InBuckeye October 2024

FUTURE

BUCKEYE

It’s a common misconception, according to Wood, who said water conservation is crucially important to Buckeye farmers. She said it’s an expensive resource and every extra dollar spent on water represents a loss in profit. “Farmers don’t waste water,” she said bluntly. Buckeye Water Conservation and Control District’s general manager, Noel Carter, declined to answer questions for this story about whether farmers could do better to conserve the resource. But it’s a fact the government has compelled most Buckeye farmers to change their ways at many junctures without mechanisms to ensure total compliance. And things haven’t stopped changing since 1980 — not the kind of change that makes things easier for farmers, either, although it does so for developers. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on June 19 vetoed Senate Bill 1172, Sen. T.J. Shope’s (R-Coolidge) piece of an unpopular omnibus bill that let developers take over farm water. Shope declined to comment about the veto, saying he would have a “better grasp of the bill’s potential next steps toward the end of the year.” Hobbs, a first-term Democrat, said in vetoing the bill she agreed with the sentiment, signaling another daunting paradigm shift in which Democrats and Republicans in power are united in staunch growth-before-agriculturalism. “The concept at the core of this bill — conversion of agricultural lands to lower water use development — is a policy that has broad potential benefits and is one that my administration supports,” Hobbs said. “However, it is critical that the legislation be carefully crafted to ensure that the water conservation savings … are guaranteed.” State Sen. Sine Kerr, a Buckeye Republican, said she supported the goals set forth in SB 1172, calling it “a good thing” that “we need to be doing.” Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona who lobbied SB 1172, said he believed it was a needed measure for Buckeye. “It’s a crime they can’t recognize the savings to the aquifers developers brought forward,” he said, “by sustainable practices that for-sale housing employs.” Kamps and Porter said residential development is more water-sustainable than agriculture. Residential developers inside active management areas like Buckeye are required to prove to the state their land has groundwater available to serve the development for 100 years.

But city leaders and policy experts say the farmers would be foolish to expect different. “It has been the plan and implicit policy that we would grow cities on top of farming,” Porter said. “That’s the way [to] grow a big city in the desert.” Indeed, according to Julia Bausch, research analyst at ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy in Phoenix, the dominant narrative around agriculture in Buckeye since the late 1970s has been one of “urban-led development” and “agriculture obsolescence.” Bausch’s 2015 study “Development pathways at the agriculture-urban interface” asked metro Phoenix residents if farming was obsolete. She found only a slim majority said it was not, those participants marking urbanization a “threat.” However, University of Ottawa economist Michael Wolfson in his paper published the same year wrote the family farm is obsolete and “inefficient,” arguing an economically viable path is confining agriculture to only the highest output at the lowest cost. In other words, corporatize and move production to the vacant, arable flyover swaths. Conservatives dismissed the paper as a pedantic missive, saying the liberal Wolfson was too eager to rhapsodize about a utopia of government-grown foodstuffs. Agri-food policy has quickly risen to become a quotidian right-wing talking point. Especially MAGA Republicans bandy about an Orwellian future where Big Brother force-feeds us a veganesque diet of lab-grown meats and insects, which they claim is part of a conspiracy to lower testosterone levels in men so they are easier to control. Such pro-ag conservatives in Buckeye pointed to a wing of the city government’s economic development department called Grow Buckeye, which maintains a pro-housing propaganda website, as evidence of their theory. The conservatives also pointed to an eight- page municipal law first proposed Aug. 13 that limits the number of animals Buckeye residents can own, including livestock and chickens. It levies further restrictions on how the animals may be kept and outright forbids some like pigs. Jennifer Schjoll is a homeowner in Phoenix Skyline West, a neighborhood in the Sundance area near Interstate 10. “Our city leaders are trying to keep this under wraps so we can’t do anything about it,” Schjoll said of the new law. “This is not OK.” But city leaders, touting their own magnanimity, somehow maintain they are not

ARTIST RENDERING OF PUBLIC SAFETY HEADQUARTERS

ARTIST RENDERING OF INDIAN SCHOOL RD.

Question 1: Public Safety

$137 million for public safety projects: • Public Safety Headquarters • Training Facilities • Westpark Fire Station • Victory Fire Station

“ I’m happy with farming being here as long as they want to be here. BRIAN CRAIG, BUCKEYE BUREAUCRAT pushing agriculture out of Buckeye. In fact, they claim the farmers happily up sticks. “We talk to a lot of different farmers in the area, and I haven’t had anybody approach me bitter that they are having to move to different locations,” Orsborn said. “In fact, generally what I hear from farmers is that they understand this is the evolution.” Evidently, the mayor and reporters working on this story did not hear from the same farmers. “City government is changing,” and away from agriculture, Bales said.

Question 2: Streets & Transportation

$145 million for traffic safety and traffic flow: • Widening Indian School Road (Jackrabbit to Perryville) • Eliminating Traffic Pinch-Points throughout Buckeye • Road Reconstruction and Rehabilitation • Lighting Installation along parts of Sun Valley Parkway

BUCKEYE

Thousands have lived without love, no one without water. W. H. AUDEN

Buckeye 2024 General Obligation Bond Election November 5, 2024

The Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980 is widely considered the greatest paradigm shift in the history of farming in Buckeye. That’s when five water management districts were instituted in the Phoenix and Tucson metros, Douglas and eastern La Paz County, and urban water on Arizona farms was regulated for the first time. The average American farmer was 58 years old and at least one-third were over 65 when the USDA last checked two years ago. As such, the average Buckeye farmer’s foray into the industry was sans water regulation. Bales and Kenny said farmers are constantly blamed for the state’s water crisis — some 8 in 10 gallons of water from the ever-depleting Colorado River go to agriculture with Arizona using triple the national average. Their stance is backed by beaucoup headlines like Food & Water Watch’s doozy in August: “Ag is draining the Colorado River dry.”

• Funding: Through a secondary property tax • Total Tax Rate: Not to exceed $2.25 • First Year Cost: Around $115 for the median residential property in Buckeye. Funding Details

Funding Public Safety, Street Improvements and Traffic Flow Optimization

For more details: buckeyeaz.gov/bond Check voter registration: beballotready.vote For questions please email: buckeyebond@buckeyeaz.gov

InBuckeye.com | Fall 2024

Fall 2024 | InBuckeye.com