This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Cities and towns across the Mississippi River basin have always needed to weather the environmental disasters associated with living along a river.

The past few years have brought wild fluctuations between flooding and drought, bringing more stress to the communities nestled along the Mississippi’s 2,350 miles.

In the last five years alone, they’ve seen springtime flooding, flash flooding, significant drought, and low river levels, with opposite ends of this spectrum sometimes occurring in the same calendar year.

“When these rivers have disasters, the disaster doesn’t stay in the river,” said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. “It damages a lot of businesses, homes, sidewalks, and streets; even broadband conduit and all kinds of utilities, mains and water return systems.”

The cost of those damages can run into the millions, if not billions.

One potential solution Wellenkamp encourages the 105 individual communities in his organization to consider is to work with, rather than against, the river. 

“Just about all of them have some sort of inlet into the Mississippi River that they’re built around,” he said. “Some of them are big and some of them are really small. But all of them need attention.”

It’s not a new idea, and many cities are already investing in nature-based solutions, such as removing pavement, building marshes, and making room for the river to flow. Now, St. Louis is looking to learn from Missouri’s neighbors in Dubuque, Iowa, on what the city can do with its River Des Peres. 

‘It’s just an eyesore’

“It’s just an eyesore,” said Beatrice Chatfield, 15, who was walking along the River Des Peres pedestrian and bike greenway with her mom Jen. “There’s trash and debris and muck in it. It’s just all-around gross.”

It’s less of a river and more of a large concrete and stone-lined drainage channel that winds from the Mississippi through the urban landscape before disappearing beneath St. Louis’ largest park, Forest Park. It then reemerges further west in the suburb of University City.

“It’s basically the small version of the LA River, which is just a cesspool,” said Sam Rein, 29. “During the summer it smells—we don’t exactly like living next to it, but it’s a neat feat of engineering that’s for sure.” 

It can also be dangerous, Wellenkamp said.

“As the Mississippi River rises, the River Des Peres then begins to back up into people’s basements and yards and small businesses into the city,” he said. 

Some 300 homes flooded in University City alone when the St. Louis region was hit with record breaking rainfall in July 2022. Wellenkamp argues St. Louis should look to other cities in the Mississippi River basin who’ve learned to work with water, instead of against it.

Dubuque’s hidden creak

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dubuque, Iowa, had a major flash flooding problem. Over the course of 12 years, the city of nearly 60,000 received six presidential disaster declarations for flooding and severe storms.

Whenever heavy rains drenched the city, the water would rush down the bluff and overwhelm the stormwater infrastructure, said Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh. 

Manhole covers erupted from the water pressure, turning streets into creeks and damaging thousands of properties.

“Somewhere along the line about 100 years ago, somebody buried a natural creek and turned it into a storm sewer and it wasn’t keeping up anymore,” Cavanagh said. “Many of the residents (in these neighborhoods) are low to moderate income and those least able to really recover from damage like this.” 

Around 2001, the city started looking for solutions. 

Dubuque faced a decision: expand the existing underground storm sewer or bring the Bee Branch Creek back into the daylight, expanding the floodplain and giving the water somewhere to go. The city opted for the latter option.

The city established a citizen advisory committee early on in the process, which played a central role determining the eventual design for the restored Bee Branch Creek. 

Residents wanted more than concrete drainage ditch, Cavanagh said. They wanted trails, grasses, and greenery that wildlife and people could both enjoy, and, importantly, access to the water, he added.

The Bee Branch Creek turned into a 20-year-long project that became much more than just an engineering solution for excess rain water, Cavanagh said.

“It is one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city, a place where people go and watch the ducks and the birds,” he said.

Most importantly, it solved the city’s flash flooding issues, said Deron Muehring, Dubuque’s water and resource recovery center director, who before that role was an engineer involved with the Bee Branch restoration from start to finish. 

“2011 is the last presidential disaster declaration we had,” he said. “Now we haven’t had rains of that magnitude, but we have had significant rainstorms where we would have expected to have flooding and flood damage without these improvements.”

Learning from Dubuque

Other river cities see Dubuque’s success and want to know how they can apply it to their own flooding challenges, Cavanagh said. 

“As mayor, I’ve talked about this project more than anything else,” he said. “People want to know: ‘How did you do it? Why did you do it? What worked and what didn’t?’”

Cavanagh covered those details during a presentation on the Bee Branch to St. Louis aldermen in December, who were looking for ways to apply those lessons on the River Des Peres.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer was inspired by the ideas. 

“I could wish all day long that things like this had started sooner,” Schweitzer said. “But we’re here now and we have a responsibility. The length of time something will take always feels really long, but it takes longer if we don’t start.”

Time isn’t the only constraint, so is money. The Bee Branch in Dubuque had a price tag near $250 million. The city found a mixture of state and federal grant dollars totaling $163 million related to disaster resiliency, the environment, transportation, and recreation and tourism, leaving the city covering around $87 million, Cavanagh said. 

Midwest Climate Collaborative Director, Heather Navarro, said floodplain restoration projects like Bee Branch are worth the investment. 

“We have done a lot to pave over our floodplains and wetlands, but we know there’s a lot of inherent natural value in those,” she said. “Whether it is absorbing floodwaters, helping filter pollution, reducing soil erosion. When you start to add up those numbers, that really starts to change the economics. ”

She adds that when cities improve existing infrastructure like roads, bridges, and wastewater management, they should consider how to use nature-based solutions and reduce flood and other climate risks. 

“It’s not like we’re swapping out old infrastructure for new infrastructure,” Navarro said. For example, rain gardens can reduce pressure on wastewater drainage by absorbing excess water. Trees can reduce heat. “We’re really taking a whole new approach to how this infrastructure is interrelated with other systems that we’re trying to provide for our community.”

And there’s billions of dollars on the table from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act  for communities to tackle projects that build resilience. 

The path forward

As it stands, St. Louis is at the beginning of even considering what a project to bring more nature to the River Des Peres could even look like. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also exploring projects, specifically in University City, that could help store rainwater during heavy rains. 

The next major step would be a feasibility study of the entire River Des Peres watershed, which encompasses a handful of municipalities, Schweitzer said.

“There’s so many people who would need to be at the table to move something like this forward, which I don’t think is a bad thing,” she said. 

Navarro said if cities like St. Louis want to use natural infrastructure to reduce their flood risk, there’s no better time than now. 

“We know that climate change is impacting our communities,” she said. “We know that the way that we have been doing things in the past has in part contributed to where we are when it comes to the climate crisis.”

Wellenkamp agrees.

“Nature attracts business,” he said. “It stabilizes property value. It reduces crime. It creates resilience to disasters and extreme events. And it gives your place a better quality of life.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate risks increase, Mississippi River towns look to each other for solutions on Jan 6, 2024.

As more and more Americans embrace electric vehicles, automakers and the federal government are racing to secure the materials needed to build EV batteries, including by pouring billions of dollars into battery recycling. Today, recyclers are focused on recovering valuable metals like nickel and cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries. But with the trade war between the U.S. and China escalating, some are now taking a closer look at another battery mineral that today’s recycling processes treat as little more than waste.

On December 1, China implemented new export controls on graphite, the carbon-based mineral that’s best known for being used in pencils but that’s also used in a more refined form in commercial EV battery anodes. The new policies, which the Chinese government announced in October shortly after the Biden administration increased restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, have alarmed U.S. lawmakers and raised concerns that battery makers outside of China will face new challenges securing the materials needed for anodes. Today, China dominates every step of the battery anode supply chain, from graphite mining and synthetic graphite production to anode manufacturing.

Along with a new federal tax credit that rewards automakers that use minerals produced in America, China’s export controls are boosting the U.S. auto industry’s interest in domestically sourced graphite. But while it could take many years to set up new graphite mines and production facilities, there is another, potentially faster option: Harvesting graphite from dead batteries. As U.S. battery recyclers build big new facilities to recover costly battery metals, some are also trying to figure out how to recycle battery-grade graphite — something that isn’t done at scale anywhere in the world today due to technical and economic barriers. These companies are being aided by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into graphite recycling initiatives aimed at answering basic research questions and launching demonstration plants.

If the challenges holding back commercial graphite recycling can be overcome, “the used graphite stream could be huge,” Matt Keyser, who manages the electrochemical energy storage group at the the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Grist. In addition to boosting domestic supplies, recycling graphite would prevent critical battery resources from being wasted and could reduce the carbon emissions tied to battery production.

To understand why graphite is hard to recycle, a bit of material science is necessary. Graphite is a mineral form of carbon that has both metallic and non-metallic properties, including high electrical and thermal conductivity and chemical inertness. These qualities make it useful for a variety of energy and industrial applications, including storing energy inside lithium-ion batteries. While a lithium-ion battery is charging, lithium ions flow from the metallic cathode into the graphite anode, embedding themselves between crystalline layers of the carbon atoms. Those ions are released while the battery is in use, generating an electrical current.

Graphite can be found in nature as crystalline flakes or masses, which are mined and then processed to produce the small, spherical particles needed for anode manufacturing. Graphite is also produced synthetically by heating byproducts of coal or petroleum production to temperatures greater than 2,500 degrees Celsius (about 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit) — an energy-intensive (and often emissions-intensive) process that triggers “graphitization” of the carbon atoms. 

Relatively cheap to mine or manufacture, graphite is lower in value than many of the metals inside battery cathodes, which can include lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Because of this, battery recyclers traditionally haven’t taken much interest in it. Instead, with many battery recyclers hailing from the metals refining business, they’ve focused on what they already knew how to do: extracting and purifying those cathode metals, often in their elemental form. Graphite, which can comprise up to 30 percent of an EV battery by weight, is treated as a byproduct, with recyclers either burning it for energy or separating it out to be landfilled.

“Up until recently, people talking about recycling for batteries really went after those token [metal] elements because they were high value … and because that recycling process can overlap quite a bit with conventional metal processing,” Ryan Melsert, the CEO of U.S. battery materials startup American Battery Technology Company, told Grist.

For graphite recycling to be worthwhile, recyclers need to obtain a high-performance, battery-grade product. To do so, they need methods that separate the graphite from everything else, remove any contaminants like metals and glues, and restore the material’s original geometric structure, something that’s often done by applying intense heat.

Crude recycling approaches like pyrometallurgy, a traditional process in which batteries are smelted in a furnace, won’t work for graphite. “More than likely you’re going to burn off the graphite” using pyrometallurgy, Keyser said.

Today, the battery recycling industry is moving away from pyrometallurgy and embracing hydrometallurgical approaches, in which dead batteries are shredded and dissolved in chemical solutions to extract and purify various metals. Chemical extraction approaches could be adapted for graphite purification, although there are still “logistical issues,” according to Keyser. Most hydrometallurgical recycling processes use strong acids to extract cathode metals, but those acids can damage the crystalline structure of graphite. A longer or more intensive heat treatment step may be needed to restore graphite’s shape after extraction, driving up energy usage and costs.

A third approach is direct recycling, in which battery materials are separated and repaired for reuse without any smelting or acid treatment. This gentler process aims to keep the structure of the materials intact. Direct recycling is a newer idea that’s further from commercialization than the other two methods, and there are some challenges scaling it up because it relies on separating materials very cleanly and efficiently. But recent research suggests that for cathode metals, it can have significant environmental and cost benefits. Direct recycling of graphite, Keyser said, has the potential to use “far less energy” than synthetic graphite production.

Today, companies are exploring a range of graphite recycling processes. 

American Battery Technology Company has developed an approach that starts with physically separating graphite from other battery materials like cathode metals, followed by a chemical purification step. Additional mechanical and thermal treatments are then used to restore graphite’s original structure. The company is currently recycling graphite at a “very small scale” at its laboratory facilities in Reno, Nevada, Melsert said. But in the future, it plans to scale up to recycling several tons of graphite-rich material a day with the help of a three-year, nearly $10 million Department of Energy grant funded through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

Massachusetts-based battery recycling startup Ascend Elements has also developed a chemical process for graphite purification. Dubbed “hydro-to-anode,” Ascend Elements’ process “comes from some of the work we’ve done on hydro-to-cathode,” the company’s patented hydrometallurgical process for recycling cathode materials, said Roger Lin, the vice president of global marketing and government relations at the firm. Lin said that Ascend Elements is able to take graphite that’s been contaminated during an initial shredding step back to 99.9 percent purity, exceeding EV industry requirements, while also retaining the material properties needed for high performance anodes. In October, Ascend Elements and Koura Global announced plans to build the first “advanced graphite recycling facility” in the U.S.

The Department of Energy-backed startup Princeton NuEnergy, meanwhile, is exploring direct recycling of graphite. Last year, Princeton NuEnergy opened the first pilot-scale direct recycling plant in the U.S. in McKinney, Texas. There, batteries are shredded and a series of physical separation processes are used to sort out different materials, including cathode and anode materials. Cathode materials are then placed in low-temperature reactors to strip away contaminants, followed by additional steps to reconstitute their original structure. The same general approach can be used to treat anode materials, according to founder and CEO Chao Yan. 

“From day one, we are thinking to get cathode and anode material both recycled,” Yan said. But until now, the company has focused on commercializing direct recycling for cathodes. The reason, Yan said, is simple: “No customer cared about anode materials in the past.”

That, however, is beginning to change. Yan said that over the past year — and especially in the last few months since China announced its new export controls — automakers and battery manufacturers have taken a greater interest in graphite recycling. Melsert also said that he’s starting to see “very significant interest” in recycled graphite.

Still, customers will have to wait a little longer before they can purchase recycled graphite for their batteries. The methods for purifying and repairing graphite still need refinement to reduce the cost of recycling, according to Brian Cunningham, the batteries R&D program manager at the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. Another limiting step is what Cunningham calls the “materials qualification step.” 

“We need to get recycled graphite to a level where companies can provide material samples to battery companies to evaluate the material,” Cunningham said. The process of moving from very small-scale production to levels that allow EV makers to test a product, “could take several years to complete,” he added. “Once the recycled graphite enters the evaluation process, we should start to see an uptick in companies setting up pilot- and commercial-scale equipment.“

Supply chain concerns could accelerate graphite recycling’s journey to commercialization. Over the summer, the Department of Energy added natural graphite to its list of critical materials for energy. Graphite is also on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of critical minerals — minerals that are necessary for advanced technologies but at risk of supply disruptions. 

This classification means that domestically sourced graphite can help EVs qualify for the “clean vehicle credit,” a tax credit that includes strict requirements around critical mineral sourcing following the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To qualify for the full credit, EV makers must obtain a large fraction of their battery minerals from the U.S. or a free-trade partner. By 2025, their vehicles may not contain any critical minerals extracted or processed by a “foreign entity of concern” — an entity connected to a shortlist of foreign countries that includes China. This requirement could “drive a premium” for domestically recycled graphite, Lin said.

Tax incentives could be key to helping recycled graphite compete with virgin graphite, according to Yuan Gu, a graphite analyst at the consulting firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Despite China’s new export controls, Gu expects graphite to remain relatively cheap in the near future due to an “oversupply” of graphite on the market right now. While Gu said that graphite recycling is “definitely on radar for Western countries” interested in securing future supplies, its viability will depend on “how costly or cheap the recycled material will be.”

If graphite recycling does catch on, industry insiders are hopeful it will be able to meet a significant fraction of the country’s future graphite needs — which are growing rapidly as the clean energy transition accelerates — while making the entire EV battery supply chain more sustainable.

“You can help regional supply chains, you can help with efficiency, with carbon footprints,” Lin said.  “I think it’s a no-brainer this will happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The next frontier in EV battery recycling: Graphite on Jan 5, 2024.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court decided not to revisit its earlier decision to strike down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban in new buildings. The ruling dealt a blow to the city of Berkeley, which requested a rehearing after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ initial decision in April, and casts uncertainty over similar policies to electrify buildings in dozens of other cities. 

In effect, the court simply chose to uphold its earlier judgment in April to invalidate Berkeley’s gas ban, legal experts told Grist. But unless the city of Berkeley chooses to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit’s judgment is now final. (The Berkeley city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its next steps in time for publication.) That means that for cities in the 9th Circuit region, which spans 11 western states and territories including California, Oregon, and Washington, local gas bans similar to Berkeley’s are no longer legal. 

“For cities in the 9th Circuit that have laws that are modeled closely on the Berkeley ordinance, this is a door closing,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

In 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the country to pass a ban on installing natural gas piping in new buildings, requiring all-electric appliances. Dozens of cities across the 9th Circuit region, including more than 70 in California alone, quickly followed suit, drafting new laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air pollution. 

But later that year, the California Restaurant Association initiated a lawsuit against Berkeley’s policy, arguing that natural gas stoves were essential for preparing foods like “flame-seared meats” and “charred vegetables.” In 2021, a federal district court ruled against the restaurant industry, but that decision was overturned in April 2023 by the 9th Circuit. That court held that national energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s law, which would in effect prevent the use of gas-powered appliances that meet federal standards. The city of Berkeley requested a rehearing of the case before 11 judges on the 9th Circuit — a petition that was denied in this week’s decision. 

Sarah Jorgensen, a lawyer for the California Restaurant Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the judges had acknowledged that “energy policy was a matter of national concern and that there should be uniform national regulation.” Sean Donahue, a lawyer for the city of Berkeley, called the order disappointing and stated that Berkeley’s ordinance “is well within its authority to protect the health and safety of its own residents,” according to the Chronicle.

Tuesday’s denial featured a detailed dissent authored by U.S. Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland and seven other judges on the 9th Circuit. “Climate change is one of the most pressing problems facing society today, and we should not stifle local government attempts at solutions based on a clear misinterpretation of an inapplicable statute,” wrote Friedland. “I hope other courts will not repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.”

Including any dissent at all is highly unusual for an action as rote as denying a petition, said Turner. “It seems like she is attempting to bolster the cases of other states and local governments that might be looking to pursue building electrification policies and providing a legal road map for why other courts should find a Berkeley-style ordinance to be lawful,” Turner noted.

In the United States, buildings account for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. For cities motivated to electrify their buildings, Tuesday’s denial of a rehearing is a “disappointing outcome,” said Jim Dennison, an attorney working on building decarbonization at the Sierra Club. Since the April ruling, several cities in California have already pulled back their own natural gas bans, including Encinitas, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo, to avoid legal risks. Eugene, Oregon, which modeled its policy on Berkeley’s, also withdrew its gas ban in June.

Yet some cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, still have natural gas bans on the books. Tuesday’s decision could inspire those cities to take action, but ultimately, whether they decide to halt or maintain their gas bans is up to each individual government, said Turner. It could also depend on the resources they have available to take on potential legal challenges. 

“Local governments have different appetites for legal risk, and so they chose to navigate this decision and this time in different ways,” Turner said. The legal uncertainty created by the Berkeley decision especially impacts smaller communities that may not have the staff and financial resources to take on potential litigation, she said. “This uncertainty is going to cause some local governments to pull back a bit. And that’s an unfortunate reality of being a local government. They don’t always have the resources that a San Francisco or a Berkeley has to throw behind a challenge like this.”

Both Turner and Dennison emphasized that despite a setback to local gas bans, city officials still have a wide range of options available for electrifying buildings, including building codes and air pollution standards. Dennison highlights Washington state’s recently updated building codes as one legally robust way to reduce emissions from buildings. The codes, which set minimum energy efficiency standards, will require new buildings to achieve the same energy performance as buildings that use electric heat pumps beginning this year. Notably, they offer building owners flexibility in meeting the benchmarks instead of requiring them to install heat pumps or forgo natural gas.

Local governments can also consider setting emissions standards for buildings and appliances, which concern air pollution rather than energy use. That’s an approach taken by New York City, which prohibits new buildings from emitting more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide pollution. Turner notes that state utility regulators can also take steps to limit the expansion of natural gas infrastructure, which could also serve building electrification goals.

“Cities are extremely motivated to address emissions from their buildings, which are an incredibly important source of climate and health-harming pollution,” said Dennison. “And I don’t think that this court order can stand in the way of that progress.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Berkeley’s gas ban is all but dead. What does that mean for other cities? on Jan 5, 2024.

When a small Arizona community called Rio Verde Foothills lost its water supply one year ago, forcing locals to skip showers and eat off paper plates, it became a poster child for unwise desert development. The rural neighborhood of about 2,000 people north of Phoenix had relied on trucked-in water deliveries from the nearby city of Scottsdale, but the city elected to stop deliveries to conserve its own water amid a climate-fueled drought on the Colorado River.

Last month, after months of public debate over how to resolve the crisis in Rio Verde Foothills, the state government approved a deal that will restore permanent water access to the beleaguered community, albeit with much higher bills than residents are used to. But when the new legislative session begins next week, the Republican-led chamber may actually weaken the standards that govern new development, rather than tightening them, clearing the way for thousands more homes to pop up on water-insecure outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson. 

“The broader solutions are tougher, and people may not be ready to contemplate what really fixing the problem would require,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who represents part of Tucson. 

When Arizona developers build six or more homes on a tract of land, they have to demonstrate that they can supply water to those homes for at least a hundred years. This rule exists to protect home buyers from the kind of land fraud that was notorious in the state for decades, but over time some landowners have found a way around it. The developers of so-called “wildcat” subdivisions split large parcels of land into smaller chunks and sell hundreds of those chunks off one by one, skirting the requirement to ensure a long-term water supply. 

Rio Verde Foothills is one such subdivision. Many residents of the neighborhood have residential wells that pump water from underground. But because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

As the media frenzy around Rio Verde Foothills reached a fever pitch last summer, the state legislature passed a bill that forced Scottsdale to provide water to the neighborhood through 2025. A few months later, a state regulator approved a long-term agreement between the community and a large utility called Epcor, which agreed to build a new water standpipe in the neighborhood and import a new water supply from elsewhere in Phoenix. Rio Verde Foothills residents will pay for the $12 million project through water bills that could be double or triple current rates. The deal also limits future growth in the neighborhood, allowing for just 150 additional homes to access the standpipe.

“It’s been an exhausting, exhausting fight for this community, and people are not happy with how much it costs,” said John Hornewer, a Rio Verde resident who runs the neighborhood’s largest water hauling company.

But the state legislature’s fix doesn’t address the larger problems presented by wildcat subdivisions. While Democrats and some Republicans in the legislature sought to add language that would have limited when and how developers can exploit the wildcat loophole, they couldn’t get enough support to send it to the governor’s desk. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs initially held out for a fix to the loophole — she vetoed an initial bill in May that didn’t tackle the wildcat issue — but she ultimately signed a Rio Verde-focused bill that reached her desk the following month, acknowledging that the neighborhood needed immediate help.

“The bill did not do anything to fix the underlying problem,” said Sundareshan, the state senator from Tucson. “We could find ourselves with many more communities … in the same situation.”

Hobbs has continued to push for broader reform on the wildcat issue. Last year she created a “water policy council” made up of experts and industry leaders and tasked it with alleviating the state’s water woes, including the wildcat loophole. The council released its final recommendations in December, calling on the legislature to clamp down on these subdivisions and give local governments more power to regulate them. It isn’t clear how many such subdivisions exist, but they have been popping up outside Phoenix and Tucson for at least two decades.

Democratic lawmakers will make another push once the state’s legislative session starts next week, but Hobbs’s proposed reforms still face stiff opposition. Many members of the state legislature oppose more government involvement in water regulations, and the state’s home building lobby has fought against previous efforts to clamp down on the kind of lot-splitting that enables wildcat development.

“There’s an appetite for [reform], but I think that will be lost in the shuffle,” said John Kavanagh, a Republican state senator who represents the Rio Verde Foothills area. “The home builders will be aggressively lobbying against a lot-split bill, and you’ve got some members with a more libertarian slant who believe in the right to property being almost unlimited.”

Indeed, home builders are now pushing the legislature to move in the other direction, arguing that the 100-year water supply standard is holding back the state’s economic growth. Back in June, Hobbs’s administration paused new water supply approvals in the Phoenix area, declaring that the city’s aquifers didn’t have enough water to support future development over the next century. This has left several major development projects in limbo, with builders unable to move forward on tens of thousands of homes.

Hobbs’s administration has since moved to loosen the moratorium in response to protest from the real estate industry, and regulators may soon allow builders in fast-growing suburbs like Buckeye to resume construction on stalled projects. But the state’s builders are seeking more comprehensive changes to the 100-year water supply standard: They argue that lawmakers should create an incentive for replacing water-intensive crop fields with residential neighborhoods, which require far less water than large-scale agriculture. The builders also argue that lawmakers should tweak the state’s model for calculating groundwater shortages, which they say is too pessimistic. 

“If the legislature and the governor’s office don’t agree to the necessary changes to resolve this issue this year, that would be very devastating to our housing affordability, our housing supply, and our economy,” said Spencer Kamps, the vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

The future of the 100-year requirement is likely to take center stage this year, along with a parallel debate over how to regulate the kind of intensive groundwater pumping that has dried up wells and caused land to sink in rural areas such as Cochise County. That issue became so contentious last year that two members of Hobbs’s water policy council with ties to the agriculture industry, which is responsible for some of the most aggressive pumping, resigned before the council even finished its recommendation. 

Until the legislature reforms the wildcat subdivision statute, though, there’s nothing to stop developers from creating more vulnerable neighborhoods in the middle of the desert. Hornewer, the Rio Verde Foothills water hauler, said he’s sure his neighborhood’s crisis will play out again somewhere else.

“It’s probably already happening,” he told Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will Arizona close a loophole that lets developers build without water? on Jan 5, 2024.