As part of a plan to make up for Tucson Water’s budget shortfall of $15.4 million for this fiscal year, the Tucson City Council voted in mid-February to sell a third of its Central Arizona Project (CAP) yearly allocation, the Tucson Citizen reported.
The department will ask CAP to resell 42,000 acre-ft of their 144,000 acre-ft allocation for this fiscal year, according to the newspaper.
The department will keep 8,000 acre-ft it had planned to resell because other towns have expressed interested in buying credits for the water.
Department Director Jeff Biggs said Oro Valley hoped to buy 4,000 acre-ft in groundwater pumping credits that are more valuable than CAP water, so they could buy 4,000 acre-ft from CAP to replace that water and still make a profit, the paper reported.
Biggs said Tucson Water will try to strike a deal on the rest of the unsold water before April.
Source: Tucson Citizen