The Tucson City Council will vote next week on whether to allow veteran group Warbird National to clean up a plume of contaminated water underneath Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (DMAFB) in exchange for a new golf course.
The plume in question is contaminated with PFAs, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl. PFAs are colloquially known as “forever chemicals” due to their resistance to organic breakdown, and have been linked to various cancers and health risks in humans.
Warbird, a nonprofit that aims to combine golf, education and aviation in service to veterans’ causes, says they can fund cleanup of the plume. They would then use that treated water to grow grass on the new golf course they want to build near the base.
City Manager Tim Thomure says that if left untreated, the pool could threaten wells currently used to supply groundwater.
“The risk is that more and more of Tucson Waters’ wells in our central well field would begin to have PFAs contaminants coming towards them or even entering them, and that’s more and more of our ongoing well field production that we have to turn off because it’s not safe to deliver to our customers,” he said.
According to Warbird’s proposal, the amount of treated water would be sufficient to meet the needs of Warbird’s golf course as well as that of the City of Tucson’s Fred Enke Golf Course in the future. Their pitch is that that would take pressure off the city’s existing reclaimed water reserves, which currently feed the Fred Enke course.
“Reclaimed water is a precious resource and nobody knows that better than we do,” said Thomure. “This is water that is not controlled by the city. This is water that is not out of our community’s water portfolio.”
Warbird National wants to combine a championship golf course with an outdoor combat aircraft museum and a STEM education campus, and they say the water treatment would be financed through private donations and Air Force funding.
The city council is set to vote on the proposed Memorandum of Understanding next Wednesday, September 22.
