BY ROGER CLARK
“In arid lands groundwater is essentially like coal or oil: easy to exhaust, hard to replace.”
—Charles Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters
The Stilo Development Group is again pushing to build a controversial mega-resort on the doorstep of Grand Canyon National Park. The National Park Service has warned that the development in the gateway town of Tusayan is one of the gravest threats to the park in its 100-year history.
Stilo is seeking to build thousands of housing units, plus hotel rooms, an RV park, a conference center — over 1.8 million square feet of commercial space in all — on two islands of private land surrounded by the Kaibab National Forest. However, before it can run utilities to these parcels and pave roads, Stilo needs the Forest Service to grant rights-of-way across national forest land. But permission from the Forest Service to cross public land would help pave the way for Stilo’s massive development—unleashing a Pandora’s box of potential problems.
This latest development scheme is hardly the first. The Forest Service returned a similar application four years ago, concluding that the proposed mega-resort was “not in the public interest” as it “would stress local and Park infrastructure, and have untold impacts to the surrounding Tribal and National Park lands.” As of early September 2020, the developer is still waiting to see if the Forest Service will accept its latest application for the rights-of-way.
Stilo’s mega-resort would sprawl across 354 acres of land, about a fivefold expansion of Tusayan’s current development footprint. About a mile northwest of the town, an 80-foot-wide, 1.53-mile-long road and utility corridor would connect the 160-acre Stilo property called Kotzin Ranch to the highway and Grand Canyon National Park’s busiest entrance. Most of the mega-resort’s lodging and retail space would be concentrated on this parcel. An emergency access road would also be built to it.
Stilo would construct another 3-mile-long, 80-foot-wide road with buried utility lines to the 194-acre parcel called TenX Ranch, located about three miles southeast of Tusayan. Altogether, the road rights-of-way and utility corridors needed to develop Stilo’s private property would bulldoze 49.4 acres of national forest land, including areas currently used by wildlife and by the public for camping and recreational enjoyment.
After its last proposal was sent back to the drawing board in 2016, Stilo joined forces with the town of Tusayan to submit its newest application, which includes 2,500 hotel rooms, a conference center, health spa, retail shops, entertainment centers, educational venues, and possibly a dude ranch to boot. Its 1.8 million square feet of retail space would rival the size of Arizona’s largest shopping mall. And its thousands of new housing units, including Airbnb-type rentals, could spur the town’s population growth from about 600 to more than 5,000 residents.
All of the new housing would rely on Tusayan’s three deep groundwater wells; decades of pumping have already diminished seeps and springs located 3,000 feet below the Grand Canyon’s south rim. A recent study found that drought and development have reduced, or in some instances stopped, groundwater flow from South Rim springs. It concluded that pumping additional groundwater from the regional aquifer will further reduce flows to springs in the national park and adjacent tribal lands.
The depletion of the Grand Canyon’s groundwater, loss of wildlife habitat and public land for recreation, and increased traffic congestion and light and noise pollution are among the many concerns that caused the Forest Service to return Stilo’s similar application for revisions in 2016. Since 2019, Tusayan and Stilo have submitted several new draft applications for the agency to review.
If the Forest Service accepts the current application, it will trigger a multi-year study to evaluate how the new roads and utility corridors and the mega-resort will affect the surrounding national forest and park lands. Public engagement will be essential to protect those adjacent public lands and to ensure that the addition of thousands of faucets, tubs, and toilets will not drain diminishing supplies of already scarce groundwater.
If this feels like déjà vu, that’s because it is. Stilo has been angling to build a large-scale tourist enterprise in Tusayan since the early 1990s. Originally, it purchased more than 2,100 acres of private land scattered throughout the Kaibab National Forest in hopes of exchanging those parcels for national forest land near Tusayan. It planned to build 3,650 hotel rooms, 425,000 square feet of retail space, and a large residential area on the traded land. But, county voters nixed Stilo’s bid to rezone the area for building that mega-development.
BLAKE MCCORD
Undaunted, Stilo aligned with Tusayan business owners to incorporate the town and to assert local control over development decisions. Five candidates for town council — all supported by Stilo — were elected in November 2010. Stilo essentially engineered the town of Tusayan’s incorporation and finagled the election to advance its mega-development.
In fairness, Stilo collaborated with many entities in the early 1990s in its attempt to make its development proposal more palatable. Among Stilo’s early selling points was a promise to end Tusayan’s reliance on groundwater by delivering Colorado River water to the gateway community by train. But that never happened. During the intervening years, neighboring communities drilled new wells, and Tusayan’s guzzling of groundwater grew as hotel rooms, swimming pools, and residences were added within the bubble of existing development.
For more than a decade, Tusayan’s businesses have known that their wells can’t sustain increased levels of pumping, much less supply Stilo’s mega-resort. By 2004, water in a well drilled by the Grand Canyon Squire Hotel had dropped by 16 feet in two years. And by 2009, the water level in another Tusayan well had dropped by 13 feet. Despite clear and mounting evidence that Tusayan is exhausting the Grand Canyon’s underground reservoir of water, it still joins Stilo in proposing to pump evermore groundwater.
Rural landowners in Arizona are permitted to drill wells beneath their property and pump groundwater. In 2013, Stilo’s representative said it was legal to sink a well to supply its development, “but it may not be the wisest decision for a variety of reasons,” conceding that Stilo’s own hydrologists agreed that groundwater pumping affects springs in the park.
Steve Rice, Grand Canyon National Park’s hydrologist at the time, said that if Stilo does decide to drill for water, the damage could be “pretty substantial,” suggesting that any increase in groundwater use could cause small seeps and springs below the South Rim to go dry.
Can we stop existing wells from mining the Grand Canyon’s groundwater and prevent new wells from killing its life-giving waters?
BLAKE MCCORD
Those who have the most to lose think so. In 2016, the Havasupai Tribe filed suit in federal court against Tusayan’s well owners and those of 15 other wells that consume the Grand Canyon’s groundwater, claiming that the wells threaten the tribe’s sole source of drinking water and world-famous waterfalls, essential to their economy. The tribe’s lawsuit sought to cap pumping rates from existing wells and to prohibit the drilling of new wells. A federal judge dismissed the suit for technical reasons.
Nonetheless, the Havasupai Tribe continues to seek a remedy to the reality that the tribe’s underground water source cannot sustain current rates of pumping — nor can it support siphoning more water for new development. The odds are against stopping Tusayan’s wells from pumping even more water. But there’s a good chance that the public can plug Stilo’s ploy to tap into the Grand Canyon’s groundwater.
Tusayan’s and much of the West’s recoverable underground water is rapidly being exhausted. It’s worth considering Charles Bowden’s query: “If groundwater is basically fossil and nonrenewable in arid regions, then one asks whether it should be used at all, and if used, for what?” To save the Grand Canyon’s disappearing seeps and springs, we must first stop Stilo from mining the Grand Canyon’s groundwater.
And that is exactly what the Trust has been, and will continue, working toward. Along with a coalition of environmental organizations, we’re making the case to the Forest Service that Stilo and Tusayan’s proposal should be rejected because it is not in the public interest and would irreparably harm the Grand Canyon. But if the Forest Service allows it to move forward to the next step—a multi-year study of the development’s environmental impacts— we’ll be ready. We’ll continue to work with the Havasupai Tribe and others to present the facts to the Forest Service and mobilize the public. Massive public opposition can crush Stilo’s plan to pump more water from a tank that’s running lower and lower. And longer term, the Trust will continue to pursue innovative legal and policy mechanisms to stop this kind of unsustainable development. It’s simply not in the public interest.
Roger Clark directs the Grand Canyon Trust's Grand Canyon Program.
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