She Has Sold Us Out (Part 3): how Gail Griffin has placed special interests over Arizona's future water security
Part 3: a look at Griffin, her special interest roots, and the water crisis in her own district
In recent years, Arizona State Representative Gail Griffin has gained a reputation as being perhaps the biggest obstacle our state faces to any attempt at reigning in our growing water crisis.
Even as homes and municipal wells run dry in her own district-- as roads are torn apart by earth fissures caused by unchecked and rapacious groundwater use-- the Hereford-based lawmaker has sat as head of the Arizona House of Representatives' water committee and killed every common sense attempt at legislation to secure our future water supply.
Given this track record, Cochise Regional News has conducted an investigation of the lawmaker's activities, in the hope that we can help shed some light on Griffin, her values and motivations.
What we have found is the story of how one inveterate lawmaker, from a sparsely populated rural district, has held water policy for the entire state hostage-- for the clear benefit of the special interests who serve her interests.
This is the third part of a three-part series [read Part 1 and Part 2]. If you have not yet Part 1 and Part 2, please do so-- this will make a lot more sense.
Part 3: a look at Griffin, her special interest roots, and the water crisis in her own district
Ultimately-- campaign contributions, expensive lobbyist meals, and paid trips to luxury resorts aside [see Part 1 and Part 2]-- it seems unlikely that Griffin has required a great deal of persuasion in order for her to place the short-term interests of real estate developers, wealthy investors, and industrial agriculture over the interests of Arizona's future water security.
Griffin is, after all, a creature of the very industries seeking to cash in on Arizona's dwindling water resources.
As previously discussed, Griffin is a career real estate agent. She is also a longtime member of both the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation and Arizona Association of Realtors special interest/lobby groups.
Furthermore, according to Arizona Department of Real Estate Records (AZDRE) records, Griffin's daughter, Vicki Griffin-Berglund, has been a licensed Arizona real estate broker since at least 2004.
According to AZDRE records, Griffin-Berlund has been employed by Phoenix-area broker DeLex Realty since 2018. DeLex specializes in the Phoenix-area residential market, and does have listings in the developments of Queen Creek and Rio Verde [see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series].
According to Griffin's officeholder statement of personal financial disclosure, her sources of employment income are two-pronged, consisting of her compensation as member of the Arizona House of Representatives (which is only $24,000 per year), and compensation she earns as a real estate broker.
According to AZDRE records, Griffin, who is originally from Pennsylvania, was first licensed as a real estate broker in 1978.
According to AZDRE records, the Hereford-based realtor has been employed, as an “associate broker,” with one firm, Sierra Vista Realty, during her time in Arizona. Records indicate she has been employed by the firm since at least 1994.
According to financial disclosures, Griffin also regularly reports assets and income attributed to properties she owns and sells through her Gail Griffin Revocable Living Trust.
Real estate investments disclosed through her role as trustee and beneficiary of this trust are valued at “$100,001 +.” This is the maximum valuation range required in officeholder disclosures of such assets. Griffin is not required by law to disclose the actual value of these real estate investments.
According to records, Griffin owns, and has sold, a number of properties through her trust. These have consisted of a number of property types-- including commercial properties and unimproved parcels of land, often within areas subdivided for the purpose of residential development.
One recent sale, recorded in March of this year with a sale price of $179,000, was of acreage south of Sierra Vista, in the Ramsey Canyon area. Records describe the property as being vacant, for rural residential development.
Review of available documentation shows that Griffin's trust-held real estate investments in recent years has consisted of properties in the unregulated Upper San Pedro Groundwater Basin (which is adjacent, to the west, of the Douglas and Willcox groundwater basins)-- primarily in the areas of Hereford, Sierra Vista, and Whetstone.
It is important to note here that personal real estate investments bought and sold by Griffin through her trust are likely unrelated to her income as an associate broker with Sierra Vista Realty. Realtors are typically paid commissions on sales they transact, and generally do not own the properties they are brokering. You do not need a broker's license to sell your own property. Furthermore, Griffin herself delineates between these two sources of income in her officeholder statements of financial disclosure.
According to AZDRE, records disclosing real estate transactions brokered by specific agents are not a matter of public record.
Cochise Regional News sent Griffin written questions inquiring about the nature of her work as a real estate broker. Griffin did not respond.
As such, the nature of real estate transactions brokered by Griffin as an associate broker employed by Sierra Vista Realty, as well as the amount of her compensation derived from this activity, is unknown.
What is now Sierra Vista Realty was founded in 1960 as Watkins Realty, by Bob Watkins. According to his obituary, Bob Watkins, who died in 2013, also founded Bisbee Realty and Tombstone Realty.
Records indicate that Sierra Vista Realty was run primarily by the Watkins family (Bob, his wife Janet, and their son Nathan) for decades, up to the time of Bob Watkins' death in 2013.
According to Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) records, following Bob Watkins' death, his daughter, Elizabeth Hughes, assumed the role of president and chief executive officer. Her husband, Michael Hughes, became vice president.
According to ACC records, Nathan Watkins remains corporate secretary and a director of the brokerage.
According to AZDRE records, Nathan Watkins has served as an associate broker and manager of the firm. Records indicate he was employed as an associate broker with the firm as recently as April 2022.
In addition to the real estate business, Griffin's longtime employers were also in the business of selling water-- especially to real estate developments.
According to Arizona Corporation Commission records, Bob Watkins founded Indiada Water Company, Inc. in 1967.
As stated in the company's articles of incorporation, the purpose of Indiada was to serve as a “water distribution company,” concerned with the “transportation, delivery, and sale of water [and to] buy and sell water and water rights from and to individuals, firms, corporations, counties, municipalities [...]”
According to records, Indiada was a water utility company that sold water to homes in the then newly-formed Indiada Subdivision real estate development, located between Hereford and Sierra Vista.
Records indicate that, by 1985, the Watkins water business had branched out to form two additional Cochise County water companies: East Slope Water Company and Antelope Run Water Company.
According to records, all three of Watkin's water companies shared the same business address, and that address was that of Sierra Vista Realty.
In 1992, Nathan Watkins joined his father in the water business, becoming both a director and president and CEO of Indiada, according to ACC records. Bob Watkins stayed on as chairman of the company's board of directors.
Records indicate that Nathan Watkins remained president and CEO of Indiada Water Company until the company's apparent end, following the death of Bob Watkins in 2013.
In 2009, Indiada filed an application for an “emergency rate increase” with the Arizona Corporation Commission. The rate increase would allow the Watkins water company to charge its customers more for water.
In this application, the Watkins water company pled financial hardship-- stating that, among other challenges, the family's water companies (to include both Indiada and Antelope Run Water Company) were facing a “dire situation” due to significant depletion of the area's groundwater, causing a significant drop in the water table.
So, here we have Griffin's longtime employers claiming that there was an emergency situation, requiring a customer rate increase in 2009, due to declining groundwater levels in Cochise County.
Acknowledgement of water issues in the real estate business, however, is often a selectively acknowledged reality.
Beginning around 2015, Cochise County's Sulphur Springs Valley, which consists of the Douglas and Willcox groundwater basins (adjacent, to the east, of the Upper San Pedro Basin, which is the basin containing the Indiada development), saw the rapid expansion of agricultural irrigation and well/water rights acquisition by out-of-state industrial-scale growers. The largest of these were the afore-mentioned Minnesota-based Riverview mega-dairy and California-based nut grower, Trinut. [See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.]
In the Douglas Basin, much of which was at the time the Douglas Irrigation Non-Expansion Area (Douglas INA, created in 1980 through the Arizona Groundwater Management Act), many local farmers with grandfathered irrigation rights sold out to Riverview and Trinut.
In the Sulphur Springs Valley, selling out became a substantial industry in its own right.
Review of records on file with the Cochise County Recorder's Office disclose scores of real estate transactions involving Riverview, Trinut, and their various holding companies. Today, Riverview alone owns and irrigates tens of thousands of acres in the Douglas and Willcox basins of the Sulphur Springs valley-- with its holdings stretching from Elfrida, in Cochise County, to Bonita in Graham County.
According to records, influential directors of the Cochise County Farm Bureau, the local branch of the influential Arizona Farm Bureau Federation lobby group [see Part 2], played a significant role in the selling of the Sulphur Springs Valley and its water resources.
According to records, in 2015, at the time of the Riverview mega dairy's initial acquisitions in Cochise County, the Haas family, which owned the Bonita Bean Company (a sizable family farm in the Willcox Basin), entered into a partnership, Mountain Vista Farms LLP, with Riverview co-founder and board president Gary Fehr.
ACC records show that members of the Haas family were serving as treasurer and directors of the Cochise County Farm Bureau at the time of the formation of their Mountain Vista partnership with Fehr.
Records on file with the Cochise County Recorder's Office indicate that Mountain Vista, locally represented by Haas family members, was a real estate holding company which, by 2018, held more than a dozen agricultural properties under a purchase agreement with Riverview.
Though these transactions are not the full scope of Riverview's acquisitions in the valley, the Mountain Vista deals allowed the mega dairy to quietly establish a firm foothold in the area.
According to records, in September 2017 the Riverview mega-dairy's own public relations specialist, Moiria White, replaced Haas family matriarch, Kay Haas, as the Cochise County Farm Bureau's treasurer.
Records indicate that the Haas family had sold their Bonita Bean Company farmlands to Bonanza Bean, LLC the month prior, in August 2017. According to ACC records, Bonanza Bean is a Minnesota corporation that lists Riverview's Fehr among its directors.
As previously discussed [see Part 2 of this series], in 2021, local residents launched a campaign that would allow basin residents to vote, in November 2022, on whether to implement groundwater regulations administered by the Arizona Department of Water Resources through the creation of groundwater Active Management Areas (AMAs) in the Douglas and Willcox groundwater basins.
This effort was largely a response on the part of local residents to the rapacious consumption of the Sulphur Springs Valley and its water resources by growers like Riverview and Trinut. Many viewed this activity as a significant contributing factor to land subsidence and earth fissures (caused by the depletion and compaction of aquifers), and the decimation of residential, family farm, municipal, and small business wells.
In the run up to the election, Nathan Watkins ('Watkins' from here on), whose family has employed Griffin for decades through their real estate business, was a vocal opponent of the proposed groundwater regulations.
Records indicate that Watkins and his wife, Jackie Watkins, moved from Hereford to their McNeal-area San Ysidro Farm around 2002. This farm is in the Douglas Groundwater Basin.
Watkins currently occupies a seat on the Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission, representing the commission's second district, which covers the Douglas Groundwater Basin.
Jackie Watkins is currently director of the Cochise County Department of Engineering and Natural Resources.
According to ACC records, Nathan Watkins has served as a director of the Cochise County Farm Bureau since September 2019.
As previously discussed, Riverview's Cochise County public relations specialist Moiria White has served as treasurer of the Cochise County Farm Bureau since 2017.
In 2022, Cochise County Farm Bureau president Sonia Gasho co-founded the Rural Water Assurance (RWA) political action committee. Gasho serves as treasurer of RWA.
This PAC-- funded largely by well drilling companies, industrial scale growers, and outside investment groups-- was created in opposition to the AMA initiatives. [See Part 2 of this series.]
In the summer of 2022, Gasho and her RWA co-founder, a "public relations specialist" named Heather Floyd, filed a lawsuit in Cochise County which sought to block voter access to the AMA initiatives. This suit was dismissed as being without merit.
Another local grower to sell land to the mega-dairy during the Riverview/Trinut agricultural land rush in the Douglas Basin was Fred Zamora. According to records on file with the Cochise County Recorder's Office, Zamora sold some of his agricultural property in the area to Riverview for $520,000 in April 2021.
According to ACC records Watkins currently serves as vice-president of the Cochise County Farmer's Association, alongside Zamora, who serves as a director.
In late 2021, as the AMA voter initiatives were gaining traction in the Douglas and Willcox basins, Zamora, along with Cochise County Farm Bureau director and past president John Hart, signed on as corporate members of Southeastern Arizona Water, LLC.
According to ACC records, the group had been organized by Riverview LLP co-founder and board president Fehr in November of that year. The address given for Southeastern Arizona Water in ACC records was also that of the Riverview dairy.
Amid the calls for groundwater active management designation in the Sulphur Springs Valley, Southeastern Arizona Water proposed to build a massive, very ambitious, water delivery infrastructure. This, according to the group, would be built in the form of a "water district," consisting of up to 300 miles of pipeline, servicing up to 2,500 residences and 4,000 vacant parcels of land throughout the Douglas and Willcox basins.
Critics of the Southeastern Arizona Water plan saw it as an ultimately unrealistic proposal meant to placate, or distract, residents who were calling for some curb (such as those offered by the AMA initiatives) on the groundwater use of industrial-scale growers like Riverview.
A few public meetings were held by Southeastern Arizona Water during the 2022 election cycle, though the proposed water delivery "water district" infrastructure has yet to materialize.
Another director of the Cochise County Farmer's Association, alongside vice-president Watkins and director Zamora, is Mark Cook.
According to ACC records, Cook is a director of the Arizona Pecan Grower's Association and serves as manager, alongside a number of partners based in California and Ohio, of North Bowie Farming, LLC. Cook and these same out-of-state partners operate several nut growing concerns operating in the San Simon Valley Sub-basin (located to the east of the Willcox basin, near the New Mexico border).
According to Arizona Election Commission records, this entity gave Gasho and Floyd's Rural Water Assurance PAC $5,000 in October 2022, just prior to the November 2022 vote on the AMA initiatives, and another $5,000 in February of 2023, following voter enactment of the groundwater Active Management Area in the Douglas Basin.
It is worth noting here that, according to records, this nut-growing industry funding comprised the majority of RWA's reported income at the time of RWA president Floyd's opposition in the Arizona Legislature to the 2023 Biasiucci Local Groundwater Stewardship Areas (LGSA) legislation [See Part 2 of this series].
In fact, records indicate that RWA received $5,000 from North Bowie on February 22, just two days prior to RWA president Gasho's February 24 registration of opposition to the LGSA legislation in the Senate [see Part 2].
In any event, this is the Cochise County agricultural crowd that Watkins has placed himself in.
Though the Watkins family's Indiada Water Company, in their 2009 quest to raise customer fees, had claimed an emergency due to declining groundwater levels in Cochise County, in 2022 Watkins urged voters to reject the proposed AMAs in the moths leading up to the vote.
Under Arizona law, irrigation rightsholders within the basin's already-extant Douglas INA, who had not irrigated their property within the five years prior to the election, would lose those unused water rights when the INA converted to the more stringent management of an AMA (unless certain 'substantial investments' in irrigation infrastructure, made within the year prior to the vote, could be demonstrated).
Further, the proposed AMA would cover the entire Douglas Basin-- unlike the INA, which only covered a portion of the basin.
As such, land anywhere within the basin that had not been irrigated within the five years prior to the vote would not be granted grandfathered irrigation rights under the AMA (unless certain 'substantial investments' in irrigation infrastructure, made within the year prior to the vote, could be demonstrated).
Similar restrictions to grandfathered irrigation rights would apply in the neighboring Willcox Basin, if voters there approved that AMA initiative as well.
From a real estate perspective, the creation of the Douglas AMA would significantly curtail the big business of selling irrigable acres within the Douglas INA, and in the Douglas Basin as a whole, as many dormant grandfathered irrigation rights under the INA would be lost-- leaving significantly fewer irrigable parcels in play, and substantially lowering the value of properties with lost unused irrigation rights.
In a September 2022 Facebook post, Watkins (whose family has employed Griffin for decades through their real estate business) summed it up well:
“Do you have property in the Douglas INA that has irrigation authority from [the Arizona Department of Water Resources] but for whatever reason it hasn't been irrigated in the last five years? If the Douglas INA is replaced by the proposed AMA, you can kiss those rights away.
“Your land that had an increased value because of assigned irrigation acres will become basically rangeland, which is valued considerably less than irrigation acres.
“Vote NO on the AMA in November. Tell your neighbors, friends and even enemies.”
Cochise Regional News asked Watkins if he, as a realtor, had brokered any agricultural real estate transactions involving Riverview or Trinut.
CRN also asked Watkins what percentage, if any, of his real estate brokerage has consisted of agricultural land sales.
CRN asked Watkins if he had any knowledge of such real estate transactions brokered by Griffin.
And, CRN asked Watkins if he believes there are any threats to groundwater supplies in the Douglas Basin.
Watkin's sole response to all of these questions was: “no comment.”
Douglas Basin residents voted to approve the Douglas AMA in November 2022. Following the election, Governor Katie Hobbs (a Democrat) appointed Jackie Watkins to the area's Ground Users' Advisory Council (GUAC). The role of the GUAC is to advise the Arizona Department of Water Resources in crafting groundwater management plans for the Douglas AMA. Jackie Watkins currently serves as chair of the Douglas AMA GUAC.
CRN also submitted written questions to Griffin, asking whether she, as a real estate agent, has brokered any agricultural land/water rights deals in either the Douglas or Willcox groundwater basins, and whether any such transactions have involved Riverview or Trinut.
Griffin did not respond to these questions.
Review of legislative records show that Griffin, as chair of the Arizona House of Representatives Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee, has introduced, and worked to pass, multiple bills since 2021 that sought to allow agricultural interests to more easily expand irrigable acreage, and retain grandfathered irrigation rights attached to properties, within both AMAs and INAs.
Griffin is currently running for yet another term in the Arizona House. She faced no primary challenger from within the Republican Party, and will be on the ballot in this November's general election.
The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AZIRC) currently describes Griffin's LD 19 as being a non-competitive district, with more than sixty-percent of votes cast in the entire district (including portions of Cochise, Graham, Santa Cruz, Pima, and Greenlee counties) going to Republican candidates, and less than forty-percent going to Democrats.
According to AZIRC, the total voting-age population of the district is just under 168,000. Of that number, according to Arizona Secretary of State Records, 145,706 are active registered voters (as of July).
According to Cochise County Elections Division records, there are currently just under 85,000 registered LD 19 voters in the county. As such, the majority of Griffin's voting constituents reside in Cochise County.
Given this fact, it is important to note that, following the 2020 Census, what is now Griffin's Legislative District 19 was formed by removing Bisbee and its more politically liberal voters from the district map-- making the district even less competitive.
According to Cochise County Elections Division records, there are currently 18,541 Democrats; 34,003 Republicans; and 23,501 non-affiliated independent registered voters within Cochise County's portion of LD 19.
This, in essence, means that the future of Arizona's water policy-- for at least as long as Griffin continues to seek office and control water committees in the Arizona Legislature-- rests largely in the hands of Cochise County's Republican and independent voters.
[If this doesn’t make sense to you, please read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.]
Beau Hodai, Cochise Regional News— October 4, 2024