The Yavapai County Board of Supervisors held a brief study session on Wednesday, July 2, to discuss forming a Water Resources and Open Space Committee.

The Yavapai County Comprehensive Plan Update 2032, which was approved March 15, 2023, recommended the creation of the committee. The plan calls for a group “broadly representative of the regional jurisdictions and land managers as well as professional hydrologists and water managers.”

Among the plan’s other water-related recommendations are hiring a full-time water planner and developing a watershed management plan.

“Since I’ve been here the last two-and-a-half-years, this has been a recurring conversation about what is the county’s role in water?” Yavapai County Manager Maury Thompson, said. “The previous board, my interpretation [of] their opinion was ‘we have no role in water.’ … I’ve sensed over the last two years, a real change in opinion to … ‘we may not have a direct role, but we’re very much affected by water issues.’ And at the same time, I heard from our [municipalities] that they believe, because we don’t have a direct role, there’s probably a facilitating role for the county to play in this larger [water] conversation.”

That role would be to have a discussion between municipalities and unincorporated communities within the county along with regional groups such as the Central Yavapai Metropolitan Planning Organization and tribal nations.

It’s a sentiment shared by Supervisor Nikki Check [D-District 3] several times during the 2024 election and by Supervisor Brooks Compton [R-District 1].

“I talked about this on the campaign trail the entire time, about the county taking the lead and moving forward and being the facilitator … so I’m in concurrence,” Compton said.

Check, a former mayor of Jerome, previously served on Yavapai County Water Advisory Committee as an appointee from the Jerome Town Council.

“I served on that [committee] and in 2014 it was disbanded,” Check said. “So there’s this history of structure with Yavapai County facilitating a conversation around water.”

Check added that she felt the reason that the previous WAC disbanded was in part because there was “no productive outcome,” as well as a lack of impetus from the state government and that the conversation “got mired around misunderstandings and disagreements around the interpretation of the data that’s available.”

The board has identified the Growing Water Smart Technical Assistance grant of up to $25,000 from the Sonoran Institute as a potential funding source to hire a third-party facilitator to conduct meetings.

Check said the county is particularly interested in Southwest Decision Resources, which she believes is the leading candidate. The effort may be supported by municipalities and county staff.

The goal is to create a sustainable, countywide approach to water resource management that continues beyond the initial grant funding.

Check subsequently said that her contingency plan if the county is not awarded the grant funding is to have the board and county staff “get some initial [water] conversations outlined with the municipalities.”

“I think the timing is wonderful for a group like this to come together, because we are in the beginning of our zoning ordinance update,” Check said. “[So] if some meaningful outcomes can be reached in the near term, they could be included in our zoning ordinance update” such as updating landscaping requirements to be more water friendly.

“Everything we’ve talked about for 20-40, years is starting to happen now,” Supervisor Chris Kuknyo [R-District 4] said. “I mean, the earth is showing us signs on Williamson Valley, on Coyote Springs, it’s getting slim, so what are we going to do, and what are we going to do in case of emergency?”

Public Lands

Prior to the study session, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Resolution No. 2161, issued in response to a proposal by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, included in draft legislation of the now-signed federal Big Beautiful Bill. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s draft amendment sought the potential sale of up to 3 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service for housing development.

The proposal was the sale amendment was blocked on June 23, by Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who ruled that unrelated policy measures could not be included in a budget reconciliation bill.

The Clarkdale Town and Sedona City Councils approved similar resolutions on June 24 opposing the sale of federal USFS and BLM lands.

“But the issue is not going away,” Check said, because Lee said he plans raise the issue again, possibly as a stand-alone bill.

“I was concerned about having to walk through the ‘Jeff Bezos National Forest’ or some lumber company getting all that land,” Kuknyo said. “[While] it looks like that’s been pulled from the bill, but I think this is something we need to stay out in front of to make sure one of the reasons a lot of us moved here was for the use of these public lands to hunt, fish.”

Kuknyo added that the “checker board” of BLM holdings “needs to go away.”

“Yavapai County strongly supports the continued federal management and stewardship of its public lands, opposing any efforts to sell, transfer, or dispose of these lands in ways that conflict with local desires,” the meeting agenda reads. “We encourage Arizona’s congressional delegation to reject legislation that would harm these lands and to champion policies ensuring their long-term preservation and sustainable use.”

The supervisors noted however that they were not wholesale against the federal government transferring public lands, noting their efforts to purchase approximately 80 acres of federal lands adjacent to Oak Creek and Windmill Park to expand the Cornville park.