Lobbyist For Saudis Using AZ Groundwater To Grow Alfalfa Elected To Maricopa County Water Board

[hatrack]

An official recently elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he holds sway over an ongoing water dispute, was also a lobbyist for a Saudi company looking to protect its extraction of precious groundwater. Thomas Galvin, elected in the midterms to the post he was first appointed to in 2021, lobbied on behalf of the Saudi-owned farming company, which is using Arizona’s most depleted natural resource for foreign exports.

State lobbying disclosures show that Galvin is a partner at Rose Law Group, which lobbied on behalf of a subsidiary of the Saudi corporation Almarai currently tapping U.S. groundwater in drought-stricken Arizona and California to grow alfalfa. The animal feed, which is grown in harsh desert environments, is shipped overseas to support livestock on Saudi dairy farms. In 2014, Almarai bought almost 10,000 acres of farmland in Vicksburg, Arizona, through its wholly owned subsidiary Fondomonte, spending nearly $50 million on the purchase. The near-nonexistent water regulations in La Paz County, where Vicksburg is located, mean that Fondomonte can pump vast amounts of water out of Arizona’s water table, which has declined by over 50 feet in the past two decades.

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Four years after Galvin’s testimony, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors finds itself adjudicating an increasingly tense situation that pits residents, politicians, and transporters against each other over who has a right to water and how each interest group should pay for access. In December 2021, Galvin was appointed to the board of supervisors by the sitting board in a unanimous vote. In January of this year, Galvin found himself in the middle of the standoff, with politicians and residents on all sides of the water divide demanding action on a water redistricting plan that would affect the price paid by hundreds of Maricopa residents, some of whom rely on water hauled for miles and distributed into tanks below their drought-stricken homes.

After the federal Bureau of Reclamation declared a water shortage from the Colorado River last year, Scottsdale — where many Rio Verde Foothills residents draw their water from — declared that their own water supply would be off limits to the tenders who deliver water to individual resident tanks in Rio Verde. In light of the looming shut-off, citizens of Rio Verde attempted to garner Galvin’s support to designate a new water district that would allow pumping from Harquahala Valley. While Galvin was fast to support unlimited pumping by Fondomonte before he was appointed to the board, Rio Verde residents found a less sympathetic ear once he was on it. Neither the residents who support the new water district nor the water haulers who oppose it were able to get Galvin to make a determination in the process for weeks. As the January 1 water shut-off for Rio Verde residents rapidly approaches, Galvin and the rest of the Maricopa supervisors have failed to secure a resolution to the water crisis, in part due to the complex and overlapping matrix of regulatory authorities that govern Arizona’s water use. In August, Maricopa supervisors unanimously voted down a proposal to create a new water district. Galvin endorsed the idea of a privately held water utility, like the Canadian-owned Epcor, supplying the water, but some residents are opposed to the construction burden and the multiyear timeline that the plan would necessitate. In 2021, Rose Law helped facilitate Epcor’s purchase of Johnson Utilities on behalf of land owners and home builders in and around the San Tan Valley south of Phoenix.

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https://theintercept.com/2022/11/28/maricopa-supervisors-saudi-lobbyist-thomas-galvin/

[CrispyQ]

1. "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Even on DU there are those who argue that Phoenix is so excellent at water management they'll never run out. I thought Lakes Mead & Powell & the Great Salt Lake would get more national attention but no. The drying up of the Mississippi River got a few days, but they were mostly light hearted stories about how people were hiking to Tower Rock. We're on a trajectory to a very grim future while the Republican party works on "Don't Say Gay" bills.