One of my grandfathers was a proud Arizona miner. Another was a hard-working grocery store operator in a small Arizona town. Although both of these men led vastly different lives, they both were united around one very important fact for the desert they called home and were cultivating for their children and grandchildren: water is integral to survival, progress, and prosperity.
Past generations of Arizonans have understood the importance of our water future—especially with a critical source in the historic and life-giving Colorado River. Each generation has successfully built blocks on each other of water conservation, security, and innovation, allowing future men, women, and children to grow up, work, and raise their families in an environment that could support the tremendous growth of this state over the last century. Yet, as we see all around us, the exponential Arizona growth continues. The small towns my grandfathers inhabited so many years ago are becoming larger by the day. Houses, businesses, and schools continue to be built. Thousands of people move to Arizona in search of a better future. All require water to fuel and sustain the efforts and migration.
In generations past, Arizona has risen to the challenge, made the right decisions, and paved a water future for our children and grandchildren. And yet we face a new fork in the road that will determine what kind of Arizona we will pass along to our descendants.
Decisions are being made right now about the Colorado River that will shape Arizona’s water security for decades. The current rules that govern how water is shared across the West are set to expire at the end of this year, but the states that rely on the water from this river have until February 14 to comprise an agreement on future management plans. The federal government has now released draft options that could define how the river is managed well into the future. I’m thankful for the Trump administration’s willingness to listen and work with the basin states—especially Arizona—throughout this process, yet this resource is too important to our future to leave it solely in the federal government’s hands.
As Chairman of the Arizona Senate Committee on Natural Resources, Energy & Water, I’ve been deeply involved in these negotiations with local, state, Tribal, and federal partners, continuing my longtime efforts to enhance the Grand Canyon State’s water future and security. Arizona has already stepped up. We’ve conserved water, made real reductions, and passed commonsense laws to protect our long-term supply. Our farmers, cities, and businesses have done their part—and then some. The next agreement must be fair. Arizona families, farmers, and communities should not be asked to carry a heavier burden while other states avoid meaningful commitments. I’ve been clear about that in discussions with federal officials and other basin states. Cooperation remains the goal, but it has to be balanced and enforceable. The alternative is more uncertainty, more litigation, and higher costs for everyone. That’s a future I won’t leave behind for the next generation of Arizonans.
My grandfathers knew the importance of water to our state as they worked throughout their lives to build the foundation of our family and community. Their dedicated efforts are why I’ll continue fighting for a solution that protects the river, preserves Arizona agriculture, and secures a stable water future for our state. Future generations of Arizonans deserve nothing less from their public servants.
T.J. Shope is the Arizona Senate President Pro Tempore and represents Legislative District 16.
Writing at Axios, energy writer Amy Harder says “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning — in speed, scale and scope.” Harder quotes oil historian and S&P Global vice-chairman Dan Yergin as saying, “There’s no handwaving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate.’ It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.’ We’ve gone from over-indexing it to zero-indexing it.”
Polling has never shown climate change as being an issue of primary concern to American voters. Americans have consistently been more worried about issues that impact their daily lives today than about warnings from modern-day P.T. Barnums like U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres about some nebulous “highway to hell” and “the age of global boiling. The issue had been slowly losing its effectiveness during the Biden years even as that administration tried to memorialize the movement’s objectives in policy.
Even Democrat politicians have quit talking about the so-called “climate emergency” which used to be a central plank in their talking points list. When was the last time you heard New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, co-author with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of the “Green New Deal” introduced in 2019, talk about the supposed need to force ordinary citizens to give up their cars, flying, and vacations and spend trillions on a nationwide network of high-speed rails to save the planet? When was the last time you heard any Democrat utter the phrase “Green New Deal,” for that matter? It simply doesn’t happen anymore.
One of the motivators for the political abandonment of the climate scam by Democrats came from a pre-election analysis from the center-left Searchlight Institute last November. That memo advised Democrat candidates to avoid using the term “climate change” entirely, and to focus on the supposed cost savings to be obtained by switching to green energy solutions. Never mind that such cost savings are a myth: The truth doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to influence voters with the message.
Therein lies the central existential threat to the movement’s survival in the coming years.
For decades, liberal politicians and climate advocates were able to advance the climate alarm agenda by creating, well, alarm among the public that the world is going to end if we don’t stop putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Always the messaging had a deadline claiming, “We only have X number of years to stop burning fossil fuels before it’s too late!” Over the past 40 years, that deadline to act has given the term “moving the goalposts” a new green meaning.
AOC claimed the drop-dead date was only 12 years in the future as she rolled out her ambition to control everyone’s daily lives in the name of climate alarm in 2019. But the very next year, in 2020, child activist Greta Thunberg moved the goalposts to a mere five years. But wait: Just a year later, Joe Biden read a script from his teleprompter that set the deadline at 10 years. It’s all so darn confusing.
No doubt, these politicians and activists wish they could erase their past claims from everyone’s memory. Their trouble is, the Internet is forever.
Advocates were even successful in convincing Barack Obama’s EPA to dummy up an Endangerment Finding declaring that carbon dioxide is in fact a “pollutant” that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act in order to save the planet. Never mind that CO2, otherwise known as plant food, the foundational basis for all life on Planet Earth: The truth doesn’t matter.
Now, it appears that the movement is inheriting the wages of decades of deception with a sudden and stunning fall from grace. It could not happen to a more deserving bunch of people.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
In a previous op-ed, I argued that Arizona’s district school system is no longer failing quietly or at the margins; it is failing in concrete, measurable ways that any citizen can see. Districts are sitting atop tens of millions of square feet of unused facilities, fleets of underutilized buses, and continued academic declines, even as families vote with their feet for charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. I suggested that this mismatch between assets and enrollment is not primarily a failure of effort by teachers or even of management by principals and superintendents. It is, rather, a structural failure—a failure of the political governance model that was built for a different age and has now grown badly out of step with a landscape defined by choice and specialization.
That first piece only sketched the deeper questions. If Arizona’s district schools are governed by locally elected boards precisely so that they can respond to the public interest, why do they so consistently struggle to respond to the public itself? Why do boards that are supposed to safeguard public funds preside over billions of dollars in underutilized assets? Why does a structure designed to protect the common good now preside over persistent scandal, fiscal mismanagement, declining enrollment, and widespread frustration among teachers, administrators, and parents alike? To answer those questions, we must look beyond current headlines and follow the longer arc of how we came to equate “public” with “politically governed” in the first place.
A Short History
The political governance model that structures Arizona’s districts did not descend from heaven fully formed. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a particular way—one way—of securing community oversight of local schools. The assumption was simple: if citizens chose board members at the ballot box, then “the public interest” would be represented in school decisions. Over time, that prudential, albeit contingent, arrangement hardened into dogma. Political representation came to be treated not only as a means of protection, but as the necessary and exclusive guardian of the public good, public funds, and the formation of the next generation. To question the structure itself began to sound, in some ears, like questioning public education altogether.
Yet a careful look at both history and experience suggests that this is far too narrow a view. Arizonans know as well as anybody we must distinguish between the health of a society and the reach of the state. Our southwestern culture has long insisted that families, churches, associations, and voluntary institutions represent the public and serve the common good, often more effectively than formal political bodies. We know that political power is not the sole guardian of the public interest; it is one instrument among many and must be judged by its fruits. Therefore, we also know that if a particular form of political governance routinely frustrates educational excellence, wastes public resources, and subjects schools to the whiplash of partisan cycles, it is not sacrilege to reconsider it. It is an act of enlightened stewardship.
Arizona did not begin with today’s sprawling unified districts and five-member boards. In the territorial period, the basic unit of public education was the local school district, often consisting of a single schoolhouse serving one community. Territorial law in the late 1860s and 1870s required each district to elect a small board of three trustees, who oversaw the teacher, maintained the building, levied modest local taxes when necessary, and kept a simple census of school-age children. Early political governance of schools in Arizona was rudimentary and intensely local. The trustees were neighbors, the school was usually the only option for miles, and the questions before the board were concrete: hire a teacher, repair the roof, stretch a short budget a little further. And parents were close and connected to every operation of the school.
With statehood in 1912, the picture began to change. The Arizona Constitution established a State Board of Education and charged the new state with maintaining a system of common schools, while statutory law gradually formalized local districts as political subdivisions of the state. Over time, those simple boards of trustees evolved into today’s “governing boards,” recognized in Title 15 of the Arizona Revised Statutes as the governing body of each school district, typically consisting of three or five members serving staggered four-year terms and elected on the regular general-election ballot. What began as lay oversight of a single schoolhouse was thus absorbed into the broader machinery of state and county elections and invested with a much wider portfolio of powers.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, Arizona followed the national trend toward consolidation and unification. Numerous small districts were merged into larger common and unified districts, each with a single governing board responsible for K–8 and high school operations across multiple schools and neighborhoods. State law now gives these boards dozens of specific powers and duties—from hiring and evaluating the superintendent to adopting curricula and policies, issuing bonds, and managing the district’s substantial real estate portfolio. In effect, and by necessity, school boards shifted from being small committees of trustees to quasi-legislative bodies whose decisions shape complex organizations serving tens of thousands of students and stewarding hundreds of millions of public dollars. With this growth, parents became more like mere bystanders.
Political = Public?
From a legal standpoint, Arizona’s embrace of political representation as the default mode for “real” public education is baked into its constitutional and statutory architecture. Article XI of the Arizona Constitution charges the Legislature with creating a “general and uniform public school system” and vests the “general conduct and supervision” of that system in a State Board of Education, a state superintendent, county school superintendents, and locally established governing boards. District governing boards are thus conceived, from the outset, as political bodies—public offices filled by election, exercising delegated authority from the state to manage schools, steward funds, and set policy. Over the twentieth century, this framework was reinforced as boards took on larger consolidated districts, wider fiscal responsibilities, and explicit policy-making roles. In practice, “the public school system” came to mean the system supervised by these constitutionally recognized, electorally chosen officials.
Culturally and politically, this legal design was then wrapped in a powerful democratic narrative. State and national advocacy groups routinely describe elected school boards and district schools as the “cornerstone of democracy” and the essential vehicle for citizen oversight of government. In Arizona, governing-board candidates and education associations explicitly frame district schools—not charters—as the institution that embodies this democratic ideal and warn that parental-choice policies “attack public education” and threaten that cornerstone role. The result is that, in both rhetoric and policy debates, “public education” is habitually equated with electorally governed districts, while other public schooling arrangements (charters, open enrollment, and yes ESAs) are treated as exceptions or threats. Political representation by board election is no longer presented as one prudential way to secure the public interest; it is treated as the litmus test for whether a school is truly public at all.
The Results
Measured against its own stated aims, Arizona’s district governance model is not delivering. Start with the most basic metric of public confidence: whether families actually use the system they are taxed to support. Since 2011, district school enrollment in Arizona has fallen about 8 percent while charter enrollment has grown 87 percent; nearly all net growth in public-school enrollment over the past decade has come from charters, not districts. A recent analysis estimates that roughly 27 percent of Arizona’s 5- to 17-year-olds now do not attend a district school, and that close to 40 percent of incoming kindergarteners bypass their assigned district campus for charter, private, or home- and micro-school options. In other words, under the very governance structure meant to embody the “public interest,” a steadily shrinking share of the public is choosing the product offered—even before one considers the additional 7 percent (and growing) of students now educated via ESAs outside the district and charter systems altogether.
The picture is no more reassuring on fiscal stewardship. Arizona’s Auditor General recently warned that dozens of districts are on the verge of serious financial distress, and state financial investigators fielded 102 fraud-related allegations involving school districts and other public entities in 2024 alone. In the Isaac Elementary School District, mismanagement and budget overruns became so severe that the district could not meet payroll, prompting the State Board of Education to place it into formal receivership and triggering investigations by the Auditor General and Attorney General. The Nadaburg Unified School District has likewise drawn public accusations of “gross financial mismanagement” from the state treasurer, who urged an audit and potential receivership. All of this is happening in a system that, even as enrollment declines, continues to accumulate physical plant and capital costs: between 2019 and 2024, district enrollment fell 5 percent while gross square footage rose 3 percent, capital spending rose 67 percent, and square feet per student rose 9 percent, leaving districts operating at roughly two-thirds of their capacity while charter schools operate at about 95 percent. A governance model that presides over shrinking usage, growing fixed costs, and periodic fiscal crisis is, at a minimum, not obviously safeguarding public funds.
Nor is the system maintaining the confidence of its own professionals. A 2024 study from Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute found “deep dissatisfaction” among K–12 educators statewide, with nearly two-thirds reporting that they have considered leaving the profession. Separate reporting notes that more than half of Arizona’s public-school teachers say they may leave within two years if working conditions do not improve. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s most recent survey shows the teacher shortage remains at a “catastrophic” level: since July 2025, more than 1,000 teachers have quit, over 4,000 positions are being filled by long-term substitutes or other stopgaps, and nearly 1,400 positions are entirely vacant. These are not merely human-resource headaches; they are evidence that the governance structure is failing at the elementary work of sustaining a stable, dignified professional environment for the adults on whom student learning depends.
Finally, academic results under this model are stubbornly mediocre. On Arizona’s 2024 statewide assessments, close to 60 percent of students were not proficient in English Language Arts and 67 percent weren’t proficient in math, essentially unchanged from the prior year despite significant pandemic recovery spending. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s eighth-grade math score in 2022 was lower than in 2019 and not significantly different from its score in 2000; barely 18 percent of students reached “proficient,” and the share below “basic” was alarmingly high. Reading scores for fourth and eighth graders declined again in 2024, with only about a quarter of students proficient. After more than a century of elected-board oversight, the system is educating barely one in three students to grade-level standards in core subjects.
Taken together, these facts are not the story of a governance model quietly doing its job in a difficult environment. They are the record of a structure that has failed to retain families, failed to steward assets, failed to sustain its workforce, and failed to secure strong academic outcomes—even as alternative, non-political public models have expanded alongside it.
Beyond the Political Governance Model
The political cycle all but guarantees that Arizona’s district schools cannot build the kind of stable, long-horizon strategy that genuine educational excellence requires. Board elections, party primaries, and shifting legislative coalitions continually reset priorities, rewarding short term gestures that energize a partisan base rather than quiet, steady investment in students, families, and faculty. The incentives are clear: politicians and would-be board members gain more by fighting over the latest cultural controversy or signaling loyalty to party talking points than by aligning curriculum, staffing, facilities, and budgeting to a coherent, decades-long vision for student formation. In this environment, strategic plans are drafted to placate interest groups, messaging is crafted to survive the next news cycle, and superintendents are hired and fired according to political winds rather than educational competence. The result is a political strategic governance model, in which schools are treated as stages for ideological contest, rather than an educational governance model, in which decisions are anchored to evidence about what helps children learn, what sustains excellent teachers, and what builds strong, enduring school communities.
It is therefore time, not out of hostility to public education but out of love for it, that we rethink the political governance model that currently defines Arizona’s district schools. The interests of students, families, faculty, and staff are too precious to be chained to a structure that persistently frustrates their flourishing. If public education is truly a public good, then it must be governed in a way that safeguards that good by honoring scarce resources, attracting and retaining excellent educators, and treating children as persons to be formed rather than as data points in a political contest. Structures exist for the sake of these ends, not the other way around. To ask whether elected boards and partisan incentives remain the best guardians of our schools is not an act of heresy; it is an act of stewardship and, in a self-governing republic, a moral duty. A people that refuses to examine its institutions when they fail to serve their purpose is not defending the common good. It is neglecting it.
Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. He served as President of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022.
At a time when Arizonans are still struggling to recover from years of Biden-era inflation, Republican lawmakers acted swiftly to deliver on their Affordable Arizona agenda. On just the fourth day of the legislative session, they passed SB1106, a tax conformity package that delivered the full benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) to Arizona taxpayers, families, and businesses. The legislation provided $1.1 billion in tax relief and, just as importantly, immediate certainty for millions of Arizonans heading into tax season.
The very next day, Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it.
That veto leaves taxpayers facing a potential $1.1 billion tax hike and widespread chaos as filing season begins. This isn’t simply the typical tax policy fight between Democrat and Republican ideologies. But a full display of Katie Hobbs’ failure to lead.
From the outset, she has mishandled this critical issue of federal tax conformity with conflicting messages, unauthorized executive actions, and zero coordination with the Legislature or even apparently her own agencies. The result has been a self-inflicted mess, and Arizona taxpayers will be the ones to suffer the price.
The United States is facing an urgent strategic issue that is moving much faster than most of Washington’s current energy debates.
Right now, China is rapidly moving ahead in next-generation nuclear, specifically thorium-fueled molten salt reactors, building directly on technologies the United States originally pioneered at Oak Ridge. Their TMSR-LF1 molten salt reactor has already demonstrated key milestones in the thorium fuel cycle under real operating conditions. China has developed a pathway to abundant, high-density, domestically controlled energy capable of supporting industry, AI and data centers, maritime applications, and defense for decades.
At the same time, China is positioning itself as the future exporter of this technology and associated fuel services, which would give them enduring leverage over global nuclear deployment, standards, and supply chains. If they secure cheaper and more secure sovereign baseload power while we dismantle our own strategic advantages, no tariff regime or short-term subsidy program will offset that structural gap.
By contrast, the U.S. is allowing its position to erode. We are downblending our limited U-233 inventory, treating it as a cleanup problem instead of what it is: a uniquely valuable strategic asset for advanced fuel cycles and life-saving medical isotope production. This is exactly the quiet, procedural decision-making that risks foreclosing options while our competitors scale up.
Congress can still change course, but it must act now:
Immediately Pause U-233 Downblending Place a hold on further downblending and require a comprehensive strategic review of remaining U-233, including its potential for thorium/molten salt reactors, medical isotopes, and national security.
Recognize U-233 and Thorium R&D as Strategic Assets Direct DOE to treat these materials and programs as strategic infrastructure, not mere liabilities, with clear interagency coordination and regular reporting to Congress.
Launch a Serious Thorium / Molten Salt Demonstration Program Provide dedicated, multi-year funding for U.S.-based demonstrations in partnership with private innovators, with milestones focused on deployed hardware and licensing, not just reports.
Modernize Advanced Reactor Licensing Instruct NRC and DOE to create fit-for-purpose licensing pathways for non-light-water designs so U.S. companies can build and iterate here at home instead of ceding deployment experience to China.
Require Transparency & Briefings Request immediate briefings on U-233 inventories, current and planned downblending, and DOE’s thorium/MSR activities so Congress can make informed decisions before irreversible steps are taken.
Beyond the federal urgency, there is a major upside here for forward-looking states.
A state that chooses to lead on thorium and molten salt reactor development through hosting secure U-233/thorium R&D infrastructure, aligning its regulatory environment, and partnering with private innovators can position itself as a long-term anchor for:
World-class industrial power costs: Stable, high-density baseload power can underwrite advanced manufacturing, refining, AI and data centers, and port and logistics facilities, drawing in the very projects now shopping globally for clean, reliable energy.
High-wage technical and research jobs: National labs, engineering programs, medical isotope production, and nuclear supply-chain firms cluster around serious demonstration efforts, creating durable, specialized employment rather than transient construction booms.
Cutting-edge medical and technology ecosystems: Leveraging U-233 for medical isotopes supports a globally relevant health sciences hub, while advanced nuclear capability underpins secure digital infrastructure for finance, AI, and defense applications.
Energy, economic, and strategic credibility: A state that proves this out, prudently and safely, will not only strengthen U.S. security, it will become a model other states and allies look to for standards, supply-chain partnerships, and deployment know-how.
Put simply, this is the kind of targeted leadership that can make a state’s energy and industrial base the benchmark others quietly measure against.
One concrete path would be to build on the framework, as an example, of S.4242 – the Thorium Energy Security Act of 2022, which sought to preserve U-233 inventories to foster development of thorium molten-salt reactors and required DOE to secure and manage those inventories strategically. The government could:
Explore state-level resolutions or companion legislation urging preservation of U-233 and support for thorium/MSR R&D.
Signal interest in hosting secure storage, processing, and demonstration facilities consistent with an updated Thorium Energy Security framework.
Pair that with state incentives and regulatory clarity that welcome advanced nuclear innovators while maintaining rigorous safety and environmental standards.
China is not waiting. If we continue down this path, we are not simply “falling behind,” we are choosing to surrender long-term energy, technological, and geopolitical leverage, along with an opportunity for American states to anchor the next generation of strategic industry at home rather than abroad.
Julia Cartwright, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow in Law and Economics at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
From harvesting timber in national forests to grazing cattle on the open range, our nation has faced many tragedies of the commons over the years. Whether hunting big game in the wild or extracting oil and gas from underground reservoirs, each example presented our leaders with the same, fundamental issue: if nobody owns it, everyone will overuse it.
For rural Arizona, groundwater is no different. As explained in Part 2, Arizona’s groundwater challenges are a tragedy of the commons, stemming from the fact that groundwater is a finite resource with multiple landowners on the surface, any one of whom can tap into the common supply.
How we approach this tragedy moving forward will determine not only the health of the aquifers but also the future of our rural communities. While some proposals have been offered to date, none have been sufficient to earn legislative support, and most have been wrong for our state.
To get it right, we must consider the approaches that have been taken in other contexts to see which have worked and which have not, allowing us to determine which could be the best fit for groundwater.
The socialist approach views self-interest as the problem. It seeks to control human behavior through mandates, permits, and fees. Whether renewable energy standards for climate, catch limits for fisheries, or sustained yield mandates for national forests, all prioritize resource preservation through government control—maintaining communal ownership and regulating beneficial use through bureaucrats who decide who can use what, when, and how much.
The property-based approach, on the other hand, views communal ownership as the problem. It seeks to eliminate the tragedy by establishing private property rights to the resource, allocating individual shares and allowing users to manage and conserve their own supplies, limited only by the fundamental principles of private property rights, such as the “no harm” principle and “right to exclude.”
Mining claims have operated on “first in time, first in right,” and grazing allotments grant exclusive rights to leaseholders, thereby reducing conflicts among users and making individuals responsible for their own supplies.
To address rural groundwater, Arizona leaders must decide which of these approaches they will take.
Socialist options don’t work
Quod nullius est, est domini regis. It means: “What is the property of no one, belongs to the king.”
In 1976, after the Arizona Supreme Court declared groundwater a public resource, the Court said: “The legislature has the authority to determine which groundwater uses are most important to the general welfare and to allocate the state’s groundwater resources accordingly.”
This statement illustrates the truth about communal ownership: if no one owns the resource, then the government has absolute authority to act as king over its use. This is why the Arizona Department of Water Resources frequently reminds landowners that their right to use water is only “usufruct” to the land they own: meaning they don’t own the groundwater itself, the state does.
Like wild animals in Old England, communal resources belonged to the Crown—hunters could only hunt when, where, and how the king said they could. Those systems, like today’s socialist groundwater regimes, treat resources as communal property controlled by government fiat.
Such approaches typically fail because they lead to higher scarcity, higher prices, and worse outcomes for the resource itself. The federal government’s centralized control over national forests, for example, has produced catastrophic wildfires, endangered protected species, and restricted affordable timber.
In Arizona, the infamous “management area” is the hallmark socialist approach to groundwater— including 1948 “Critical Management Areas” and 1980 “Active Management Areas.”
According to Dean E. Peterson and Larry L. Deason in Arizona’s Groundwater Problem & Proposed Legislation, the 1948 Critical Management Areas “did not adopt any of the basic principles of water law,” but rather were an “exercise of the general police power of the state” through centralized restrictions.
In 1980, Arizona doubled down on its socialist approach with the Groundwater Management Act, establishing “Active Management Areas” that centralized control into the Arizona Department of Water Resources. This gave the agency near-absolute power over groundwater in AMAs, allowing its director to effectively act as king over the common supply.
In both cases, users rushed to drill before grandfathering deadlines, and corporate and municipal users entrenched their historical pumping, distorting market incentives. After 40 years, the 1980 Act has failed to achieve “safe yield” in most AMAs.
Despite their clear failures, proponents today continue to argue that Arizona should “finish what was started” with the 1948 and 1980 groundwater acts by expanding socialist-style control statewide through “Rural Groundwater Management Areas” and “Local Groundwater Stewardship Areas.”
These proposals must be rejected, as they would only impose new bureaucracies, tax personal groundwater withdrawals, and mandate volumetric reductions while maintaining the same communal ownership model that led to the tragedy in the first place.
Property-based solutions are best
Meum et tuum. It means: “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours.”
According to John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, the role of government is not to seek to control human behavior, but rather to protect private property by using the limited power of government to quantify and secure individual rights, prevent takings, support transferability, and uphold the “no harm” principle and biblical golden rule between and among property owners.
Rather than mandating conservation through coercion, property-based systems embrace human nature and seek to harness the power of self-interest to guide the invisible hand toward voluntary conservation.
History has proven that this approach works. When socialist mandates in American fisheries led to overfishing, policymakers switched to property-based catch shares and individual transferable quotas, which restored fish populations.
When hunters arrived in the New World, they rejected the Old English system and adopted the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which includes transferable hunting permits, helping to maintain healthy wildlife populations while providing a fair system of access.
Even “adopt a highway” programs harness self-interest to address trash and litter on public highways, granting exclusive naming and advertising rights to private parties in exchange for maintenance.
Overall, individual ownership protects scarce resources better than bureaucratic control because direct ownership creases individual responsibility. Where individuals are given ownership and responsibility, conservation increases because what belongs to someone is protected by someone.
Arizona needs correlative rights
To solve Arizona’s groundwater tragedy, we must remove it from communal ownership and apply a property-based approach. One solution designed specifically for finite underground resources like groundwater is “correlative rights.”
Derived from oil and gas law in resource-rich states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, correlative rights allocate proportional shares of the resource to adjoining landowners on the surface, based on the amount of land they own. If a person owns five percent of the surface, then they own five percent of the oil and gas below, plain and simple. This is consistent with the ad coelum doctrine described in Part 1.
In many of these resource-rich states, policymakers have already adopted correlative rights for groundwater. In Texas, for example, the Edwards Aquifer Authority uses correlative rights to allocate groundwater. In Nebraska, natural resource districts administer correlative rights.
Because allocations are treated as real property, users are free to trade their shares among themselves within the same basin—allowing market forces, rather than government bureaucracy, to dictate the most efficient use of limited resources.
This is why correlative rights have been such an effective way to prevent the tragedy of the commons in finite underground resources to date. As a proven, property-based framework rooted in America’s traditional values, correlative rights are the right approach for Arizona.
It’s time to restore private property rights to groundwater
When the Arizona Supreme Court enshrined “communal ownership” into law, it likened groundwater to a wild animal, saying it was “free to roam as [it] please[d]” and the “property of no one” until “captured.”
In so doing, it wrongfully embraced the Old English model that Americans rejected and failed to follow the American path that utilizes private property rights to advance the public good. This must be undone.
To address the tragedy of the commons in Arizona, we must recognize the harms of communal ownership and reject the socialist schemes that seek to maintain it. Only by restoring private property rights to groundwater through the adoption of correlative rights can Arizona finally address the tragedy and allow landowners to protect and conserve the supplies beneath their feet.
It’s time that Arizona leaders consider a new approach to groundwater supplies. As Arizona Justice Duke Cameron wrote in 1976: “The time has come to consider again the doctrine of correlative rights.”
