How the city with the most to lose in the Colorado River crisis is trying to adapt

With the Colorado River facing a dry future, Cave Creek's struggles could provide lessons for other cities that might feel the pinch of shortages.

The sun sets on Cave Creek on March 27, 2026. Town officials say they can keep taps flowing for the next five to eight years and are looking for long-term solutions to water cuts. Those long-term fixes are likely to be complicated and expensive. Alex Hager/KJZZ

Alex Hager/KJZZ

'A game changer'

On a recent March day, blue-green water ambled through the wide concrete-lined CAP canal. Shawn Kreuzwiesner, Cave Creek's utilities director, squinted through the scorching afternoon sun while standing on its banks.

"These three booster pumps are what's providing almost all the water for the town," he said.

Behind an unassuming chain link gate, three water pumps whirred loudly on the canal's edge. The pumps send water into a 16-inch pipeline that runs 12-and-a-half miles north to the town's water treatment plant. Without them, not a single drop of Colorado River water would flow through the taps of homes and businesses in Cave Creek.

With 95% percent of his town's water coming from the canal, and big cuts that could go into effect as soon as January 2027, Kreuzwiesner's job is not an easy one.

"It is stressful," he said. "Other agencies I've worked for in the Valley have had the luxury of that more diverse water portfolio … I hate to use the term, but we're sort of the sharp end of the stick or the spear here. We're the first one that's going to feel the impact."

Adding to that anxiety, the federal government has not finalized the size of those cuts, making it harder for Kreuzwiesner to plan for the years ahead.

"Not knowing what the cuts will be is very stressful," he said "because we've been trying to plan for 20%, 25% cuts, and now all of a sudden, this number of 50-plus percent came up. Well, that's a game changer for everybody."

A pond sits on the Rancho Manana golf course in Cave Creek on Feb. 20, 2026. The town uses effluent from its water treatment plant to supply a portion of the golf club's water. Alex Hager/KJZZ

Alex Hager/KJZZ

The backup plan

Even amid the uncertainty, Cave Creek has a plan. It might only last for a few years, but it would keep taps flowing.

Brad Hill is playing a big part in bringing that plan to life. He spent more than 30 years in the municipal water business — including long stints with the cities of Flagstaff and Peoria, Arizona — before becoming an independent consultant.

Cave Creek hired him, essentially, to go out and find more water.

The first option for most cities, Hill said, would be a turn to groundwater. For most, it is relatively easy and cheap to dig more wells near town and carefully use some of the water sitting in underground aquifers. Cave Creek cannot do that. Aquifers underneath the Phoenix area are shaped like bathtubs. For one of those bathtubs, the deepest part is in the middle, and Cave Creek sits on the outer edge, so there isn't much water underneath town.

Cave Creek is part of a program to store excess Colorado River water underground. The town pays an annual fee for the rights to put water into that pool, which essentially serves as an emergency savings account for times when there isn't enough water above ground to serve everybody's needs.

Cave Creek has the right to take some of that water, but first it has to physically get it to town.

Since the underground aquifer is far away, building a pipe directly into it would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

So instead, Cave Creek will be part of an exchange.

Cave Creek is working on deals with three other nearby cities: Phoenix, Peoria and Surprise. Those cities can more easily tap into that underground savings account, so they will start using more groundwater and leave some of their CAP water in the canal, where Cave Creek can access it using its existing pumps.

'Every single house in this Valley is too big to fail'

Neighboring cities have been eager to lend Cave Creek a hand. They won't make much money from the exchanges, but city leaders said keeping water flowing in Cave Creek is more about protecting the reputation of the Phoenix area as a whole.

"Everybody, when they move to Arizona, the first question they get from their family is, are they going to run out of water?" said Max Wilson, the water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix. "We need to make sure that doesn't happen. We need to make sure that's not true."

Basically, city officials around the metro are worried that one small town's water crisis could make national headlines and spook people and companies from moving to — and spending money in — the Phoenix area, which was the nation's fourth-fastest growing metropolitan area, according to the latest census data.

"Every single house in this Valley is too big to fail," said Wilson, who is helping to forge Phoenix's exchange deal with Cave Creek. "I think anything that undermines the confidence that the nation has in sustainable lives here in the Valley would be negative for all of us who live here."

The city of Phoenix is also working to connect Cave Creek to its water treatment system, giving the small town a backup to its existing pumps and pipes. The "interconnect" would allow Phoenix to send treated drinking water to Cave Creek. It would not give Cave Creek additional water, but provide a failsafe if the town's own water delivery system had any issues.

Cities around the area got a taste of the negative attention that can come from hyperlocal water crises back in early 2023. Taps ran dry in the small community of Rio Verde Foothills, north of Scottsdale, and news outlets around the country ran lengthy stories about the issue.

That unincorporated community is an outlier when it comes to water. Homeowners in Rio Verde Foothills had private wells or got water delivered by trucks. The community does not have a traditional system delivering water through pipes, like all of the incorporated towns nearby.

Kathryn Sorensen, a senior researcher at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, said the Rio Verde Foothills crisis couldn't happen within the bounds of other Arizona cities that have made careful plans to keep water flowing for years into the future.

"If one small part of the Valley of the Sun experiences problems," said Sorensen, who is also former director of Phoenix's water department, "everyone is going to get stuck with that same label. That could be bad news for our economy. So I think that there is a very sound reason for all of us to hold hands and help each other weather this storm."

Solutions are expensive and complicated

Cave Creek is ready to weather the storm for a few years, but a longer-term water picture for the town and the broader Phoenix area is less certain.

Climate change has made the Colorado River basin hotter and drier. Policymakers have not been able to rein in demand accordingly. As a result, the nation's two largest reservoirs have been brought to historic lows. They are so low that even a string of consecutive record-breaking snowy years would not meaningfully refill the reservoirs with runoff. About 36% of Arizona's water comes from the Colorado River, and many cities using Colorado River water will be forced to use less.

For most of those cities, their ability to keep water flowing in the future depends on the strength of their backup plans.

A number of larger cities in the area can lean harder on other water sources — like the Salt River or groundwater — during dry times on the Colorado River. Peoria, for example, gets about 60% of its water from the Colorado River. That number is 56% for Mesa, 41% for Gilbert, 40% for Phoenix and 37% for Chandler.

Hill, the water consultant, said Cave Creek will have "five to eight years" worth of alternatives in the event of Colorado River cuts, and will need longer-term fixes once that time runs out.

There are a few options, but those solutions will not come easily.

"They're getting harder to find," Hill said, "They're getting more expensive, and they're getting legally more complicated."

Hill rattled off a few strategies that might work. One could involve bringing in water from the Harquahala aquifer, a massive underground supply west of the Phoenix metro. Over the past few years, the state developed new rules that allowed the fast-growing suburbs of Buckeye and Queen Creek to import from the aquifer. Cave Creek could join them.

Hill said Cave Creek could buy or lease water from a willing seller — perhaps a farming district closer to the Colorado River itself, or a Native American tribe.

"All the cheap, easy water has been taken," Hill said. "It's already developed. The longer term supplies are the more challenging, more expensive ones."

Even some bigger cities with more diverse water portfolios are seeing the writing on the wall for the Colorado River and getting creative with their long-term plans.

As natural water supplies dwindle, cities around the West are investing big in wastewater recycling. In essence, it's a technology that can take sewage and turn it back into safe, clean drinking water, allowing cities to squeeze every last drop out of the water they already have.

The city of Phoenix is about halfway through the construction of a wastewater reuse facility that will cost roughly $350 million and aims to send purified water into city pipes in early 2029. By 2033, it hopes to bring another reuse facility online as part of a joint venture with the cities of Mesa and Glendale as well as EPCOR, a private utility provider that brings water to Anthem, Surprise, and a handful of other Arizona communities.

Meanwhile, state officials are exploring desalination technology, which can turn seawater into fresh drinking water. Those efforts include proposals to build a desalination plant in Mexico, and either transport its fresh water to Arizona, or use that fresh water in an exchange for some of Mexico's Colorado River water. Those projects are likely to be complicated and expensive, but a new proposal to exchange desalinated ocean water from an existing plant in San Diego has drawn interest from the Central Arizona Project. The water would not be cheap, but an exchange with San Diego's plant — the largest desalination facility in the Western Hemisphere — could be a relatively low-friction way for the Phoenix area to tap into the ocean.

All of these solutions may play a role in helping Arizona cities and farms endure a shrinking Colorado River, but they will be easier to access for bigger cities with more money. Cave Creek, with a population about 0.3% the size of Phoenix, is not one of those cities.

"There's ways to solve the problem," said Kreuzwiesner, Cave Creek's utilities director. "It's just, at what cost? That's what we're struggling with right now. Some of those alternate supplies are just so expensive. How do we put that on the back of our current customers?"