Senator Jon Kyl on Arizona’s Response to Its Water Challenges, Past and Future
The CAP canal, near Phoenix, Arizona.
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Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Senator Kyl: My time as a lawyer in Phoenix was partially devoted to doing legal work for the Salt River Project. As a result of that, I learned a lot about water and water law. Also, Arizona had enacted the 1980 Groundwater Management Act (GMA), and I was directly involved in that as a lawyer. I took that experience with me to Washington, DC, when I was elected to the House of Representatives and
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later to the Senate. I served in the House of Representatives in the days when the Arizona delegation was seeking funding for the CAP. Our entire delegation worked in a bipartisan way for that. When I was in the Senate, Arizona’s Indian tribes were making claims to Arizona’s water, which threatened and in some cases resulted in litigation. The parties that were involved, including the Indian tribes, the state, and private parties, decided to try to resolve some of those issues through negotiation and settlements rather than litigation. At a certain point, they asked me, as a United States senator who knew something about water law, if I would be involved in the negotiations and help them reach settlements. This made some sense, because with any Indian water settlement, there is a congressional component. Tribes cannot waive their water rights without congressional consent. In addition to that, most of the settlements involved developing projects that would allow the Indian tribes to take advantage of the water rights that they acquired in the settlements, and that meant an appropriation of money from the Congress. So, a irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF ONEL5969, LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 3.0.
uring his more than 26 years in Congress and his time working as a lawyer in Arizona, Senator Jon Kyl was directly involved in groundwater management programs, surface water allocation settlements, and the development of a major water supply project, the Central Arizona Project (CAP). In this interview, Senator Kyl reflects on his accomplishments in Congress, Arizona’s response to the ongoing drought in the Colorado basin, and how Arizona can address the challenges of the future.
