Pull up your Queen Creek water bill. There are three things on it. A water base fee, a water usage fee, and a sewer service fee. That is everything you pay the town for water.
Now pull up your property tax bill. There is a line on it called a CAGRD assessment.
That one is not for water. Nobody delivered anything to your house for it. That one is for putting the water back.
Almost nobody has looked at it. Property taxes come due twice a year, and if you have a mortgage your lender pays them out of escrow, so the money never passes through your hands. About 89 percent of Queen Creek water customers pay this assessment and most of them have no idea.
The town is proposing to take that job over. Not to shuffle a fee from one bill to another, but to actually assume the responsibility itself, retire the CAGRD line on your property taxes, and charge for it on your water bill instead.
That is what the water resource fee is. Here is why it exists and what has to be true before any of it works.
Why you pay to put the water back
Arizona confronted its groundwater problem in 1980.
The Groundwater Management Act, passed that year, said the state could not keep pulling water out of the ground faster than it goes back in. The goal has a name. Safe yield. Every gallon withdrawn has to be replenished.
That is an awkward law for a place like Queen Creek, because Queen Creek is not short on groundwater. The town says so plainly. There is ample groundwater here. The expensive part was never the pumping. It is the putting back.
It is also not optional. A subdivision built on groundwater needs a 100-year assured water supply to be approved at all. Most Queen Creek neighborhoods satisfy that by enrolling in the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District, created by the Arizona legislature in 1993 as a component of the Central Arizona Project. CAGRD goes out, buys renewable water, and replenishes the aquifer on your behalf.
You pay for that service in two pieces. An annual membership fee, and a fee based on how much water you used the year before. Both land on your property tax bill.
So the water you ran last summer already set a number on a tax bill you will pay later. You never saw the connection because the two documents show up months apart from two different agencies, and one of them gets paid by your bank.
Why that invisible number keeps climbing
Here is the part that matters more than any of the fees.
To replenish groundwater, CAGRD has to buy renewable water. Renewable water in Arizona largely means the Colorado River, and you already know what is happening there. The town’s own language is blunt. Uncertainty related to the Colorado River will only further increase the price of water, which has continued to rise.
Your assessment moves with that. The town says it has historically increased each year and is projected to keep increasing.
And you have no lever on it. You cannot conserve your way out of a rate set by a district you are not a customer of.
The town saw this coming. Starting in 2018, the Town Council began applying its own groundwater credits at the maximum allowable amount to knock down CAGRD assessments for residents. Depending on when your neighborhood was built, that cut assessments somewhere between 33 percent and 100 percent. The town says those offsets have saved customers $71 million.
That was never the plan. It was a bridge, and the town said so at the time. The real fix was to stop needing CAGRD at all.
The one thing that actually ends CAGRD
There is only one way out, and it is not paying a different fee.
A water provider can be certified by the Arizona Department of Water Resources as a Designated Water Provider. That certification means the provider has proven a 100-year assured water supply, of adequate quantity and quality, to serve its own customers.
Once Queen Creek holds that designation, the town carries the replenishment obligation instead of you. Individual homeowners come off CAGRD’s member lands rolls, and the assessment comes off the property tax bill.
To get there, you have to actually own water. Not lease it, not buy it year to year at whatever the market says. Own it.
That is the reason for everything the town has done since 2018.
What Queen Creek bought to get there
In 2025 the town bought its way to the finish line. We covered that deal in how Queen Creek locked in 100 years of water, so here is only the part that bears on your tax bill.
Queen Creek secured 1.7 million acre-feet in the Harquahala Valley, a basin the state specifically designated for water storage and transportation. The town was the first entity to buy that water for transport, which means it paid the lowest price anyone is going to get.
The piece that matters for CAGRD is this. Harquahala is groundwater sitting as deep as 8,000 feet down. The Arizona Department of Water Resources studied it, confirmed a 100-year supply, and determined that Queen Creek does not have to replenish it.
Read that again. Does not have to replenish it.
That is the whole obligation, gone, for that portion of the supply. No renewable water to buy every year. No assessment tied to a river in trouble.
With Harquahala in the portfolio, dependence on local groundwater pumping drops to roughly 6 percent, and reliance on the Colorado River stays around 10 percent. That 10 percent is why the new river cuts did not hit Queen Creek the way people expected.
What changes on your bill
Staff recommended a water resource fee of $3.07 per 1,000 gallons of metered water at the September 2 meeting. It would sit alongside the base fee, usage fee, and sewer fee you already pay.
You probably will not pay the full $3.07.
The town uses all of its treated wastewater to offset groundwater pumping, which means the water that leaves your house through the sewer comes back into the system and has real value. So if you pay Queen Creek for sewer service, you get a credit against the fee. Homes and schools get 40 percent. Commercial and multifamily properties with landscaping get 80 percent. Commercial and multifamily with no landscaping get 90 percent, because almost everything they use goes right back down the drain.
For a household using 10,000 gallons a month, that comes out to $30.70 before the credit and $18.42 with it.
If you do not pay a Queen Creek sewer bill, you do not get a credit, because the town does not get any water back from you.
In exchange, the CAGRD assessment comes off your property tax bill completely. Not reduced. Gone. Including the portion the town has been quietly covering for you since 2018.
The honest parts
This is not a swap where nothing else changes.
The proposal includes incremental increases every year. The town is not pretending otherwise.
Designation has not happened yet. The town is still working toward it, and until it lands, the town still owes CAGRD replenishment obligations on behalf of customers. The water resource fee is what pays those during the transition. Your property tax line goes away. The town’s bill does not, not until the certification comes through.
This is also separate from the 15 percent water rate increase Council approved in July 2025, which hit bills starting August 27, 2025. That one paid for system infrastructure and operations, and it was described at the time as the first step in a phased approach. The Harquahala opportunity came along afterward.
And on September 16 the Council will consider more than this one fee. There is a new water resource capacity fee aimed at developers, an increase to the existing water capacity fee, a restructuring of the water tiers where single-family tiers 1 and 2 go down and tier 3 goes up, changes to some wastewater rates, and a solid waste increase of $3.78 per month for curbside customers.
The town is also evaluating a utility assistance program for customers who meet state assistance thresholds.
Why the trade is worth taking
Strip out the numbers and here is what is actually happening.
You are moving from a charge you cannot touch to one you can.
A CAGRD assessment is a property tax line. It is set by a district, it tracks the price of renewable water, and nothing you do at your house changes it this year. Water a little less and pay the same. Rip out your grass and pay the same, at best, eventually.
A metered fee moves with your meter. Use less, pay less. The town’s free conservation tools at QueenCreekAZ.gov/ReduceTheUse are suddenly worth actual money instead of being a nice idea.
The bigger shift is underneath that. Replenishment through CAGRD means buying renewable water forever, every year, at whatever the market charges, from a supply everyone in the Southwest is fighting over. Queen Creek bought 1.7 million acre-feet outright, at the lowest price anyone will pay for it, in a basin drought does not reach and the state says does not need replenishing.
As the price of water in Arizona keeps climbing, and the town expects it to, Queen Creek is holding an asset it already paid for instead of a bill that reprices every year against the Colorado River.
You will see the fee. That is the design. You should see it. It is the first time the true cost of water in Queen Creek shows up somewhere you actually look.
What happens next, and how to say something about it
There is a real window here and it closes fast.
On Wednesday, September 16 at 6:30 p.m., Council considers a Notice of Intent to establish the fee and set a public hearing.
If that passes, the public hearing with possible action is Wednesday, November 18 at 6:30 p.m. Nothing is decided until that vote. The earliest the fee could take effect is January 2027.
In between, the town is holding open house sessions at the Municipal Services Building, 22358 E. Ellsworth Rd, in the San Tan Conference Room. Walk in, ask questions, no agenda.
- September 14, 3 to 5 p.m.
- September 22, 9 to 11 a.m.
- October 1, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- October 7, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
- October 12, 9 to 11 a.m.
- October 20, noon to 2 p.m.
- October 28, 4 to 6 p.m.
- November 5, 10 a.m. to noon
- November 9, 3 to 5 p.m.
- November 17, 4 to 6 p.m.
If you manage or sit on the board of an HOA, there is a session for you on October 13 from 4 to 5 p.m. at the Community Chambers.
You can also reach the Customer Service team at MyUtilities@QueenCreekAZ.gov or 480-358-3450, Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Everything here comes from the town’s own page, Securing Queen Creek’s Water Future, at QueenCreekAZ.gov. Go read it before September 16. Then go find the CAGRD line on your property tax bill. You have been paying it this whole time.