Maricopa West Valley

The Phoenix Active Management Area covers Maricopa County’s West Valley from Buckeye and Goodyear east through Avondale and western Maryvale, a landscape that carried irrigated agriculture and railroad-era Mexican-American communities through most of the twentieth century. Goodyear is 32 percent Hispanic or Latino; Avondale is 54 percent Hispanic; the western Maryvale census tracts exceed 70 percent Hispanic. The Gila River Indian Community, whose 2004 water settlement carries senior rights in the basin at 653,500 acre-feet per year, holds its boundary roughly twelve miles southeast of the Tract Buckeye site.

In June 2023, the Arizona Department of Water Resources froze new residential subdivisions served by groundwater across the Phoenix Active Management Area after state modeling projected the aquifer cannot sustain another century of growth at current extraction rates. Hyperscale data centers kept receiving approvals under industrial zoning because the Assured Water Supply rule that blocked housing did not apply to industrial groundwater allocations. Microsoft’s Goodyear campus, Compass Goodyear, and Tract’s 2,069-acre Buckeye Tech Corridor at 1.8 gigawatts together committed water from the Hassayampa sub-basin on terms that residential builders could not obtain. The October 2025 ADWR designation of an Alternative Assured Water Supply for EPCOR ended the residential freeze by shifting cost to ratepayers, while data-center allocations remained in place.

APS residential bills rose 11.2 percent between 2023 and 2025, in part because new 500-kilovolt transmission from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station to the Buckeye corridor must be financed through general rate base. Tract’s Buckeye campus carries a 2,000 acre-foot annual water cap, averaging 1.78 million gallons per day, from the Hassayampa.

The essays under this county document the Tract Buckeye and Microsoft Goodyear clusters, the ADWR moratorium and its unequal application, the ratepayer cost shift, and the organizing by Poder in Action, Chispa Arizona, and Western Resource Advocates at the Arizona Corporation Commission.