PARKER, Ariz. — This dusty desert land called Planet Ranch seems light years away from the trendy restaurants and upscale homes of Scottsdale, a posh, growing Phoenix suburb. And 180 miles away in far western Arizona, it might as well be.
But this is Scottsdale property, and with it go the water rights to the 8,400-acre farm.
Welcome to water ranching, just one facet of the shell game that is water rights in this parched state, where distant property and rights to faraway water are bought and sold as growing cities seek to quench their thirst in the future--if only on paper.
Water was the sole reason that Arizona cities snapped up ranches and farms like this one in the mid-1980s. The cities hoped that they could tap water on remote properties to supply the growing urban areas if other water sources dried up or couldn't keep pace with demand.
"When you start running out of municipal supplies, you start looking around and figuring out who has less money than you do," said Steve Olson, a lobbyist for the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
Larry Byers, a longtime Parker-area resident who now works for Scottsdale on the ranch, said people around here thought it strange that a city so far away would buy this land just for its water rights.
"I thought they could find water closer than out here. The reaction was mixed, because they didn't know what was gonna happen to Planet Ranch," he said as his truck bounced through miles of desert washes on the way to the ranch.
Rural communities reacted with alarm as such sales continued. Water ranching stopped in 1991 after officials from rural areas complained to the Legislature that the practice threatened their water supplies and potential for growth. But cities that bought water ranches before then were able to keep them.
In theory, Scottsdale could someday run a pipeline from Planet Ranch. Instead, it went another direction in the early 1990s and bought a portion of the rights the smaller cities of Prescott, Payson and Nogales hold in the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile canal that brings Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.
By selling their rights in the project, the smaller cities--which are far away from the canal--were able to use the money to buy and tap water closer to them.
That left Scottsdale trying to sell Planet Ranch. And that hasn't been easy.
