Maricopa’s history, growth tied to water

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Every time he helps to bathe his two small boys in his Maricopa home, Ed Borromeo is reminded of just how important his job is.

After all, he’s the man most responsible for ensuring that the city’s residents – customers of the utility he manages – receive the cleanest and safest water available, whether they drink it, cook with it or bathe in it.

As the general manager of Global Water Resources, Borromeo has been in charge of supplying the community’s water for the past 10 months, when he left his former job as an Air Force captain skilled in disaster response, construction management and large-scale military repair operations at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

A native of the Philippines and a self-styled “army brat,” Borromeo studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and received an MBA from Webster University.

Still on the shy side of 30, Borromeo is clearly happy to be settled in his new home in Maricopa, after spending three hours a day just in commuting from Anthem, where he used to live.

He proudly conducts visitors on tours of Global Water’s state-of-the-art headquarters on North Powers Parkway, just east of Rancho El Dorado and adjacent to yet another new subdivision: the Lakes. One of the attractions for that community is an outsize lake created by Global Water Resources as part of its recycling operations. “This plant will pretty much blend in pretty close to the homes,” Borromeo said, as he handed a visitor a bottle of cold water.

The 20,000-square-foot facility, dedicated just last May by Gov. Janet Napolitano, is the only privately-owned structure in Pinal County to have earned official recognition as having been designed and built in concert with five categories of environmental and human health, focusing on the building’s effect on the atmosphere and its use of energy. In effect, it’s a “green” place.

One dramatic example of the building’s thoughtful design is its unique plumbing, which reduces the amount of potable water consumed by 83 percent, over conventionally designed facilities. It does this with customized dual water lines, tapping recycled water to flush all toilets in the building.

The building’s lobby evokes the feeling of a modern hotel or small airport, peppered as it is with comfortable seating and kiosks featuring a computer system that allows customers to pay their water bills. “Yes,” Borromeo said, “some people still prefer to walk in and pay their bills.”

Adjacent to the main lobby is an alcove that features dramatic graphics, flat-screen television monitors and massive windows that allow children and adults, who tour the facility regularly, to view the building’s nerve center: three massive monitors on the wall of an adjacent room that illustrate the flow and processing of fresh water as well as the recycling operations.

On the opposite side of the lobby is a comfortable meeting room, currently used on a weekly basis for city council meetings, but available to other non-profit groups on a first-come, first-served basis.

From this facility, Borromeo and his staff of 30 chemists, technicians and other employees control the flow of water from the city’s four main wells and carefully supervise the treatment of wastewater, much of which is recycled for landscaping and other purposes. Currently, 16,000 customers in Maricopa received their water from the Global plant, and Borromeo said there is an “ample” supply for a population of “more than 100,000.”

Cognizant, however, of the 13 years of drought in the Sonoran Desert, Global Water Resources, which runs 16 separate water and waste facilities in Arizona, is conducting a series of seminars to educate consumer and housing contractors on the importance of water conservation in the 21st Century. The privately owned company also is preparing a series of fact-filled ads designed to raise public consciousness about water resources in a desert environment.

The headline on one of the ads, superimposed on a shot of an arid desert background, reads: “160,000 people moved here last year. And not one brought water along.”

Local residents aware of the town’s history would probably be reminded by that statement of the fact that the city was first known as Maricopa Wells, due to its proximity to a valuable source of water. When the railroads moved west, the entire town was moved away from the wells (roughly situated south of Pima Buttes, or “M” Mountain) and renamed Maricopaville, and then, finally, Maricopa.

But it was water that first gave this community life, and it is water that will sustain it.

Photo by Joe Giumette