Every Phoenix resident who has fixed a sprinkler head or adjusted a watering schedule under the Mayor's Save Water Pledge has done their part under the same drought messaging the City issued alongside its July 31, 2026 announcement on Colorado River supply cuts. What that resident doesn't see is the other side of the ledger: six golf courses the City itself owns, irrigated at a scale no household conservation could ever offset.
The numbers come from the City's own reporting to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. The six City-owned golf courses — 117 holes across Phoenix — used 1.14 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone, a total that has grown 9.7 percent since the early 2000s. They lean on groundwater sixteen times as heavily as the City's own drinking-water utility. And across twenty-five years of filings, none of the six has reported using a single gallon of reclaimed water — the treated wastewater Phoenix already produces and already delivers to other users across the Valley. Cave Creek Golf Course alone has run on groundwater at 99.9 percent every year of that period.
Two of the six — GCU Golf Course, operated by Grand Canyon University under a thirty-year agreement, and Papago, operated by Arizona State University — sit on land the City still owns, and their filings are reported to ADWR the same way as the four courses the City runs directly. The zero-reclaimed-water figure covers all six without exception, over the full twenty-five-year record.
The comparison isn't close. Phoenix-area golf courses as a group already average 21 percent reclaimed water; courses in the Prescott Active Management Area average 75 percent. These six City-owned courses are at zero. Matching just the Phoenix-area average would free an estimated 738 acre-feet a year — the annual household water use of about 2,100 homes.
GOOD|GOAT is not asking the City to stop watering the courses it owns. We are asking it to adopt and publish a reclaimed-water transition plan — which courses convert, on what supply, and by when — with annual public reporting of each course's source mix alongside the same conservation messaging it sends residents.
Read the full course-by-course data, or tell the City that a conservation pledge should apply to what it owns, not just what residents do.
1 Matter
The City of Phoenix asks residents to check for leaks four times a year and adjust sprinklers when it rains. Its six municipal golf courses used 1.14 billion gallons in 2024 alone, lean on groundwater 16 times as heavily as the City's own drinking-water system, and have reported zero reclaimed water in twenty-five years. GOOD|GOAT is calling on the City to adopt a reclaimed-water transition plan for the six courses it owns.
