Welcome everyone to our Mesa City Council study session.

It's nice just, you know, I I did realize we're running a few minutes late.

Uh we're just kind of enjoying uh the day, the morning.

Uh the study session for February 12th, 2026.

Uh, Vice Mayor Summers and Council Member Adams are participating by Zoom.

Otherwise, all other council members are present.

Item one is a presentation.

We're going to uh postpone item one A to a further date.

So, Mayor, we will uh yeah, thank you for the understanding um about the need to reschedule item one.

So we'll uh work to get that rescheduled just as soon as possible.

Okay.

Then moving on, uh item one B is a presentation to receive an update on the current conditions of the Colorado River and impacts to the City of Mesa water portfolio.

Mr.

Hassard or Jesse Haywood, thank you, Mr.

Haywood.

Our retiring uh water resources director.

You sure you don't want to reconsider?

Paperwork's already done, Mayor.

We could cancel it.

It's such a hassle to try to undo all that.

Trust me, Mayor, we've tried.

We've tried.

I'm sure we have to fight with your wife.

Yes, you would, you would indeed.

Uh well, thank you.

And and uh as you recognize, I do have Jesse Haywood, assistant director here with me today.

He's gonna uh participate in this discussion, which is uh an important overview related to the Colorado River.

Um let me start with you probably see in in the media quite a bit um a lot of articles that talk about the Colorado River and and basin states and drought and uh all of those things, and it's it's it's pretty persistent.

Um so with that, if we can go to the first slide.

So all of that is because the 20-year operating guidelines for the Colorado River that were drafted in 2007 are expiring at the end of this year.

So that in itself is not that big a deal, but coupled with the fact that we're going into year 26 of a prolonged drought that's been very persistent.

We've had a couple of years here and there that have been promising with a lot of snowpack, but then they they tend to be backed up by then a series of very dry years.

So water bless you.

So water levels on the on the whole system, both in Lake Mead and Lake Powell have continued to drop.

Um there's seven basin states that receive Colorado River water.

Um Arizona is one of those.

We've been in negotiations, all seven states together, trying to formulate what the the next 20-year plan uh playbook, if you will, is gonna look like on the Colorado River.

Uh it's been very tenuous, those negotiations.

It hasn't gone well.

Every every state is different, every state has different interests, and they're set up differently.

So the federal government, they had hoped that the seven basin states would work something out, but it's looking like at the end of the day, they're gonna have to make the call.

Another thing I should say is because the the operating guidelines on the Colorado River have such a direct impact on the environment, the NEPA process, the federal NEPA process is required.

And under the NEPA process, it starts with the environmental impact statement, and the draft environmental impact statement, which had been in the works for about two years, was just released recently.

And none of the alternatives that are in the draft bode very well for Arizona.

There's cuts, even very significant cuts to the Central Arizona project, which is CAP, and that's important to Mesa, all the valley cities, um, stretching all the way down actually to Tucson, because that's how we receive our share of the Colorado River water is through CAP.

So with that backdrop, what we wanted to do today is tell you specifically how we're doing here in Mesa, what our water supply looks like.

We're gonna give you probably the most detailed breakdown that we ever have for you to show you where our water comes from, how it what it consists of, um, and then show a history.

Jesse's gonna walk through a few graphs that talk about the the history of both our demand and how we've built our supply over the years.

So with that, let's go to the next slide.

So this is our whole city service area.

And it shows the different zones.

We have the city zone, which we're sitting in right now, which is served by SRP, and then the eastern zone and southern zones are served by Colorado River water.

And uh I want to state that the entire service area can be supplied with groundwater from our groundwater allowances.

So before we get it, we're gonna break part of the city into the zones and drill down and talk specifically about where the water comes from that supplies these zones.

But we first want to do if you go to the next slide, uh a little refresher on units because we use this archaic turn, and all the slides going forward are gonna be using this term acre feet.

And a lot of people don't know what that means, but when we're talking in in water supply and talking about water portfolio, um we use this term acre foot.

We just that's just what we use.

When we're talking about flow through a plant, it's it's MGD.

But when we're talking about just supply of water, it's acre feet.

So I can visualize an acre, one foot deep of water, and that's pretty easy.