By J. Graber | Daily Independent (abridged)
The Scottsdale City Council unanimously agreed during its June 23 meeting to buy 15,000-acre-feet of water out of the Harquahala Valley for $8.25 million, but it’s not clear how much it’s going to cost to actually get the water to Scottsdale.
The city would have to build infrastructure to get the water over to a Central Arizona Project infrastructure that could ultimately get it to Scottsdale, and there were no answers forth- coming at the meeting on exactly how much that would cost.
Former City Councilwoman Betty Janik also pointed out that some of the water in the Harquahala Valley has arsenic in it, which means it would have to be treated before it could enter the CAP system and transferred to Scottsdale.
Interim Water Resources Senior Director Thyra Ryden-Diaz said, “There is a considerable amount of study and we are not concerned about arsenic in this location. I do believe that other cities that are pursuing water in the same valley do have concerns at the location of where their wells are. They’re not near these wells so we are not concerned about arsenic here.”
She repeated several times during the conversation that she was not concerned about arsenic in the water, but that left some in the crowd wondering what that meant, especially after Ryden-Diaz also noted that the Scottsdale water campus has the ability to remove arsenic from water.
“‘We are not concerned? What exactly does that mean?’” Scottsdale Budget Review Commissioner Carla (her legal name) texted to the Daily Independent during the meeting. “How are they getting the water to Scottsdale and how much does it cost? Don’t the taxpayers deserve to know the particulars? I thought that she wrote she was going to ‘talk honestly about water.’”
The Town of Cave Creek was prepared late last year to spend $11.5 million in order to pull 500-acre-feet out Harquahala every year for 100 years, but city leaders ultimately voted the plan down in February for a lack of understanding of how much the infrastructure to get the water to town would cost.
Around the same time, the Queen Creek Town Council voted to spend $19.3 million to build infrastructure to transfer water from the Harquahala Valley to their residents.
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