Arizona governor critical of those opposing water purification program

By Howard Fischer
Mail | X: @azcapmedia

SCOTTSDALE — Gov. Katie Hobbs is lashing out at those who are trying to undermine plans for what some call a “toilet to tap” system of converting waste into drinking water.

The governor’s comments come as the question of whether cities should pursue programs to produce purified water from what has been sewage has become an election issue in at least one Arizona city. There, a candidate is running on a platform to kill the program, even making a campaign video featuring some brown-looking liquid and telling viewers that is what they are being asked to drink.

“It’s irresponsible to spread the kind of misinformation that’s being spread about technology that we need to continue into the future,” the governor said after speaking at an event to promote work done by a program at Arizona State University tasked with finding new sources of water and conserving what the state has.

And Hobbs took a poke at those who believe that what they are drinking right now is pure and untouched.

“The fact is, most of the water that we get out of our taps in Phoenix comes out of the Colorado River,” she said.

“I don’t know if you’ve been to the river at any time,” she said. “But people recreate in there.”

More to the point, the governor said, that river water goes through a purification process before it comes out of the faucet.

“This is no different,” she said of what is known as “advanced water purification,” though the process — approved by the state Department of Water Quality — is far more intense and involves more steps including additional filtering.

Hobbs was speaking Wednesday during a formal celebration of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. That program, operating out of Arizona State University, is designed to work with communities, industrial users, farmers and others to find new ways to help the state’s water supply, from augmentation and desalination to conservation and reuse.

“We’ve taken action to get Arizona businesses the tools they need to grow alternative water supplies so they don’t have to depend on groundwater,” Hobbs said of the work being done there. And she said it is why Arizona is “on the forefront of water-management solutions.”

“It’s why I invested $40 million into the AWII,” she told those in attendance at the event.

Only thing is, it wasn’t Hobbs who put that money into the program. It was her predecessor, Doug Ducey, who set aside COVID relief dollars in November 2022.

So why did the governor, in the middle of her reelection effort, make that claim?

“I don’t know the answer,” she said when asked after the event.
After she left, some of her advisers sought to justify the claim.

“All of the work and the decisions that were made were made under the Hobbs administration,” said Jennifer Loredo, one of the governor’s policy advisors. And Patrick Adams, Hobbs’ senior adviser for water policy, said while the money actually was allocated by Ducey — one of a series of COVID grants he awarded in the last weeks of his administration — said “there wasn’t a water innovation initiative as a name.”

But that, too, is untrue: The 2022 press release from ASU said the university “will lead a multiyear Arizona Water Innovation Initiative to provide immediate, actionable and evidence-based solutions to ensure that Arizona will continue to thrive with a secure future water supply.” And it credited Ducey for providing the funds.

Still, Loredo said it was the Hobbs administration that sat down with ASU to work out “what are some of the priorities.”

And Loredo had yet one more reason she believes her boss can take credit.

She pointed out Hobbs, after taking office, rescinded about $210 million in grants of COVID dollars that Ducey had doled out in his last days in office.
That involved 19 grants to 16 organizations given out between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1. An attorney for Hobbs said at the time that those last-minute grants were illegal because Ducey had not used a competitive bidding process.

By contrast, Loredo noted, Hobbs left the AWII grant in place.

“We saw this as a good investment,” she said.

But the funding wasn’t one of those last-minute grants: The announcement came Nov, 16, 2022.

Regardless of who gets credit, what is clear is that one of the subjects this program is designed to address goes straight to the heart of the debate about recycling. And it comes as some Arizona communities already are looking at the possibility of using treated effluent given the multi-year drought and cuts in water from the Colorado River.

State officials have done what they can to tamp down that “toilet to tap” phrase, something they conceded is designed to eliminate the “ick” factor of the idea that something flushed down the toilet could end up back in the drinking water supply days later.

Initially it was being promoted under the more sanitized name of “direct potable reuse.” But the Department of Environmental Quality, which has oversight of the regulations, finally opted for “advanced water purification.”

Randall Matas, the agency’s director of the water quality division, told Capitol Media Services when ADEQ was working on rules that rebranding was based, at least in part, on testing what is acceptable to consumers. But that, he said, is a small part of the story.

“The main reason for the change is that it just more accurately reflects what this purified water is,” he said. “We felt that ‘advanced water purification’ was a better description of what this is, that there’s an advanced treatment system that purifies this water and provides that safe and healthy drinking water.”

Hobbs said Wednesday she’s convinced.

“We have to trust the science,” she said. “We have the technology to build the water resources that we need to go into the future.”

And, Hobbs added, she personally trusts the science.

Andy Biggs, the Republican gubernatorial challenger, agreed that AWP “is a potential route” to increasing the state’s water supply. But not, he said, necessarily the best one.

“There are so many better options for Arizonans to augment the water we already have,” he said in a statement in response to an inquiry from Capitol Media Services. And one, he said, are desalination plants.

But he would not respond to a question of whether he is willing to drink water produced through the AWP process.

Tucson, Phoenix, and Scottsdale all had started the process of putting advanced water purification systems online with the idea of supplementing the municipal water supply. That has taken on urgency as the state is losing a large chuck of its allocation from the Colorado River.

But the question has become a political issue in Scottsdale ahead of this year’s city council race.

In May, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a former Republican lawmaker and now a candidate for the council, put out a campaign video with comedian Rob Schneider, also a city resident, holding a glass of something that looks like chocolate milk.

“They want you to drink this, toilet to tap, you and your family to drink it,” he said, pointing to the brown liquid. “Mmmm,” Ugenti-Rita responded.

And in June, the city ditched its plans to put more funds into the AWP program, replacing it with a $100 million allocation for unspecified programs to develop new water sources and supplies.

That leaves in place the city’s practice of using wastewater — treated, but not to drinking water standards — for golf courses and recharge projects.

There hasn’t been that kickback in Tucson — at least not to date — where the city last year said it would build the region’s first plant to treat wastewater to drinking standard by the early 2030s.

Part of what’s driving that is the more than $86 million in construction costs is coming from the federal government. In exchange, the city would leave about 56,000 acre-feet of its Central Arizona Project water supply in Lake Mead over a decade.

One potential reason for the lack of negative reaction is the scope of the project.

The plant would supply only about 3% of the water the city delivers. And that would be confined to the city’s northwest side where wells that had been supplying drinking water have been shut down due to contamination with “forever chemicals,” known as PFAS.

A Phoenix project is advancing faster, with an existing water treatment plant near Cave Creek and Deer Valley roads being converted to producing AWP by 2029.