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Peoria staff outline water portfolio, warn of possible large CAP cuts and plan to use stored credits
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Summary
City staff told the council Peoria has multiple supplies — CAP, SRP, reclaimed water and long-term storage credits — and described contingency plans if federal changes reduce Central Arizona Project deliveries, including increased recovery-well pumping of stored credits and infrastructure and partnership projects.
Peoria city staff on April 7 delivered an annual briefing on the city’s water portfolio, saying the city has a mix of Central Arizona Project (CAP) water, Salt River Project (SRP) allocations, reclaimed effluent and long-term storage credits that together meet current demand but could be strained by future CAP reductions.
“We do not anticipate that our 2026 scheduled order will change in any way,” Water Resources Advisor Melinda Whittington said, describing recent federal releases to support Lake Powell and staff’s current CAP order. She added that staff modeled scenarios in which post-2026 operations could reduce Peoria’s CAP allocation by roughly 40–60 percent and identified a 57 percent reduction as a probable scenario for planning purposes.
The presentation quantified supplies and storage: Whittington said Peoria’s CAP allocation is about 34,000 acre-feet (with roughly 21,000 acre-feet typically delivered directly to customers), SRP annual availability is listed at 25,000 acre-feet (with about 10,000 acre-feet demanded in 2025 on SRP lands), and the city has generated long-term storage credits (LTSC) by storing excess water underground. Staff said the city has roughly 2,400 acre-feet of LTSC available annually and on the order of 250,000 acre-feet in total credits recoverable over time using recovery wells.
Deputy City Manager Burke clarified terminology for council members and residents: some of the water recovered from wells is artificially stored and later recovered as LTSC rather than native groundwater, and Peoria tracks those volumes on paper to distinguish stored credits from natural aquifer supplies.
Staff described steps to strengthen reliability if CAP deliveries drop: drilling and bringing recovery wells online (including projects in North Peoria and in the city’s southern area), securing additional SRP storage at Roosevelt Lake when available, expanding the geographic radius for LTSC recovery tied to city-owned wells, building booster pump stations and a pipeline from Butler to the Beardsley underground storage facility, and pursuing advanced purification and regional partnerships (EPCOR, Glendale, Phoenix). Reclaimed effluent — treated at Jomax, Beardsley Road and Butler Drive reclamation facilities — is already used for turf-related customers and is being leveraged to reduce groundwater pumping.
Council members asked technical questions. Resident Casper Dunn asked how stored water is physically kept underground and staff explained recharge methods such as spreading water at recharge basins (e.g., Agua Fria) or injection; staff emphasized there is no liner and that the distinction between injected/stored water and native aquifer water is maintained in accounting records. Vice Mayor Finn asked how the roughly 250,000-acre-foot total credit balance reconciles with the ~2,400-acre-feet annual access figure; staff said the total is effectively amortized over a 100-year planning period to derive the annual-use number.
Whittington also told the council staff is pursuing a potential long-term-storage purchase that staff described as "in the neighborhood of about 175,000 acre-feet," which, if amortized over 100 years, would provide roughly 1,700 acre-feet per year of additional annual availability. Staff said the city will return with more detailed proposals and recommended next steps for council consideration.
The study session concluded with the mayor adjourning and the council recessing before the regular meeting.
