The Sedona City Council approved a land lease agreement with the Yavapai-Apache Nation during its Tuesday, July 11 meeting to permit the installation of a wastewater treatment skid by the YAN at the city’s wastewater treatment plant for a three-month period, with the lease itself running for seven months.

A skid is an integrated equipment package mounted on a pallet that performs additional functions to those carried out in the plant itself.

“What will happen is that our fully-treated effluent — a portion of that water will be sent to the skid and it will be further treated to gain some information on treatment methods that might improve the water quality even further,” Sedona Director of Wastewater Roxanne Holland said. “It’s like a small-scale project just for research purposes.”

Carollo Engineers will be running the project on behalf of the Nation.

Negotiations between the city of Sedona and the YAN have been ongoing since 2017, when the Nation made inquiries about purchasing some of the city’s treated effluent. On Oct. 18, 2018, an intergovernmental agreement gave YAN an exclusive option to purchase the city’s treated wastewater.

The Nation’s option under the agreement would allow it to purchase up to 1,450 acre-feet, equivalent to 472.5 million gallons, of reclaimed water annually from Sedona, subject to the needs of the Sedona Wetlands Preserve. The plant’s total effluent flow during fiscal year 2022 was 438 million gallons. Such an arrangement, the agreement stated, “could provide water resources for the Nation, while also providing a definitive, low-maintenance effluent management option for the city.”

“They want to sustain their own water needs, and so this was a step in that direction,” Holland said. She was unable to discuss the quantities of treated water likely to be needed by the YAN in practice due to their requirement for a nondisclosure agreement with the city.

Any long-term purchase of water by the YAN will require a new agreement between the city and the Nation, as Holland confirmed that the Sedona City Council “has elected not to renew that IGA,” which will expire on Oct. 18.

Whether any water eventually purchased by the YAN will be transported by pipeline or tanker truck will be determined during future negotiations. Tribal Councilwoman and YAN spokeswoman Amanda Honwytewa did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Expansion Limits

The YAN currently has a 1980 contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior for an annual allotment of 1,200-acre-feet, or 391 million gallons, of Central Arizona Project water. While the Nation is eligible for additional water rights claims under Arizona’s General Stream Adjudication process, and is engaged in settlement negotiations with the state, these negotiations have stalled so far due to the state of Arizona’s demand that tribes give up their ability to expand their reservations through the Interior Department’s administrative process. Tribes that agree to the state’s terms can subsequently acquire additional lands only through Congressional action.

“Unfortunately, the state’s policy that Arizona tribes must waive their right to take lands into trust as a condition of settlement has been a huge obstacle for the Nation,” YAN representatives told the Arizona Department of Water Resources during a September 2020 conference. “We have almost maxed out our capacity to build homes on our small land base — yet we have a very young and growing population. We have selected some additional lands that the Nation would like to be able to take into trust through the normal process, even after our water settlement is complete.

“We are working on intergovernmental agreements with our neighbors in an effort to secure an exception from the state. Our efforts to satisfy this requirement have resulted in significant delay to our water settlement. We have reason to believe the state will insist on a new toll for tribal settlements — a requirement that we waive our ability to object to any future groundwater pumping even if it harms our on-reservation water resources.”

The Yavapai-Apache Nation’s current reservation includes just over 600 acres in the Verde Valley. It has approximately 2,600 enrolled members.

“Many of the [Navajo] Nation’s leaders found this provision to be an invasion of the Nation’s sovereign authority over its lands and so abhorrent as to render the settlement untenable,” Navajo Nation Attorney General Doreen McPaul said in reference to the Navajo’s failed settlement effort.

“No other state in the country requires this concession as part of a water rights settlement,” Robert Valencia, chairman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, wrote to the Governor’s Water Augmentation, Innovation and Conservation Council on March 13, 2020.

IGA with Camp Verde

In June 2022, the Yavapai-Apache Nation entered into an IGA with the town of Camp Verde to collaborate on negotiating a land swap with the U.S. Forest Service that would place around 1,200 acres of current Forest Service lands near the junction of Interstate 17 and State Route 260 into trust for the Nation. If successful, the deal would triple the size of the Nation’s reservation, which currently consists of about 600 acres on five non-contiguous parcels near Camp Verde, Middle Verde and Clarkdale.

Former YAN Tribal Council Vice Chairman Norman Smith noted at the signing of the agreement that the Yavapai people’s range formerly included around 10 million acres.