In this issue…

_Lifestyle
Free water is the best water
Looking for land?
_{Land News}
There’s Gold in That Airport
It’s All Part of Some Master Plan
Data and Taxes
The Eyes in the Sky
Smelting Benson’s Government
There’s Gold in That Monument
_{Water News}
$11 Million to Drill Deeper
Deeper Isn’t Deep For Long
“Plenty Of Water”
Want To Buy A Vineyard?
New Flood Maps Just Dropped
Happy Birthday, From The Federal Government
_Classifieds
Funny ones, real ones

Howdy, folks.

If you hadn’t noticed, springtime is pretending like it’s summertime. And who knows what summertime is gonna pretend to be like. If there’s any hope for cooler temps, it will be by the grace of generous monsoon rains.

Speaking of rains… surely you’ve at least considered harvesting rainwater.

Maybe you thought there’s just not enough in the desert to be very useful.

Well — you’d be wrong.

Or maybe you figured it costs too much to build a proper catchment system. That one I can’t judge — I don’t know your bank account — but I do have good news: there’s free money available right now if you want to build one. I’ll get to that in the Water News section below.

You may also have noticed this newsletter arrived a couple days late. That’s because I’ve been buried in a few projects, one of which is a free tool I’m handing over to you today. There will be a March edition coming shortly — and it will be an interesting one.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the food grows… but a calculator helps.

I recently did some research work for the SkyHarvest non-profit down in Bowie. They’re trying to help folks harvest their own rainwater instead of waiting around for infrastructure to love them back. In the process, I built a few graphics — one of which makes a simple point:

Even a modest 600 square foot roof can collect thousands of gallons of rainwater in an average Arizona year.

Thousands.

With a proper reverse osmosis filter — like the Berkey Phoenix filters — all that water is drinkable.

But then I got curious. It’s one thing to collect water. It’s another thing to grow food with it. So I built a calculator to answer a very basic question: How much food can you grow, year-round, using nothing but rainwater?

But what about using that water for growing food? I wanted to know how much food you can grow with just rainwater all year round. So I put together a calculator spreadsheet that figures this out, and I’m making it available to all you readers of the Papers.

The spreadsheet already includes preset local monthly rainfall averages. You can adjust those if you’d like, but you don’t have to. All you need to enter is:

• Your roof size

• Your storage tank capacity

• Your garden size

And the tool will tell you:

• How much water the garden gets from direct rainfall

• How much collected additional water is needed

• If there will be enough water from the tank that month

• How much surplus water will get stored in the tank

• How much runoff will be lost because the tank is at capacity

• Basic costs for low-tech rainwater harvesting systems

In the example I ran above, an 800 sq ft roof with 1,100 gallons of storage can support a 100 sqft garden nearly year-round. The only month that needs supplemental tap water is June — and it’s just 31 gallons.

The other 3,421 gallons come right out of the sky.

Now, before anyone writes me an angry letter: this is not an exact science. Rain doesn’t arrive politely on the first of the month in evenly spaced increments. It comes in bursts. It comes sideways. It comes all at once and then disappears for six weeks.

That’s why I recommend erring on the side of slightly larger storage than the spreadsheet might suggest. Also worth noting: the calculator already assumes only a 90% collection efficiency, to account for real-world losses.

If you want to use the tool, you can open it here and copy it to your google drive.

If you improve it, break it, or think of a better way to model it, reply to this email and let me know. The desert is a collaborative experiment.

If you want to learn more about rainwater harvesting, you’re in better luck than you knew — the local People for the Playa non-profit is hosting a rainwater harvesting workshop on March 28th.

The workshop is free, but it’s first-come first-served for the first 30 registrants. You can register here: www.peoplefortheplaya.org

Up in Tucson you can find the Rainwater Harvesting King himself, Brad Lancaster, and his website has lots of information: https://www.harvestingrainwater.com/

And if this summer turns out cooler than February suggests, we’ll all pretend we saw it coming.

Home Sweet Home

If you’re still looking for a little slice of high desert heaven, or know someone who is, we got some options for ya.

One of the major reasons people love southeast Arizona is the epic mountain views. The bigger, the better. These 18 acres are just west of Bisbee, snuggled right against the Red Mountains, and zoned RU-4 for owner-builder opt-out. A little further west is access to the San Pedro River riparian area, one of the nicest places to cool down under the shade of big trees and with the relaxing sound of free-flowing waters. To the south you get an epic view of the Sierra San José. Meanwhile, you’re only 12 minutes away from Safeway, gas stations, and good restaurants. Best of both worlds. — $40,000 — Link

$35,000 — 30 acres — Elfrida — Link

$19,000 — 5 acres — Cochise — Link

$12,000 — 5.6 acres — Douglas — Link

$9,500 — 5.17 acres — Pearce — Link

If you know, you know — our corner of Arizona is the most biodiverse region of the inland United States. And if you want to be close to all that natural splendor, it doesn’t get any better than the hideaway of Portal, where so many nature lovers retire. But this property doesn’t require that you live like a wild animal — grid power is adjacent to the parcel. Or you can do the off-grid DIY owner-builder thing because this property is RU-4 zoned for opt-out construction. You’ll be just four miles from the famous Portal Peak Lodge & Cafe and the best local trailheads, and you’ll notice a lot of neighbors with actual observatory domes on top of their houses — astronomers love to retire here too. — $89,000 — Link

$49,500 — 8 acres — Portal — Link

$39,900 — 8.45 acres — Portal — Link

$39,500 — 7 acres — Portal — Link

$21,000 — 8.74 acres — Portal — Link

And don’t forget: you get 50 Points of Good Luck if you tell the realtors the Ground Party Papers sent you their way.

Cochise County is under construction these days, and construction ain’t cheap. In a political moment where federal funding is being reined in, or even slashed, what magic spells have our local officials uttered such that we’re seeing real cash money flow our way?

Let’s take a look at what’s going on.

There’s Gold in That Airport

The Bisbee-Douglas airport is getting runway money, a hefty $2 million in federal funding for “revitalization” that Rep. Juan Ciscomani advocated for. County and city officials are talking about the 800-acre airport as a long-game economic asset and using jargon like “opportunity corridors.” Supervisor Kathleen Gomez said, “This can be a huge gateway for economic development, for the county, for the state and for the whole country.” Douglas Mayor Jose Grijalva tied it straight to the new Commercial Port of Entry project next door: “Commercial port is right next door… it’s a huge incentive.” This may all be true, but my imagination is failing to conceive of what cargo would get trucked across a border just to then be put on an airplane, when it could more easily be put on an airplane in Mexico. But I am open to being educated on the matter. Write in if you see the bigger picture.

It’s All Part of Some Master Plan

Speaking of the new port of entry, the federal government committed $20 million for the Douglas Port connector road, compliments of Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego. ADOT says it will be built in its full four-lane configuration linking State Route 80 to the new commercial port of entry. Gov. Katie Hobbs called it “a win for Arizona,” and framed it around trade and competitiveness. Construction is slated for fiscal year 2027, with the new commercial port expected in fall 2028. With new runways, roads, and ports, it all looks like a county-level bet on trucks, freight, and border trade to drive economic growth.

Data, Water, and Taxes

Cochise County is also trying to write the rules before the next wave of applicants shows up smiling. At a Feb. 11 work session, supervisors and staff reviewed utility-scale solar regulations and proposed standards for data centers — hot topics because of their water use and fire risk issues. Staff discussed regulations and special-use conditions including water budgets, drainage and soil reports, cultural resource surveys, and decommissioning plans with cost estimates.

At the meeting, Supervisor Frank Antenori said, “We are not growing economically,” a sentiment which he later elaborated in an interview with the Herald/Review, pointing to a projected $15 million budget shortfall in the face of decreased funding from the state and federal government. Antenori sees data centers as one way to pay for county services without raising taxes on local property owners — something that always gets huge pushback in Cochise.

At the county meeting, staff recommended “restrictions on routine potable (drinking) water use for cooling unless an applicant demonstrates nonpotable alternatives are infeasible.” I don’t think this formula is strong enough to really protect our groundwater resources, but I’ll say more on that next in the next edition.

The Eyes in the Sky

The county also hit the brakes on a surveillance purchase that was starting to look bigger than a simple infrastructure grant. Flock Safety license-plate reader cameras, which many cities have installed, are getting nation-wide pushback after privacy and data-sharing concerns continue to surface. Supervisor Antenori said “a private company is getting around the Fourth Amendment by collecting all this data through persistent surveillance.” The county had received a $54,000 grant for the system, which is how these things usually enter town: free money first, hard questions later. Supervisor Gomez said “we should dig deep… understand what kind of data is being collected and where it goes.”

Smelting Benson’s Government

Benson’s aluminum fight has moved beyond permits and into the machinery of local power. ADI received an air quality permit from ADEQ, clearing their biggest regulatory hurdle. Meanwhile, the legal challenge and recall campaign have been moving forward. Three Benson City Council members are facing challengers in a May 19 recall election tied to the project. In court, plaintiffs argue the city should have required a variance through the Board of Adjustment instead of using a conditional use permit for the height issue, and plaintiff Misty Bloom put the local stakes plainly: “We also want to live here and we want to have water and clean air.” Aluminum Dynamic’s counsel called the challenge an attempt to rewrite the city code and requested to have the case dismissed. The judge has yet to rule on the motion.

There’s Gold in That Monument

After previous legislative failures, Democratic Senators Kelly and Gallego have reintroduced legislation to designate Chiricahua National Monument as Arizona’s fourth national park, with companion legislation in the House from Republican Rep. Ciscomani. Kelly said the move would preserve a “one-of-a-kind landscape” while delivering “an important win for southeastern Arizona’s recreation economy.” Gallego tied it directly to tourism and “new economic opportunity in Cochise County.” Everybody loves the rocks, and everybody can also hear the cash register — Democrats and Republicans alike.

$11 Million to Drill Deeper

If you didn’t hear, Attorney General Kris Mayes reached a settlement with the local “mega dairy” Riverview and it includes two $5.5 million funds — one administered by a local third-party and one by Riverview. The funds are meant to go directly to local residents in the Willcox and Douglas basins who have been impacted by declining water levels, and eligible remedies include deepening of wells, installation of rainwater catchment systems, and infrastructure for using hauled water. Willcox resident Lisa Glenn said, “I am amazed at this development! It is not something I ever thought would actually happen.” Riverview also agreed to fallow 2,000 acres over 12 years, which won’t fix our bigger groundwater issues, but its a first-of-its-kind win toward keeping industrial agriculture in check. I wrote more about this story for the Water Agenda here. And I’ll keep you updated on how to apply for that money if you live in Sulphur Springs Valley.

Deeper Isn’t Deep For Long

The Arizona Department of Water Resources has recently been doing its mandatory basin sweeps of local water levels. The agency found Cochise wells have been “steadily declining for years,” with some down more than 20 feet in five years. KGUN9’s Alexis Ramanjulu tagged along for the job with ADWR hydrogeologist Aaron Stolley who said, “As long as there’s more water being used than is replenished, we will continue to see decline.” ADWR is measuring nearly 2,000 wells across Cochise and parts of Graham counties in the current survey cycle. Stolley also noted farming areas tend to drop faster while the fringes decline more slowly.

“Plenty Of Water”

People can say the wildest things with a straight face. After the Attorney General’s big moves in Cochise County, our local state Representative Lupe Diaz (who is running for re-election this year) decided enough is enough and introduced a bill to limit her ability to pursue nuisance charges. During the legislative hearing for the bill, Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton asked Diaz: “Is it your position that the homeowners in Cochise County, who live where Riverview set up shop, don't deserve help after their wells went dry?”

Diaz replied to the question: “What a lot of people don't understand is that Riverview, 12 years ago, offered to put in a water district for them. See, there's a lot of water in the Willcox Water Basin. There's plenty of water — but it's deep. The only ones that could reach that water for the people there was the dairy. They offered to do that for the people there. …My position is that they're there to help.” That exchange lands right on the nerve of the whole Cochise water fight: the difference between “plenty of water” and “plenty of accessible water”. They didn’t even get into the problem of earth fissures which will increase as groundwater declines continue.

Want To Buy A Vineyard?

Sam Pillsbury sounds like a man who built something real and would like, for once, to sit down. The Willcox wine pioneer says he is ready to retire after a quarter of a century, and his 80-acre property has been on the market for over a year. “I just have been working non-stop for 25 years, and I want a year off, that’s all,” he said. He says the local wine industry is in trouble, but also remembers, “Almost the first 10 years, people would just come up and laugh in my face” that he’d ever have a successful vineyard. One the one hand, grapes have high economic value per gallon of water consumed. On the other hand, the young people aren’t drinking wine as much as previous generations.

New Flood Maps Just Dropped

FEMA did what FEMA does: moved some lines on paper that might make a real difference for your regulatory responsibilities as a home owner-builder. New flood maps affect Douglas, Huachuca City, Tombstone, and unincorporated Cochise County, with an appeal window running from Feb. 26, 2026 through May 27, 2026. The maps become effective April 25, 2026. Floodplain updates sound like background noise until a lender, insurer, or permit desk starts using the new map instead of the old one. Then everybody suddenly develops a deep interest in hydrology.

Happy Birthday, From The Federal Government

February 14th is a date of many meanings. It’s Valentine’s Day, Arizona’s statehood birthday, and the extended deadline chosen by the federal government for the Colorado River states to reach an agreement on how to share Colorado River water that Arizona depends on every day. That deadline was, once again, missed. Arizona Water Director Tom Buschatzke said, “Arizona remains committed to compromise and accommodation.” That’s polite bureaucrat-speak for “we’re fighting like hell to get every drop of water we can — compromise be damned.” At the federal level, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, “We believe that a fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.” But if the states don’t reach an agreement among themselves, the federal government will step in, and they’ve indicated that the results probably won’t be great for Arizona which has the weakest legal claims to the River water. To learn more about the possible management plans proposed by the federal government, you can read Jonathan Thompson’s excellent explainer here.

Today we’ve got some real classifieds and some fake ones. I think you’ll be able to tell the difference.

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