In 1980, Arizona began regulating groundwater in the state’s largest cities and suburbs under a landmark law that called for most of these areas to achieve an overarching goal by 2025: a long-term balance between the amount of water pumped from the ground and the amount seeping back underground to replenish aquifers.
Forty-one years later, the state’s latest data shows most of the areas where groundwater is managed remain far from achieving a long-term balance, a goal known as “safe yield.” Groundwater is still overpumped in most of the state’s “active-management areas,” or AMAs. And in many places, aquifer levels continue to decline...