First, the legal, financial and operational issues of CAWCD and BOR had to be developed. This hurdle was overcome in 2017 with the approval of the CAP System Use Agreement. This agreement allows CAWCD and BOR to provide non-aquatic water supply services outside the project and increases the capacity of CAP`s long-term contractors to exchange water. By the end of 1993, the City of Tucson was paying approximately $145,000 for the installation of filters in 925 homes, losing approximately $200,000 in revenue by adjusting water bills, and paying approximately $450,000 in damages claimed by homeowners for destroyed pipes, water heaters and other equipment. [10] The city put some houses back in the groundwater, but the problems remained. Zinc orthophosphate was added to cover the pipes and prevent rust from coming off, but the return to the water table removed the zinc orthophosphate. [11] The solution was a “mixed” water system funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, including automatic monitoring of water quality throughout Tucson, and a website to report water quality to the public without intervention from the Tucson Water Department. [12] [13] The agreement authorizes the use of the CAP system to implement the last critical parts of the innovative waterbank program in which the State of Arizona has participated since the mid-1990s. The agreement provides CAP with the operating flexibility to recover stored water at a lower cost, including more than four million CAP Acre Feet water stored by the AWBA in aquifers in central and southern Arizona. The agreement also resolves legal, financial and operational issues related to cycling. The agreement allows CAP to cycle off-project water deliveries through the PAC system, in accordance with standard form cycling agreements and expanded system capacity.
Wheeling by the Reclamation Office is also permitted. Finally, the agreement helps to maximise the beneficial use of the CAP system by widening the possibility for long-term contractors to exchange parts of the allocation with another party. In order to ensure the efficient operation of the system, both for new and existing uses, the Agreement establishes a planning priority system that reconciles conflicts of delivery capacity. On average, 1.2 million feet of acre water per year will pass through the CAP aqueduct system to supplement resources in central Arizona and reduce groundwater uncovering. As with virtually everything in the water world mentioned above, it`s far from easy. Although Wheeling had already been the subject of debate in the early 1980s (even before CAP had provided a drop of water) and was approved in the 1988 Master Repayment contract between the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (CAWCD) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), water still has to pass through the CAP system. According to the Arizona Republic, Senator Goldwater, Senator Hayden, the Udalls – Rep. Morris Udall and U.S. Secretary of State Stewart Udall and other Arizona leaders, the successful passage of McFarland`s legislation, which became the CAP, “probably the state`s most famous transpartisan achievement of the twentieth century.” [6] This law provided that the U.S. Department of the Interior entered into an agreement with non-federal interests, under which the U.S. federal government acquired the right to 24.3 percent of the electricity produced in the non-federal Navajo project.
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