For Star subscribers: Tucson Assistant City Manager Tim Thomure says his vote for continued discussion of a proposed $5.5 billion desalination plant is the beginning of a long, public process.
Tony Davis Tucson Assistant City Manager Tim Thomure joined a unanimous vote last month by a state water board that will allow for state-run discussions with an Israeli firm over its proposal for a $5.5 billion desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco on the Gulf of California.
But Tucson Vice Mayor Steve Kozachik and Councilman Kevin Dahl blasted the desalination plant proposal in interviews, following the water board's vote, as fiscally and environmentally unsound. The mayor said she had"many questions, including environmental concerns," adding she hasn't seen the formal IDE proposal.
"We need to be talking about conservation. The money it will take to purchase the land and construct it, the costs are astronomical," he said, although much of the pipeline's U.S. section will run through land already owned by the government. Drought-proof water supplyThe Israeli proposal calls for building a plant large enough to desalinate up to 1 million acre feet of water per year. That's about as much as the Central Arizona Project canal system delivers to Arizona annually from the Colorado River. The water would then be shipped via a 200-mile-long pipeline to the Hassayampa River Basin west of Phoenix.
But the authority board's Dec. 20 resolution"exactly addresses" the public concerns that until the previous week,"the project was only known to some ," Thomure said in reply to such criticism.
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