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Mohave County outlines five recharge basins to bolster Hualapai Basin near Kingman
Summary
Mohave County told Kingman council the Hualapai Groundwater Basin is increasingly in deficit and described five recharge/detention basins that together could recharge tens to hundreds of acre‑feet annually; county officials said most funding came from grants and urged ongoing modeling and monitoring.
Mohave County officials told the Kingman City Council on May 19 that updated groundwater modeling shows a growing deficit in the Hualapai Groundwater Basin and presented five recharge/detention basins designed to both reduce downstream stormwater velocity and infiltrate water into the aquifer.
Supervisor chairman Lingenfelter opened the presentation, saying, “This should have happened a long time ago, but I'm glad that we can come here and present on the stormwater work and the water retention, the detention base and recharge work that the county's been doing.” Development services director Scott Holtree then outlined the county's model updates and project list.
Holtree said the county's USGS‑based modeling — updated with 2021 and 2024 data — shows the basin deficit rising substantially since 2013; his presentation cited a basin deficit on the order of tens of thousands of acre‑feet (Holtree described an approximate 50,000 acre‑foot deficit in recent estimates). He described five basins selected from about nine candidate sites: Sierra Vista (a small test basin with roughly 1.39 acre‑feet or about 453,000 gallons of annual recharge), Mohave Rattlesnake (the largest, cited at roughly 144 acre‑feet or ~47 million gallons per year), Feldspar (about 38 acre‑feet), Crestwood (about 16 acre‑feet), and Riata (about 36 acre‑feet). Together Holtree said the selected projects could provide on the order of “roughly 237 to 270 acre‑feet” per year to the aquifer, which he expressed as a meaningful but partial contribution toward a multi‑decadal deficit.
County staff told the council the work is paired with an ongoing groundwater monitoring program and regular running of the USGS model so planners can improve long‑term supply and demand assessments. Holtree said most project costs were covered by external grants: WIFA grants, congressional direct appropriations, ARPA and other water‑supply development grants. He stated the combined grant funding was roughly $8.6 million while the county’s direct outlay was about $836,000.
The presentation emphasized that recharge basins also serve flood‑mitigation functions — reducing peak flows and protecting downstream property — and that the projects are long‑lived infrastructure with low ongoing maintenance needs. Holtree and supervisors encouraged continued data collection from agricultural users to refine withdrawal estimates and model accuracy.
Next steps for county staff include continued monitoring, model runs, and completing construction of basins currently under way. Council members did not take formal action on the presentation but thanked county staff and asked follow‑up questions about monitoring and funding.
