Most people know that rural Arizona has a groundwater problem because farms can pump water with no regulation. But most don’t know Arizona is making the problem worse by renting state trust land to large farms. A🧵 In remote Western Arizona, the groundwater is earmarked as a future water supply for Phoenix if the Colorado River continues drying up. But the state is allowing a Saudi Arabian company to use the water to grow alfalfa to feed cows in the Middle East.

For the past six months, I’ve traveled with @ByIanJames and @HenleMark through rural Arizona to investigate Arizona’s next water crisis: a free-for-all in the desert where there are no rules on pumping groundwater. THREAD @ByIanJames @HenleMark Water levels have plummeted in many unregulated areas. Some wells have fallen more than 200 to 400 feet. Huge industrial farms have moved in from other states and foreign countries to pump out even more. Homeowners wells are going dry, and no one will help them.

More than a year ago, I was asked to do the impossible. Help build an algorithm that could tease out what statehouse bills were created from model legislation (ie copy-paste legislation). Along with a terrific team @USATODAY and @azcentral. We did it. Here’s how. (THREAD) We examined almost 1 million bills in all 50 statehouses and Congress from 2010 to 2018. We compared them to a database of more than 2,000 model bills that we collected by hand. We used a method similar to how plagiarism is detected.
azcentral.com/in-depth/news/…