After residents asked Tucson City Council to make significant changes to its large water user ordinance, council members on Tuesday narrowly approved an ordinance with only minor changes proposed by city staff.
The city council reduced the threshold for water use that defines a “large water user” from 7.48 million gallons of water per month (10,000 centum cubic feet or ccf) to almost 6.36 million gallons of water per month (or 8,500 ccf). One ccf is 748 gallons of water. They also directed city staff to return in 120 days with proposals to require water conservation plans from customers using more than 5,000 ccf a month and to notify the council when a user exceeds its approved water use.
The ordinance requires that any large water user that wants to gain access to Tucson’s water has to apply to the city and show its water conservation efforts.
At a public hearing Tuesday night, residents urged the council to drastically reduce the threshold of water use to 2,500 ccf. They also asked council members to add a 2-to-1 offset, meaning new large water users would have to replenish or conserve two gallons of water for every gallon they consume, and to pause approvals of new large water users during periods of extreme drought.
Catlow Shipek, senior program director of Watershed Management Group, said the ordinance with the proposed revisions from Tucson Water allows new large water users to “continue with business as usual.”
“We must ask new large water users to also be desert dwellers,” Shipek said. “This includes how to care and respect all waters, give back more than one takes, and be aligned with and supporting our community values and stewardship of our water, our rivers, and our watershed.”
Resident Margo Itule reiterated Shipek’s requests, and said the region is facing challenges to its groundwater supply not just because of population growth but also because of agriculture, industrial mining, data centers and other industries that are compounding groundwater depletion.
“Now is the time to plan for the future instead of reckless and short-sighted policies that naively hand over more of our precious shrinking resource,” Itule said. “It is imperative that the large quantity water user ordinance be strengthened to specifically protect our local water supplies, especially in light of the extreme drought and pending Colorado River water allocation cuts.”
Nick Maya, program manager with the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, said new large water users should “meaningfully contribute to replenishing the water they consume,” and urged the council to “adopt stronger safeguards,” before the next large water user applies to be connected to Tucson Water.
Ward 3 council member Kevin Dahl suggested reducing the threshold to 5,000 ccf, and directing the city attorney to add to the ordinance that if a large water user violates the ordinance, the course of action recommended by the city’s water director would have to be approved by the council.
Ward 4 council member Nikki Lee replaced Dahl’s motion with one that would reduce the threshold to 8,500 ccf and ask that city staff bring back the ordinance in 120 days so that the mayor and council could consider requiring a water conservation plan of customers who use more than 5,000 ccf, and notify the council if a user exceeds the water use amount it was approved for.
Ward 2 council member Paul Cunningham pointed out that reducing the threshold to 2,500 could impact hospitals. He would like to see some flexibility in the ordinance for certain industries, Cunningham said. The enforcement piece also troubles him, because there is no cap on the amount of water a customer can use, and there are no automatic consequences.
Tucson Water Director John Kmiec told city council that a 2,500 ccf threshold could include some schools, hospitals and healthcare facilities and city parks.
Mayor Regina Romero said she has to find a balance between bringing jobs to Tucson and protecting its water and other limited resources.
“I want to make sure that we are not tying our own hands when it comes to creating long-term high-wage jobs in our city,” she said.
Romero said Tucson and Pima County both have a higher poverty rate than the national average. Tucson’s poverty rate is almost 19% according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and Pima County’s is almost 14%. The national poverty rate is about 10.2%, according to 2025 Census Bureau data.
In addressing the poverty rate, mayor and council has to think about what kind of economic development projects they’re supporting, Romero said.
“We also have to think about, what is it that we want to say yes to?” she said. “We said no to data centers. We have been very good as a mayor and council to say no to mines and to other extractive industry in our community. But we need to be able to find industries that we say yes to.”
Ward 6 council member Miranda Schubert, Dahl and Cunningham all opposed Lee’s motion. It passed 4-3 with Lee, Romero, Ward 1 council member Lane Santa Cruz and Ward 5 council member Selina Barajas voting for it.
“I support business, and I want more businesses to come to Tucson,” Schubert said. “But the businesses I want to see here are ones that are willing to make a conservation plan, stand behind it and aren’t afraid to show it to Tucson residents. All this ordinance is asking is for accountability and a transparent plan for conservation.”
Residential water customers in the Tucson area use an average of 126 gallons of water per day, according to 2020 data from Making Action Possible for Southern Arizona. With that daily average, it would take a person 138 years to use nearly 6.36 million gallons of water, the new monthly threshold to be classified as a large water user.
The city council moved quickly to approve a new ordinance in August 2025 to protect the city from large water users like data centers with the intention of consulting the community to revisit and strengthen the ordinance within a year.
The 2025 ordinance was a response to public outrage over Project Blue, a massive data center that could have used hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year. In order to access that water, the land where the data center is being built had to be annexed into Tucson. The city council rejected the annexation request.
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