pay more and find greater cache in drinking spring water than in water that is labeled treated water, Artesian water, filtered water, ground water or any of the other FDA approved labels. Now, here's the problem. In order to sell spring water, they have to get the water from a well that's located immediately adjacent to the spring. That's where this photograph or diagram of Wisconsin comes in. I want to talk with you about the McCann River . It's one of the blue ribbon trout streams in the state of Wisconsin . It's home to naturally reproducing strains of brook, brown and rainbow trout. It's an area that the State of Wisconsin has been protecting for about sixty years, buying up parcels, arranging for conservation easements, making sure the river's in good shape. It's…it's a gem of a river. It depends heavily on cold flow from the springs at the headwaters and what happened was that Nestle came in and proposed to put in a well next to the spring. In fact, they were going to put in a well located 60 feet away from the spring. So that's 60 feet. That would be about the length of this room, I guess. And the spring itself is a very small spring. It had a flow of between 3 and 5 cubic feet per second, so, it would be just about that wide, I should think. And the question was, well, if Nestle puts in this well and p ped as they proposed between 5 and 600 gallons of every minute…gallons per minute of every minute of every hour of every day in the year, 272 million gallons, what's it going to do to the spring? And the answer, fortunately, is nothing. And the reason why we know that is that's what the Perrier hydrologist said.

[laughter]

So, so I can – I went back to the University of Arizona to my hydrology buddy and I said, “Tom, the Perrier hydrologist says that nothing's going to happen to the spring.” And Tom said, “He's not a hydrologist. He's a hydrostitute.”

[laughter]

This is a water folly and the reason why it's a water folly is that if Perrier had a different marketing strategy, if Nestle moved their wells two miles away, they could have obtained water with the same chemical composition, but they couldn't have sold it as spring water. And so what is it about us as Americans cons ers or the company as a marketer that finds it necessary to sell spring water or for us to drink spring water. …This particular proposal did not go through. They could have…under Wisconsin law, they have the reasonable use doctrine. There was nothing the State of Wisconsin could have done to prevented Nestle from moving forward, but the political opposition of the community was so substantial that Nestle went next door to Michigan and opened up a bottling plant there. There are controversies all over the country with Nestle's plants. California , Texas , Maine , Phila… … Pennsylvania and… …and now Michigan .

…Let's go to Florida . And this is a…a diagram of the West Coast. Two big cities, Tampa and St. Pete's… …now I think you're probably saying Florida has a water shortage problem? Isn't it a…isn't it a swamp? Oh, it used to be a swamp, but we have drained that. Florida indeed has a huge water shortage problem. The two big cities are completely built out. There's no…no more room to grow on those two peninsulas, so what… …they did in the 70's and 80's was to go north to Pasco County and to buy huge tracts of rural land. And to put in immense well fields and p p and p p and p p. And this is a photograph of subsidence. It's not the Kellogg's Corn Flakes subsidence, though, but it's huge nonetheless. You'll see the fellow standing on the left side beneath the…adjacent to a hole that looks about the size of a house. This is subsidence caused in _____ limestone formation. And when you move water through limestone, the structure of the rock actually collapses itself. Here's a photograph of Crooked Lake from the 1970's when it was healthy and a more recent photograph that shows what's happened. Scores…scores of lakes in Florida have dried up from ground water p ping. The story I tell is about Steve Monsies. He was a hero of the first Gulf War. He and his wife Kathy were Midwestern kids. They liked Florida . They decided to retire there. They purchased a piece of property on a lake and… …built their dream retirement home and then after his last posting in the Sudan returned to Florida and began to live on the lake. They… …they had… …the surprise of their lives because their lakefront property turned into mud flat property. Literally, disappeared. Well, what are you supposed to do? Well, they did what you're supposed to do in a democracy, they made inquiries, they made telephone calls, they attended meetings, they…they did everything they could think of only to be stonewalled by the local utility. Eventually, it became apparent that the lake had dried up from ground water p ping. At that point, the local utility had a major public relations disaster on their hands. They had to do something. So what the engineers came up with was that we will refill the lake. Where do you think they got the water from to refill the lake?

[laughter]

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People say that the U.S. Geological Survey has no sense of h or. No, I don't believe that for a moment. So, this is the Straight River in Minnesota and the point I want to make is those big circles. Those are center pivot irrigation circles. And you can see the one on the bottom goes right into the apron of the river itself. So once again, we see a state, this time Minnesota , with the reasonable use doctrine permissive access to a finite resource and a threat to a blue ribbon trout stream. For the moment, the Straight River is in good shape. The big grower up there, RD Offit, has worked with the Trout Unlimited chapter. He's moved some of his wells. He's financed a hydrologic study. But, there's a big change in water use in the United States . Farmers in the Midwest , the East, the Southeast are now irrigating. They never used to. They used to dry land farm. Now they're irrigating and the threats to our rivers and lakes and streams is really very profound.

I want to tell one more story and then make some concluding observations. So, let's bring it home to Arizona and to the Grand Canyon . And how many of you have visited the Grand Canyon ? What an amazing place. One of the great wonders on earth, …but frankly we're not treating it very well. We're not doing well by it. The facilities up there are in appalling shape. Traffic congestion, well, I'm not sure it rivals the 101 that I was just on, but... …it still is a problem. Air pollution is a problem, both from vehicles and from the local power plant. We're…we haven't done well. We haven't done well by the employees who live in really subsistence housing that's in dreadful shape. So, we need to improve that facility. As it is, five or six million of us visit it each year. The proposal I tell here is of a local developer, Scottsdale , Arizona . He and his buddies teamed up and they said, we want to do a development just outside Grand Canyon National Park in the little town of Tusayan . And what we propose to do is a mixed use development. There will be a Native American craft center. There will be some commercial and retail space. There will be some condo units, some hotel/motel units, mixed use. So they pitched this to the park – er…to the Forest Service. Now, the…the National Park is surrounded by a National Forest and within that National Forest, there is some private land in the town of Tusayan . And what the developer said is, look it, my buddies and I own 22,000 acres of land that are in holdings in the National Forest. What we will do, National Forest, is to trade you those 22,000 acres for 272 acres of land in the town of Tusayan and then we'll do this development. So, the Forest Service thought it was a good idea. It would… …really be a wonderful thing for the…for the forest itself and so they put it out for…for comment. And they did that by preparing an environmental impact statement which is required under the National Environmental Policy Act and the EIS asked, “Well, what are you going to use for water?” And they said, “Well, we're going to use ground water.” Well, what…what are the consequences of using ground water. Well, the flow in Indian Garden Creek would be diminished somewhat. Now Indian Garden Creek, for those of you who may have hiked down the Bright Angel Trail to Phantom Ranch is that oasis halfway between the rim and the river. It's this amazing perennial creek with cottonwood trees all around. It provides a place to stop, collect your breath. Fill your canteen. Enjoy the immense beauty of the Grand Canyon . The EIS also said it would diminish the flow somewhat in Havasu Springs. Now, Havasu Springs, for those of you who may have rafted the river, is two-thirds of the way through your trip, river left. It's a turquoise body of water. It looks like it should be in the Caribbean, not in Arizona . It's immensely beautiful. Well, when this was released. People were angry. People were very angry that anyone could contemplate actions that would have these consequences. So the developer knew that the proposal was dead on arrival. So, he needed to do something else. So what he did was he huddled up with the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the two principal tribes, Grand Canyon Parks and Conservation Association, an environmental group, and the Grand Canyon Trust, another environmental group, and they came up with another proposal. And the proposal is the…is…the history and the future of water. Where we're going is…is reflected in this proposal. So, what they would do, is they would buy some Colorado River water rights and divert the water from the town of Topac, over on the west side of the State of Arizona and just… …running past Topac is a Burlington Northern Railroad line. And they would take this water and put it on Burlington Northern Railroad tankers and move the water by rail 180 miles east to Williams where they would then off load the water and build a 50 mile, 15 million dollar pipeline to move the water from Williams to Tusayan where they would then use the water for the development. Now, …I want to put in perspective what they're doing. This was going to cost a lot of money. A great deal of money, in fact, astronomical figures. They…they crunched all the n bers. It was going to cost $20,000 an acre foot. Now, I want to put this $20,000 an acre foot n ber in perspective. Farmers in Arizona 's Wellton/Mohawk District down in the Southwest part of the state, pay $15.00 an acre foot. This was $20,000. Farmers can't make a profit with $20,000 water, even if they grew marijuana.

[laughter]

So the developer takes these n bers, gives the n bers to the accountant, the accountant crunches the n bers and the accountant says, it's a go.

[laughter]

But, you know, if we don't think about water in terms of acre feet and we think about water as, say, Nestle would think about water, in gallons or quarts, $20,000 water costs 6 cents a gallon. Just the cost of doing business for a development at the gateway to one of the great splendors on earth. The Coconino Board of Supervisors like the idea and they approved it. At the 11 th hour, two of the environmental groups that had been supportive, …The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club splint company with the other environmental groups and the hotel interest in Williams, Flagstaff and Tusayan decided that they didn't want any…any competition, so they opposed it and they mounted an initiative campaign and the voters in Flagstaff voted it down – in the county voted it down. I was sorry to see it go down. The developer told me he's going to excise the hotel units and bring it back for another try. I was sorry to see it go down because for one thing, it would have helped the park. As it is now, that 22,000 acres of land the developer owns, he can develop them and use ground water under Arizona law. This would have protected the…the park and the forest. I was also see it…see it…sorry to see it go down because it had state of the art conservation. Oh, I don't mean just typical low flow fixtures and the like. They were going to be harvesting water off of rooftops and parking lots. They had every imaginable water savings gizmo. You would too if you were paying $20,000 for an acre foot of water.

[laughter]

And that then leads me to my…to my final point and my conclusion. And…the…the final point is to try to identify the problem and tell you what I think the solution is. The problem…is it population growth? Well, of course it's population growth. There's too many of us. …I won't go there. I have little capacity to control it. Nor do you, so, let's move on.

…It is appalling waste? Oh yes, and we can all point our fingers at the…the worst abuse, but it's back to this milkshake glass. It's back to the tragedy of the commons. It's back to the fact that this is a finite resource, but we are allowing…allowing infinite access to it. And instead of reform, we get water follies. We get refilling the lakes and all these other things that we're doing to deny the reality. So what's the solution? First, I'd like to convey to you this morning a sense of urgency because the figures that I started with were from 2000. What's been happening since 2000? Historic drought and as that drought has worsened, farmers, cities, miners and individual homeowners have drilled thousands and thousands of new wells. So, the impacts I've been describing are going to get nothing but worse. And, because ground water moves slowly, it can take years or even decades before water that has p ped…been p ped makes itself manifest in terms of lower flows at the lakes or the rivers.

So what do we do? Well, I think we need to recognize that water is both a public resource and there are property rights in it. It's 150 years after the rise of the Prior Appropriation Doctrine. People who are using water have interest in it and we need to recognize those interests. So what do we do? We combine government rules and regulations, but what kind of government rules and regulations? You can't put the well in next to the river. It really isn't rocket science. And you need government rules because Nestle doesn't really care whether the flow in the river goes down and the trout don't reproduce. That's on the State of Wisconsin 's property. That's not the company's problem. So, you need government rules and regulations for locating wells and to encourage us to conserve. But we also need market forces. Because we haven't recognized the value of water. And we need to realize that if someone wants to come along and put a new straw in the glass, they should be required to pinch someone else's straw, to buy up the water rights. To retire an existing use in exchange for permission to put in a new straw. And the final component of this market idea is that we need to price water appropriately. In short, I want to raise your water rates. Now this is, I know, politically unpopular but I have tenure.

[laughter]

And to be serious for just a moment, you pay less for your water than you do for your cell phones, for your cable TV. That's an odd set of values. And what we need to do is…as a community, is to face that fact and to move toward an intelligent pricing of water that would have inverted block rates. The more you use, the more you pay. And then, as a community, figure out what we're going to do to…with that surplus that we will generate by increasing water rights. There are tremendous opportunities out there. So, in the end, …there are funny stories, but I am optimistic because Mother Nature is remarkably forgiving and though we have been profligate with her resources, if we can just change the direction somewhat…and it won't be easy. No easier than changing the direction of an ocean liner. But we can do this. If we have the will to do it, we will do it. And if we do, then there is reason to think that the springs will bubble and the rivers will flow. Thanks.

[applause]

Presenter:
Thanks very much. Jack says we have a time for…time for a few comments or questions. Yes, back there?

Question:
Well, this is interesting because we moved into our house when we graduated from the University of Arizona at the corner of 7 th Avenue and Bethany Home and Christown, at that time, was a carrot field and our water level was 27…___________ 27 feet. We… …we were on the Cave Creek Aquifer, …when we dug the septic tank. We sold our house in 1962, which was 11 years later. It was 138 feet down at that time. And imagine, there were no signals. There was nothing. So it dropped that fast and we were at the end of Phoenix . We were…we were out on the ______ it just _____ I…I've never forgotten… [unable to transcribe]

Glennon:
That's pretty common in Phoenix . At least the East Valley . Some of the West Valley is still pretty high water. In Tucson , we've dropped the water table about 250 feet and unlike you folks, we don't have the Salt River so…of course, there's not much of a Salt River this year…

[laughter]

Glennon:
… …which really annoys me. I drew – I finally drew a permit to raft the Salt River and this year there's no water.

[laughter]

Glennon:
Yeah. Other comments?

Question:
Yes sir, …ass ing that we're addressing the problems and treating them more than we are just addressing the effects, …how about using holistic medicine paradigms and attempting to increase the absorption rate in our catchment areas rather than just focusing on usage?

Glennon:
Yeah, that's a terrific point. …The…you can think about the supply and…and you can think about demand. You can think about trying to increase the supply by having water not run off, but percolate into the ground and both Phoenix and Tucson are pioneering around the country in doing lots of wonderful… …projects along those lines. If you…if you can just slow the movement of monsoon event water through a series of catchment basins, then you have reason to think that you'll get more of the water percolating in. So that's certainly part of an intelligent strategy. Sir?

Question:
In your judgment, is the Tempe Town Lake a major or a minor waste?

Glennon:
Oh golly! Do I have to take a position that that?

[laughter]

Glennon:
I…I mean, I think – or sure…is the Tempe …he's pimping me here. Is the Tempe Town Lake a minor or a major waste… …I think it's a minor waste. …There is some evaporation loss off that, …I would bet that the hydrologists can also come in and say, yes, but you're getting more recharge than if we just let that water go down further. …There's…there's certainly some cons ptive use, but if it's providing… …recreational benefits to the community, then…then it's something I could certainly see… …supporting. I mean, let's remember that 80% of water in Arizona is used by farmers. And most of that is going to grow alfalfa and cotton. And some of that is growing those crops in the driest times of the year. And what we need to be thinking about and what I'm trying to do is to give farmers an option of not growing alfalfa in July in Wellton/Mohawk. You know, maybe they'd like to spend July in San Diego .

[laughter]

Glennon:
And…I want to give them the option of doing exactly that by requiring developers to purchase existing water rights. I'm getting the signal that maybe we can take one more question. I will stay indefinitely. I am obviously passionate about these issues.

Question:
What's the technology, the economics of converting sea water to potable water?

Glennon:
Yeah, …what's the technology and economics of converting sea water to potable water? I didn't get a chance to tell you about the story from Tampa Bay where they've installed the largest desalt plant in the…in the western hemisphere. …It was on line for six weeks when the filters fouled. …Leading… …one of the… …I guess the fellow who was running the plant down there to say, sometimes being on the cutting edge is not very comfortable.

[laughter]

Glennon:
…I'm also pro—inclined to paraphrase Winston Churchill and to suggest that desalt is a technology that has great potential and always will.

[laughter]

Glennon:
Thank you very much.

[applause]