Road Work and Water - Updated with New Water Stuff

Greetings Fellow Humans from the Sonoran Desert where it is cold and wet.  This pattern is expected to continue through Tuesday.  After that it will be sunny and cool.  One can not complain about rain here, although one does whine a bit about it.  Next I will be asking for my snow bird rebate.

An interesting thing in the neighborhood has been a rather large project to replace aging gas lines.  They're not only digging up the roads, they're digging up people's yards to replace the lines all the way to the house.  I feel really badly for people who are losing ancient cacti to this project.  After the gas project is complete, the roads in the neighborhood are supposed to be paved.  The roads are really awful, we road the bikes for a couple of miles yesterday, and it was incredibly painful going downhill on the disintegrating asphalt.

Here is a row of equipment, parked for the lunch hour.

A trench in the road.

Yesterday we left to go pick up the bikes at Fairwheel Bikes.  This is the entry to the condo complex where we are staying.  They dig with a tiny back hoe (which is out of frame) and put the dirt in the front loader.  They drive the dirt down the road and dump it.  Later, when it's time to fill in the trench they go get the dirt.

Notice the guys in the trench. 

It's quite the project. 

This is Mistletoe.  It's the scourge of the desert.  Birds eat the seeds, and then sit in the upper branches of a tree and poop.  The seeds, which are the red berries, are sticky and attach themselves to branches.  The seed sprouts and dig its roots into the flesh of the tree.  Since the seeds are generally in the top of the tree, the branches a tender and not woody, so the roots can penetrate.  The Mistletoe sucks water and nutrients out of the tree.  One instance of Mistletoe can travel through neighborhoods, infecting everyone's trees and eventually killing them.  The only way to remove it is to cut the branch off.  Where we used to live, this was a hot topic because the bird fanciers wanted the birds to have food, but the tree fanciers did not want the trees being killed.  At one point the HOA had an aggressive removal program, but they chickened out and stopped doing anything.  There is a lot of it in this part of town.

Now I am going to talk about water and denial again.  Sometime in the early 2000's the Rio Verde Foothills development was born.  I found a Maricopa County Planning Document that vaguely discusses when and how this came about.  What is interesting to me is that the county gave permission to build out there at all.  Rio Verde Foothills (RVFH) which is different than the Rio Verde development, and the Tonto Verde development and the Triad development, never had a connection to city water: this in spite of the fact that RVFH abuts Scottsdale.  Some of the houses have wells, some of the houses depended on hauled water as their only source.  The hauled water came from Scottsdale.  Apparently a contract was never put in place to ensure water in perpetuity.  Scottsdale has been telling RVFH since 2021 that they were going to cut them off from water, and they did just that Jan1, 2023.  These people have no water. They do have a web site which is here. Update 1/17/2023:  I should have clarified that RVFH can still receive hauled water, they do have to pay more for it, since it comes from farther away.

Verde River Homes and the Golf and Social Club, Tonto Verde Homes and Golf, and Rio Verde have water.  They have water rights.  They are a water district.  You can read more here.

Tonto Verde, Rio Verde, and Trilogy are different, as all three have contractual water rights and obtain water from EPCOR. The developers of Rio Verde and Tonto Verde obtained water rights from the Commission when our community was planned and entered into an agreement with Rio Verde Utilities (now EPCOR) to build all the needed infrastructure to provide water to both communities and their golf courses. Our water comes from underground aquifers, and according to previous estimates, there is sufficient capacity to supply our entire water district, (Tonto Verde, Rio Verde, and Trilogy) for decades into the future.

RVFH developers subdivided their property in a way that allowed them to get around the requirement to show that there was 100 years worth of water available.  People moved out there anyway.  The area enclosed by the heavy blue line is RVFH.  It's a large area, much larger than Tonto Verde or Rio Verde.  I only discovered that RVFH is different than Rio Verde about an hour ago.  The internet treats them as being interchangeable, even though they are not.

The people on wells are in dire straits, as many of their wells have dried up.  I'm not sure what aquifer they were pulling water from.  People were building out there as recently as last year.  Denial.  

I find this interesting, and I also write about it because I'd really like to have a second home here in Arizona (a very tiny second home) but the water! It worries me greatly.  Tucson has done a much better job of water management, no golf course is watered with drinking water, it's all reclaimed.  And then there is the dead pool issue.  The internet does not indicate to what degree AZ is energy independent from the Hoover dam and the dam on Lake Mead.  There is some power generation with coal and gas, but no one actually publishes how much is from hydro on the Colorado river.

I don't know if we'll do anything about real estate.  Once you buy a vacation home, you are obligated to use it.  We'll probably dither for awhile and hope the housing market crashes big time.

This is the view from the deck.

That's it!  That's all I've got.

Update 1/17/2023:  Scottsdale released their response to RVFH's demands for water.  There is a PDF at the bottom of the document which will open.  One of the salient things that was pointed out, was that Scottsdale reclaims their water.  Water sent to RVFH is lost to them because there's no infrastructure in place to do that.  Scottsdale points the finger squarely at Maricopa County, they created the problem, and it's their responsibility to fix it.