Water Talk

Ep 72: A Blueprint for Community Organizing around Data Centers

• Drs. Mallika Nocco, Faith Kearns, Sam Sandoval • Season 6 • Episode 72

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A conversation with Professor Michael Bogan (University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment) about data center water use, the concept of water neutral development, and community mobilization. Released October 3, 2025. 

Mallika Nocco:

Welcome to Water Talk. We are talking about data centers round two, this time with kind of a southwest focus. And now it's time for our primer. So, Faith, we decided to do two episodes on data centers, thinking about different regions this time. Now we're heading to your neck of the woods to talk with Professor Michael Bogan. He's going to tell us like a story, a good story. I feel like it could be a movie, honestly. I thought this was like this is a really good story about the introduction of a potential data center and then a community's efforts to eventually not allow the data center in Tucson. One of the things that I thought about is oh, not all data centers are the same, and not all data centers use the same type or same volume of water. So yeah, other things to think about, Faith.

Faith Kearns:

You know, for me, it was just interesting because the more I talk with people about this, this is about like my third conversation just today about issues related data centers and the highest use of water. And what I'm really getting right now is just how diverse the issues are depending on the place. You know, you're talking about the type of data. There's also the background issues of the place, right? And Tucson is this really interesting place. As we were talking with Michael, I was thinking a lot about the interview that we did with Sunaura Taylor last season about her book on disabled ecologies and this idea of disabled groundwater, which was she used Tucson, right? As the case study for that. And so there are a couple of things running through that, one of which is this, you know, just the issue of groundwater in the desert and some of the things that Michael talks about in terms of Tucson's development. And I also think that the activation in terms of the community around water issues probably has a longer history in Tucson than it does in a lot of other places. Again, I think when we're talking with Sunaura, it was like very clear that environmental justice communities and all sorts of folks had already been working on some of these, you know, groundwater issues in Tucson and had groups that they could mobilize, which is really, really interesting. And I don't think that can or would happen everywhere, but it's it's something for people to be thinking about is like, what are what do we have locally? Um, and it's going to be different everywhere. And I think, you know, Michael didn't talk about it that much, but I think that one of the really important contextual things about this for Arizona is that Tucson uses a lot of Colorado River water to recharge their groundwater. And that has led to, for example, the revitalization of the Santa Cruz River. But we are, as many people know, facing a lot of uncertainty around the Colorado River in the next year. And so, you know, we're already really challenged thinking about the water portfolios for various cities in Arizona and what it might mean to have permanently less Colorado River water, right? And so I think that's kind of this important backdrop to this whole conversation is that water in Arizona has always been precious. But right now we really are in a little bit of a transition time around where our water supplies exactly are going to come from.

Mallika Nocco:

Yeah, absolutely. A couple of other little primer points as a Midwesterner, thinking about Arizona. There's two things that that kind of stood out to me. One was just that the water is different. The characteristic of the water itself is different. It has more dissolved salts in it. So it's, you know, more saline than our fresh water in the Midwest. So you'll hear Michael talking about when water becomes used in these data centers. So the other thing that I was thinking about that I kind of realized actually when I went to California is that when there's not as much water around, it is easier to count it and notice when it's being taken from one spot and put into another. And this is something that as a you know water scientist in the midWest, sometimes I struggle with it because there's just a lot more water coming in. So it's not always as obvious to people in communities when there's gonna be this loss and how the loss is gonna impact an ecosystem because we have this, you know, constant precipitation and recharge in our cycle. So that's another thing to just consider.

Faith Kearns:

Yeah, I think that's what really has hit me today is just the the issues are gonna be different. The way that you deal with it is gonna be different in every place. And so it's great to see sort of a blueprint from a place like Tucson, but every place is gonna have to kind of come up with their own solutions to some of these things.

Mallika Nocco:

So yeah, without further ado, let's talk with Professor Michael Bogan. In today's episode, we are talking about data centers and public water conservation efforts with Professor Michael Bogan. Michael Bogan is an associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Cecil and Carol Schwabi Endowed Chair in Research, Teaching, and Conservation at the University of Arizona. Michael studies how drought and other flow regime disturbances interact with and shape aquatic and riparian biodiversity. His current research projects range from assessing the ecological benefits of using treated effluent to restore flow in urban rivers to continental scale collaborative studies of the effects of stream drying on aquatic biodiversity. Michael previously was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and did his graduate research at Oregon State University. Welcome to Water Talk, Michael.

Michael Bogan:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Mallika Nocco:

So we're gonna do a silly and fun this or that game, rapid fire. So ocean or lake?

Michael Bogan:

That's tough, actually. I'll say lake.

Mallika Nocco:

All right, sparkling or still?

Michael Bogan:

Still.

Mallika Nocco:

Rain or snow?

Michael Bogan:

Rain.

Mallika Nocco:

Salty or fresh?

Michael Bogan:

Fresh.

Mallika Nocco:

Hot or cold? Ooh.

Faith Kearns:

Bath or shower?

Michael Bogan:

Shower.

Faith Kearns:

So can you tell us what your favorite body of water is?

Michael Bogan:

I think it would have to be the Santa Cruz River, which is flows here through Tucson and is what I primarily work on these days.

Faith Kearns:

That does not surprise me. So, Michael, we are we're super excited to have you on Water Talk. I'm sort of surprised we haven't had you before, but like really glad that we're doing it now. I think this is a great topic. And so before we really get into the meat of the interview, can you tell us about a pivotal moment that led you on your the professional path you're on now?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, I think you know, an early pivotal moment involved moving someplace that was very different from any place I'd ever lived before. I realize that's not something everybody can do, get up and move across the country, you know, because they have family obligations or other reasons. But for me, that was really pivotal to move from a climate that was very wet, you know, water all over the place, rivers flowing all over the place, to Southern California when I turned 18 and suddenly was in a very, very different ecosystem, very, very different climate. And I got to see kind of the combined impacts of what it's like to live in a dry climate combined with urbanization and what kind of high levels of urbanization in Southern California have done to the local rivers and streams. Um, so not only were a lot of the rivers and streams dry a lot of the year because of the climate, but then on top of that, you know, they had concrete banks or flood protection put in. So that really opened my eyes to like how different a river could be and how you know everything the previous 18 years that I thought a river was suddenly looked very different in this new setting. And so that that it took me you know another 10 years before I was actually like a full-time biologist studying urban rivers, but but that just that early exposure to it really opened my eyes to kind of how different ecology could be depending on where you lived in the country.

Faith Kearns:

Very cool. And now you seem like the the consummate desert dweller. So I think you've like fully inhabited that person. Absolutely.

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, never never leave the desert.

Mallika Nocco:

So we have talked about consumptive water use and the large amounts of water that are required for data centers in a relatively water-rich area like the Great Lakes region in Wisconsin where I am. You know, you're you're in Arizona, Faith, you're in Arizona. And we just started to think about like what what does it mean in an arid, water-limited place like Arizona to be considering these data centers and their water use?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, so Arizona is obviously naturally a water-limited landscape. You know, that's a characteristic of our climate, that we have a dry, warm climate. So even under completely natural conditions, we don't have that much water in the landscape. We don't have a lot of rivers or lakes or ponds naturally. And then we layer on top of that the last 120 years or so of human development and especially colonial and U.S. development, of dams, diversions, groundwater pumping, water withdrawals. So all of those factors have acted to further limit the amount of water that's on the landscape to the point where it's really hard to find any flowing water in most of our streams and rivers these days. And then we had a third layer on top of that, which is the last 25 years now of what we consider a mega drought in Arizona, where we've had below normal precipitation and above normal temperatures across that whole time period, which is acting to further reduce the amount of water on the landscape. So we were naturally water limited. We, through development, took a lot of water out of the landscape, and then now we've had a loss of water on the landscape due to climate conditions as well. So we're really left with very, very little surface water, you know, to support ecosystems and smaller towns and human settlements. So that's why anytime we think about introducing a new industry that's going to use water, you know, we have to consider this context that we're in of water scarcity.

Faith Kearns:

Yeah, and I guess when it comes to some of the ecological impacts, what are what are the kinds of things that you think communities, especially I guess in arid areas, desert areas, should be thinking about when it comes to data centers? I mean, I feel like this is such a new issue for a lot of folks that they don't don't even kind of know where to start.

Michael Bogan:

I think, I mean, the two when we're thinking about you know, ecosystem or environmental impacts of data centers, the two big factors we think about are their power use and their water use. So for Arizona, obviously, we're we're heavily focused on their water use. Traditionally, a lot of data centers have evaporative cooling to kind of keep the computers cool. And so what they're doing is taking in water, running it in pipes, you know, around the computing uh systems there, and cooling that in that process of using that fresh water to cool the computers, they're evaporating that water off into the atmosphere. And so you're losing that water from whatever ecosystem or or aquifer that you're drawing it out of. In addition to that direct water consumption or evaporation that happens with water-cooled data centers, what you have after you've gone through several cycles of that use, and after you've evaporated a lot of that water away, you've concentrated the minerals that were in that water naturally. And so if you say if you evaporate 80% of the water off in the cooling process, then the water that's left over is very mineral rich and it and essentially becomes saline, it becomes more like salt water. So the data centers have to get rid of that water because eventually that will corrode some of the infrastructure they have. So where that saline effluent goes is another question that we have for a lot of data centers.

Mallika Nocco:

And Michael, that's interesting because that's something that didn't come up as much when we were thinking about the Great Lakes region. And is it just like a source issue where the water in the Southwest or in the Arizona area that you'd be starting with has more salinity?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, so there's two issues. Number one, yeah, in across Arizona and across the southwest, we tend to have more minerals in our water in the first place. Um so we're further concentrating what's already mineral-rich water. And then the second is where that saline effluent goes matters, right? If it's going back into Lake Michigan, it's going to get diluted very, very quickly by a massive body of fresh water. But in Arizona, if it's going into a stream or if it's going into a wastewater treatment facility, it's not getting mixed with that much extra fresh water. And so, you know, even a relatively small amount of saline effluent going into a treatment plant or into a creek can have a much, proportionally a much bigger impact in a place like Arizona than it would in Michigan or Wisconsin. And then even if you have a air-cooled data center, which is not using that much water, but but is using a lot more power to cool it. You know, it's like a giant air conditioner instead of an evaporative cooler, then you have to think about where is that power coming from. So it could impact ecosystems if it's coming from hydroelectric power and generation, it could impact ecosystems if it's coming from natural gas and fracking or coal mining, right? Some that power is coming from somewhere, and there's going to be some downstream impacts on both freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems from that power generation. So those are kind of the two big classes that we think about of impacts from data centers.

Faith Kearns:

I'm wondering if you could just give a little bit of background on the specific Tucson situation because I'm thinking, you know, you work on, you have been working on the Santa Cruz River rate and and it and the role of effluent in sort of revitalizing that river. And so now when I'm thinking about effluent and where it would go, there's some specific things about Tucson that I'm just wondering if you might give our listeners a little bit of background on just like what the what the issues there specifically have been.

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, it's uh so let me try to first frame it as like uh a 15,000-foot overview of our local water cycle and then the specifics of Project Blue and this proposed data center here. So Tucson at one point in time was the largest groundwater dependent city in the country and and really realistically, you know, potentially in the world. The local river is the Santa Cruz River that flows through Tucson, but it never had that much surface flow, like it, and it was never a place where you could build dams. There's not the right geology for building dams, nor was there enough flow behind, you know, to store behind dams. So from the early days of Tucson as a city, going back to the 1870s, 1880s, groundwater pumping underneath the Santa Cruz and in the watershed became the major source of water for the city. That continued to happen all the way through, you know, the the world post-World War II uh growth period in Tucson. The city kept growing, kept growing, and we kept drawing more and more groundwater to the point where the aquifer in parts of the city had dropped 250, 300 feet. Like we were extracting water at a rate that was that was not renewable by any stretch of the word. We finally, in the late 1990s, we got access to Colorado River water, and this was thanks to the Sun Out the Nation filing a lawsuit against the federal government, a water rights lawsuit, and gaining access to the Central Arizona Project Canal from Colorado River, Colorado River as part of that lawsuit settlement. And so Tucson then was able to get access to Colorado River water for the first time in its history. So since the late 1990s, we've been bringing in Colorado River water, importing it, and using that both as our municipal supply and as groundwater recharge. So that has has really saved Tucson because we our wells would have run dry without that access to the Colorado River. Over the last 30 years, impressively, the city of Tucson has grown quite a bit. You know, we've added several hundred thousand residents, but our water use, our gross water use, has stayed flat or even decreased because we've also gotten much better at conservation at the local level. One of the ways that we've gotten better at conservation is water reuse. So not just using water once, but then treating it and using it again. And we use that water all over the city. So we use it for irrigation and in golf courses, parks, schools, and it's distributed throughout the city. We use it for groundwater recharge to continue to bring those aquifer levels back up that were previously depleted. And then we use it to support flow in the Santa Cruz River. So we've really, you know, the city of Tucson and our city, our public water agency, Tucson Water, have put in a lot of work over the last three decades to reduce our water consumption, to recharge the aquifer in places where it had been depleted, and also to recreate um habitat in our local river by putting some of that water back in it. So that's kind of our local water cycle, which is very different from many other places.

Mallika Nocco:

It was interesting because you kind of told us a story of consumption and then conservation, and now we're kind of in this moment where things are starting to feel pretty good. So I feel like we're in, you know, the moment to introduce the water center.

Michael Bogan:

Yes, exactly. Our public water utility, Tucson Water, had gone through a process over the last several years of envisioning, you know, Tucson 2100. So what are we going to look like? What's our water use, you know, 80 or 100 years from now? And so we really had reached the point in our community where even though there are all these other issues, right? There's Colorado River issues, there's long-term drought issues, we we felt, as a community, we felt pretty good. We felt like we had a good plan, we felt like we were really focused on sustainability in the longer term. And so I think that was the mindset that the city of Tucson and the community in Tucson had as we came into this issue with the proposed data center. And so the story of Project Blue, which was the name for the proposed data center, was really not well known or not known at all until May of this year, so May of 2025, was the first that the public had heard that there's this proposed new industrial user of water who was going to generate some kind of jobs. We we heard about it in really vague terms at first, and then in June 2025, about a week before kind of a critical Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting, they released a bit more information and we found out, okay, it's a data center, and it's gonna do something with data, but we don't really know what, and it's going to use water, and uh it's going to be on land that the county is going to sell to the company, and the water that's going to be used is uh reclaimed water or some of the treated wastewater from the water reclamation facilities. So we had that much information about five days before the county board of supervisors was going to vote on the sale of the land to the data center company, um, which was known as Beale Infrastructure. Um, so that immediately raised a bunch of red flags in the community, right? Folks were worried about, you know, why are we going to give a bunch of water to a data center that's not going to generate that much jobs, that many jobs, or that much financial incentive.

Mallika Nocco:

At that moment, did you know how much reclaimed water they wanted to use, or just that they wanted to use reclaimed water?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, at that moment, we just knew that they wanted to use reclaimed water. And then, so June 17th, 2025, they had the Board of Supervisors meeting where they were going to vote on selling the land to the company. So Beal Infrastructure was there, and that's where they started to present more details about the project for the first time was during the public vote. So at that point in time, what the company claimed was that it was going to be 100% reclaimed water that they were using, so no potable water, which is you know fairly innovative as far as data centers go, right? They're not taking drinking water, they're not pumping out of a pond or a lake or a river. Um so that part of it sounds good. And then they also made the claim that they were going to 100% offset their use of that reclaimed water. So in addition to just using reclaimed water, whatever amount of reclaimed water they used, they were going to somehow create additional groundwater recharge projects to offset the water they were using. Once we had that information, then that raised even more red flags. Because how do you have a water neutral data center that's evaporating potentially millions of gallons of water a day?

Mallika Nocco:

In a desert.

Michael Bogan:

In a desert, right. But we couldn't get more information at that point in time because the city and the county had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company. So there was no public information that was allowed to be released, and many of the elected officials in both the city and the county, and many of the staffers in the city and the county did not have access to the detailed information about water and power use. So that was another big red flag, right, that immediately got the community upset.

Faith Kearns:

And was it like after that first public meeting or during it that people started to have because I I mean there was a lot of news and a lot of social media in Arizona.

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, so what had happened in in the five days leading up to the county vote to sell the land to the data center company, um, there was a small group of us who knew what was going on, who were already the red flags were raised, right? And so we were communicating amongst each other. Many of those folks who ended up being becoming part of the No Desert Data Center Coalition, they attended that Board of Supervisors meeting and they spoke out against the sale of the land to the data center. But the Board of Supervisors on a three to two vote ended up voting in favor of selling it to the data center company. So we didn't have much time to prepare before that vote, and that vote was kind of rushed with you know no public information. And that was really in the fallout from the county voting to sell the land to the data center. That was really where the outrage and the momentum in the movement started to grow. Because all of a sudden we had you know uh an agreement to sell this land for a data center to a company, then we have no idea how much water they're gonna use, we have no idea how much power they're gonna use, we have no idea who the company is working for, because it was a company deal infrastructure that didn't have a public record. You know, they'd been around for a couple of years, and so there was obviously they weren't leading it, like somebody else was behind them financing it, and that was not disclosed at that time. So, really, as soon as we realized this whole thing might get pushed through without any public input and without any information, that was really when the community started to get upset and organize, and it and it took off very quickly after that. The county voted to sell the land to the data center, so that was approved. But what was required for the data center to proceed was for the city to then annex that land into the city so the city could provide the reclaimed water for the operation of the data center. So all this in you know, this kind of loose coalition of folks who were already aware of the situation, what we immediately shifted to focusing on was the city council and preventing them or encouraging them to vote against annexation. Because theoretically, if the data center didn't have water from the city, it wouldn't go forward. And what the company actually said, the company and the county both said during that initial meeting, was that if the city did not vote to annex the land and provide it water, then the sale would be canceled.

Mallika Nocco:

Wow. I mean, it's kind of convoluted, but also pretty interesting. I think this is a good moment to ask this question. So we both came from the same postdoctoral fellowship where we, you know, have this kind of different training for scientists where we're encouraged to be involved in policy, to take calculated risks, and to kind of bridge science and policy together. And you really did that here. I'm curious and you feel free to not talk about anything you don't want to on this front. But you are a professor at a university and you're involved in this major public controversy. How did the involvement happen? Were you always involved just as a a person in the community who cares? And then your role as a scientist became important, or were you brought in for your expertise? Or like how how did it all work out with you ending up in this thing?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah. So first of all, the you know, the training that we received in our postdoctoral program was invaluable. You know, it's been invaluable through my whole career, but this is where I really used all of the tools in the toolbox, you know, because we were trained in storytelling, science communication, policy making, meeting facilitation, you know, all those things had to be pulled into this data center issue. So where I had been at before the data center proposal popped up, as soon as I came uh back to Tucson and started this faculty position, I immediately looked for ways that I could plug in to serving our local government, and some of the water use and and conservation decisions that they make, both at the city and the county level. And I did that because it's important to me as a community member in Tucson, and I did that because it's part of our mission at the University of Arizona, as being the land grant institution. And so from the time that I started my job here, I had gotten involved in Santa Cruz River issues, had graduate students and undergrads doing research on the river, seeing how we could maybe make flight management tweak, the amount of water we're releasing, or you know, water treatment processes that we're doing to maximize the ecosystem benefit, maximize the biodiversity in the river. And so I had had those relationships already and had been working closely with a lot of the staff from Tucson Water and from Pima County Regional Flood Control District and Pima County Conservation. And we had always worked very closely together in those collaborations, but also furthering water conservation goals that you know the city and the county have. So that was kind of the context is we had all those relationships in place. Because I'm separate from the government and I'm in this kind of academic position, I was in a good position to be at a nexus point where I'm getting information from the city, I'm getting information from the county, I'm getting information from the state, we're gathering our own information in the Santa Cruz through our research, and so I can kind of put together different pieces of information in a way that it's hard for a city employee or a county employee to do on their own. So I was uniquely situated when the data center issue came up to be able to very quickly pull together, like, okay, what is all the flow information that we, you know, where do we release water into the river, how much do we release it, and how does that change depending on, you know, what our irrigation demands are in, you know. City parks and golf courses. I was quickly able to pull like what are the long-term management plans or strategies? What are the long-term goals for releasing water in different parts of the river? How does that impact groundwater recharge? How does that impact biodiversity? So I kind of had all the information together to act really quickly when there was a proposed new use of water that would affect the balance of all those other things. The question was, how much water was it going to use? And that was the information we didn't have. Because it was all under non-disclosure agreements with both the city and the county, they weren't releasing that information. And so what we decided to do at that point was say, okay, let's look at data centers that are existing in Phoenix and Mesa and Chandler, these other desert cities. Let's see how much water they're using. Let's get a range of potential water uses for this proposed one in Tucson. And then let's do like you know simple arithmetic, right? We have X amount of water in Tucson. We know where it goes into the river, we know where it goes to groundwater recharge, we know where it goes into the city distribution system. So it's a pretty simple it's it's arithmetic. And if we take out a million gallons per day to give to a data center, or five million gallons a day to give to a data center, you know, what's the impact going to be on some of those other uses? Additionally, if we're saying that the data center not only is going to use this water, but is going to offset its use somehow, that means additional water needs to be found, right, to offset the use.

Mallika Nocco:

More math addition from somewhere.

Michael Bogan:

Yeah. And so, you know, for those additional sources, you're either going to have to import new water, which is really hard, or you're going to have to somehow maximize your water credits. And this is where it really gets into super complicated Arizona specific water issues. But the the simplest way of putting it was the city of Tucson is currently losing water credit because there's water that flows into the Santa Cruz River from our wastewater treatment plants, and it flows downstream far enough to leave the Tucson metro area and go north into the next county, into Penal County. And so there's water that theoretically the city of Tucson owns, both the wet water and the water rights to that water, that is being lost to the system. So the easiest way to make a data center or any industrial use water neutral is to capture the water that's currently being lost. So the water that we're currently allowing to flow down the river and go out of the county. And that so that was my initial, you know, real simple math. I was like, okay, well, if we're going to do a data center of you know this size of one million gallons per day up to this size, five million gallons a day, how much water is the data center going to use, and then how much additional water is it going to use to offset it? And the easiest answer was to capture all of that water that's currently being lost out of Tucson and into the next county. Because there is enough water there to actually meet the need of the data center as well as create additional groundwater recharge projects.

Mallika Nocco:

And was that the plan?

Michael Bogan:

That will never quite be answered. Um and so so what we did is put out a white paper that said, we don't know how much water this project blue is going to use, but here's a range of water values that it might use. And if we assume that it's somewhere in this range, here's the range of impacts that we would expect on our local water supply. And the easiest way, like I said, the easiest way to do that is to capture some of the water that's currently being lost out of the county. So if we assume that it's a 5 million gallon per day data center, then we have to capture that 5 million gallons a day out of the river itself, and we have to capture an additional 5 million gallons a day to offset it. And because I had access to all these numbers, I can make a quick calculation and say, okay, that's gonna dry up three miles of the riverbed, or that's gonna dry up five miles of the riverbed.

Mallika Nocco:

Wow, yeah, but that's compelling. I mean, that draws a real, I mean, that that's something people can visualize.

Michael Bogan:

Exactly. That was really the only way to do it in the way they said they were gonna do it. You know, that that was the only way to do it and make it water neutral, unless you were suddenly importing Mississippi water or, you know, water from somewhere else.

Mallika Nocco:

I just shook my head and wagged my finger.

Michael Bogan:

But the interesting part was in creating this white paper saying here's a range of things, you know, that in concert with the growing public outrage about it, both of those things forced the city's hand to start releasing, okay, this is actually how much water that the data center is proposing to use. So then suddenly we had a number, like a real number of what the proposed water use was. And so I went back and just really quickly modified my white paper based on the numbers they released, you know, changed those. And we had, you know, real numbers that the people in Tucson could understand that this is X million gallons a day, you know, this is as much water as we'd use, X number of golf courses or whatever, you know, there's all kinds of different ways of looking at it, acre feet per year or whatever. But it became something tangible then at that point. And the question was, well, why didn't you say that from the first place? Right? Like why did we have to force you to release that information?

Faith Kearns:

I mean, it's it's such a cool story, though, Mike. Like that is the quintessential almost case study that people give for how a scientist can facilitate some of these processes in terms of just using the skills you have and sort of just showing, here's what this information shows us. And then I think, you know, I know there are lots of community organizing and all sorts of things going on, but it sounds like this was a pretty crucial piece of the puzzle because then jumping to the the conclusion, what did Tucson decide to do?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, so I think you know, I was able to use data, I was able to use science to say, like, you know, here's some predicted ecological impacts, some predicted real world impacts. And and really it was, I think my role was, you know, using that information, using the public status that I had, and you know, my access to journalists and ability to get a journalist to listen to what I was saying, you know, which is what some of our community members would have a harder time doing. So I was able to use that, and I feel like I just kind of started it, and then the community was able to pick up and run with it. And that, you know, that was the most impressive part of this whole thing. So over the the six weeks or so between the county vote and the city vote on approving you know the annexation of the proposed data center, that community connection, the community coalition, the outrage continued to grow and grow and grow. So my information didn't change at all, right? I had the same idea from the beginning to the end. But as more and more people grew aware of the situation, were very uncomfortable with the lack of transparency in what our city and our county was telling us, and the role of our local press in managing to get some additional information. So, you know, some of our local press outlets, like Arizona Luminaria, were able to do public information records requests. And that's when we learned, you know, that it was Amazon Web Services that was behind this heel infrastructure, this tiny company that came out of nowhere. You know, once the public then starts to hear that, oh, we're gonna give away millions of gallons of water a day to Amazon so that they can make profit, you know, that gets more and more people enraged about the situation and kind of how it was handled from the start. And then on top of that, this you know, the city, to their credit, tried to inject some transparency into the process after it was fairly far along. So they tried to have these public hearings, you know, some of our city council members tried to organize, you know, for their wards, we're gonna have a public hearing, we're gonna kind of talk about these issues out in the open. But what people saw when they went to those public hearings was kind of more obfuscation, more answers that didn't add up about, you know, this is gonna be water neutral. But how, you know, you said, you know, the city people were saying, oh no, you know, Bogan's wrong, it's not gonna dry up the river. Well, if it's not, if it's and that, you know, that's fine. That's part of me sticking my neck out there, is they can they can say right, right, right.

Mallika Nocco:

There's gonna be a Bogan's wrong group.

Michael Bogan:

I'm happy to take that, right? Bogan's wrong. But if Bogan's wrong, then where is that water gonna come from? Like, what is the explanation if Bogan's wrong? And those answers were not adequate because the answers that the city was giving was well, we're gonna take it from the ground over here, and we're gonna take it from this groundwater cleanup plant, and we're gonna take it from over here. And it's like, well, those answers, yes, that's water, but those are all extractive answers. Those are taking water out of our local water supply, out of our one-water cycle. So that's not really an answer. And so people, you know, through these public meetings, people got more and more upset because they felt like they were being lied to by, you know, people, certainly with the company, with Biel Infrastructure, but they also felt like they were being lied to by certain people within the city and the county and that. So it really just spiraled. And I rather than these public information hearings generating goodwill or transparency, it actually got people more against the data centers. Wow. So every meeting, the meeting got larger, and the volume of people and the shouting of people opposed to the data center got louder and louder and louder to the point where the city ended up pushing ahead their vote. So originally they were going to vote on it, originally they were gonna vote on it in July, then that got rescheduled to August 19th so that they could have these public hearings. But with every public hearing, the opposition grew and grew and grew, and the bad press grew and grew and grew, and we found out more information and it kept looking worse and worse. We found out that you know some of the people in the city and county had known about this for two and a half years, and we had just heard about it five weeks earlier. And so, so what you know, to their credit, the mayor and council did is push ahead that vote to early August, so I think it was August 6th, um, that the vote actually happened on, and they you know unanimously voted to not annex the land and not provide water to um to beal infrastructure and project loads which which really is, I mean, as far as you know, is that the first time that a community has been able to push back against one of these developments?

Faith Kearns:

It's the first I've heard.

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, it's the first I've heard of as well. And I think, you know, in large part it speaks to our local politics in Tucson. You know, we have a very engaged community here, and we have elected County Board of Supervisors people and city council members and a mayor who tend to be pretty responsive to our community and to our input.

Faith Kearns:

Which is a such a fascinating story. And I guess, you know, just as the the sort of coda or at least the interim coda to it, I have been reading that that still isn't necessarily the end of the line, right? So, you know, just this question of these things are obviously going to continue to be proposed into the future. So, how are you viewing this like on just as a the long-term?

Michael Bogan:

Yeah, I think you know, one of the things that's this whole experience has done is made a lot of people in the community and people in the city and the county aware that we need more regulations. Even though we had been like one of the most progressive water use municipalities in the country for decades now, we had nothing in place to prepare us for this. Um, we realized we didn't even have a regulation dealing with large water users at all. So the only reason that Project Blue went up to a vote for the city council was because annexation was required for it to go forward. So if if the company behind Project Blue had bought land in the city that was already part of the city, there was no public vote that was needed to connect the water to that land and immediately start providing a data center. So one of the benefits that has come out of this is all these discussions and a realization that we need to play catch-up with our policies. So just two weeks ago, the mayor and council voted a policy for large water users. And what that policy now says at the city level is anyone anywhere who wants to connect to our city water supply who is a large water user, they have to have a conservation plan. It has to be approved by Tucson Water, it has to be voted on by our mayor and council, it has to be transparent, you know, that that conservation water plan has to be released to the public with enough time to understand it and comment it on it. So we've we've already moved beyond where we were 10 or 12 weeks ago. We're currently now as a city developing a data center policy. You know, what what kind of city policies do we need about data centers? And we're realizing that even though we've been ahead on so many other issues, Tucson is behind in that. So cities in the Phoenix metro area already have adapted, adopted, or are in the process of enacting um data center regulations. Our neighboring town, Marana, which is a kind of a suburb of Tucson, already has a data center policy in place. So we're playing catch up. Um, but that's one of the benefits that have come out of this whole experience is that we we see now where the weaknesses are in our ability to protect our local water supply.

Mallika Nocco:

That I think it was a really great story. And I have to say, I don't know, it really kind of perked me up and gave me some hope, especially this idea of your community bonding together, going through this conflict, learning from it, and thinking about the future. I I don't know. I I feel very excited about what we can all learn from the Tucson's. We always also like to ask our guests if there's anything more that you want people to know about your work and just how we can all support your efforts.

Michael Bogan:

So, real quick, just to touch on that last topic, I think one of the lessons and one of the things we're trying to tell other communities that are fighting these data centers is that we didn't try to create a coalition from scratch to fight this data center. What we did is weave together existing groups of people to give them a more powerful voice. So there, you know, there are people like me who are already working on the river and water sustainability issues. There are other people who are looking at water through an environmental justice lens and thinking about the rights of our community to have access to water and to not give that access to corporations rather than our local communities who need it. And there were people who are really motivated in city and county politics. And so we were able to very quickly mobilize a large number of people through these existing coalitions and these existing groups, even if they were informal groups before. More than anything, like that's one of the lessons that we learned was that you as an individual, you as a researcher, or even you as a single nonprofit or organization, probably can't fight and stop a data center. You know, but if you're able to team up with and and really kind of weave that purpose together with other groups, then you can quickly gather much more political power and a much louder voice. As far as as our own work, one of the things that we struggle with in Tucson is just making people aware that we do still have a river. Because we were, you know, what I what I always say is that Tucson historically was a river city. The whole reason it's here is because there was year-round water in the Santa Cruz River. We lost that through groundwater pumping, through urban development. We lost our river and we lost our identity as a river city. But there are multiple parts in the river because of these great decisions that our city and county leaders are making. There are multiple parts of the river where we've put water back into it and we have that ecosystem again. And so we're trying to reconnect the community with that river. We're doing that through educational outreach, we're doing that through K-12 teacher training programs. So we're trying to reconnect the community with the river, because when the next data center proposal or whatever the next large water use proposal to come along is, we want people to immediately think do I want to take water out of this river and give it to this industry for you know quote unquote economic development? Because if they don't see the river, if they don't see the beneficial use of that water, then it may be easier to make that decision, to say, okay, yeah, let's give it to Amazon, let's give it to whoever, you know, so that we can have a few more jobs, without realizing both the intrinsic value of the ecosystem that we've created through this treaty wastewater, but also the cultural importance.

Faith Kearns:

Well, thank you so much, Michael. We really, really appreciate being able to talk with you about this. I think this is something that so many people are going to be facing. And you guys kind of created a blueprint. So thank you for that and for your ongoing work in terms of I personally probably wouldn't have nearly the appreciation I have for the Santa Cruz River if it wasn't for the work that you're doing. And we will point people to your Instagram and all of that kind of stuff where I think, you know, just Michael's love for the river and for the desert really comes through and is pretty infectious.

Michael Bogan:

So thanks very much for the invitation. It's fantastic.

Faith Kearns:

And now it's time for our parting gift.

Mallika Nocco:

All right. Well, that was, you know, as we hoped, a fantastic and very, I don't know, to mean an inspiring story. I think a parting gift, a big one for me is what Michael talked about with how the coalitions were in place in the community. And this was, I think the word that he used was weaving that I liked. It was more about mobilizing and weaving the coalitions together quickly to make something happen. So to me, just in thinking about how to react to something like this for a community, just having coalitions in place or trying to understand which coalitions in place that could be mobilized was a parting gift. The other parting gift that is kind of an interesting gift that we have talked about a little bit on Water Talk is we've talked about just the power of anger and rage in a community. We talked about that before when we were talking about drinking water quality in the Central Valley is the power of that righteous anger and what it can mobilize communities to do. I felt like came through. But what about you, Faith?

Faith Kearns:

Yeah, I think relatedly, the thing that came through to me, probably just because of my little hobby horse or my my own sort of sense of what makes the world tick is just that Michael really spoke to the importance of having these background relationships already, not only the coalitions, you know, but the work that he had already been doing with the city and with the county and with various groups, right? And so him having those relationships in place when this issue came up is actually both a prime example of both the importance of thinking relationally, even as a scientist, right? And thinking about the value of these relationships because of situations like this, like when an emergency happens, I don't think a book about I'm not trying to do that, but it was a very beautiful example, maybe, uh, of that. And then the other piece that really struck home again was about the the power of a land grant institution in a city, right? And and it's related because it's the the land grant, the home of cooperative extension in Arizona, which really does amongst all these scientific institutions, I think still place the most importance on relationships as part of your actual work. And so it's just a really great example to see somebody who embodies that at a land grant institution working on an issue like this in concert with the community that he lives in and cares about.

Mallika Nocco:

Yeah, absolutely. And last parting gift, a small parting gift, is I learned that people who live in Tucson are called Tucsonins, which I thought was pretty amazing.

Faith Kearns:

I'll never get that wrong again.

Mallika Nocco:

I'll never get that wrong again. I'm not even gonna say the other thing I said because I edited it out. All right, well, I'll see you soon, so take it down. Good.

Faith Kearns:

Thank you for listening to the Water Talk Podcast. I'm Faith Kearns and I'm the director of research communications with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at Arizona State University.

Sam Sandoval:

My name is Sam Sandoval, I'm a professor at UC Davis and a cooperative extension specialist in water resources management at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Mallika Nocco:

I'm Mallika Nocco, Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in Agricultural Water Management at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. If you enjoy our show, please review, listen, like, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Please find transcripts and additional content at WaterTalkPodcast.com. Original music by Paloma Herrero Thomas.