Arizona State and Local Government Documents Collection

The Arizona Water Banking Authority was created in 1996 to store the unused portion of Arizona’s annual allocation of the Colorado River. By storing this unused water the AWBA secures a dependable water supply necessary to ensure the state’s long-term prosperity. The plan is intended to govern the operations of the AWBA over the course of the entire calendar year.

The Arizona Water Banking Authority was created in 1996 to store the unused portion of Arizona’s annual allocation of Colorado River water. Until the AWBA was created, Arizona had not fully utilized its 2.8 million acre-foot allocation of Colorado River water and the state’s leaders recognized that leaving a portion of Arizona’s allocation in the river was a lost opportunity. The AWBA was created to provide assurances that water users within the state had secure, long-term water supplies.

The primary purpose of the Inventory is to identify storage capacity available to the Arizona Water Banking Authority to meet its water storage goals. Inclusion of a facility in the Inventory does not equate to a commitment by the AWBA to utilize any specific facility in the future. The AWBA will continue to determine annually which facilities will be used through the development of the Annual Plan of Operation. Conversely, not including a facility in the Inventory does not preclude the AWBA from utilizing that facility in a future Annual Plan. It does, however, preclude the facility from being utilized for interstate water storage, until such time as it is included in an updated Inventory.

Water banking is one of Arizona's most important water management strategies, and its success depends on effective planning. This joint plan helps advance the objective, articulated in the intergovernmental agreement among CAP, ADWR and AWBA, to develop a coordinated and cooperative planning process that includes distribution and recovery of water stored by the AWBA.

Marketing research in consumer packaged goods shows that consumers’ brand choices, category choices, and purchase volumes are all affected by different factors and in different ways by pricepromotions
and advertising. Research also suggests that brand-loyalty, purchase rates, and inventory behavior are important determinants of category choice. These findings are likely to be true of apples as well.

The Fuji apple variety is relatively new in the U.S. As a new product, questions concern the relative impact of consumer learning by experience, by variety-specific promotion, or by generic apple promotion. A two-stage (LES/LAIDS) model incorporating both types of promotion is used to estimate the effect of generic and variety specific promotion, as well as consumer experience, on the demand for Fuji apples. Estimates show each to have a positive impact, and also show new or specialty apple varieties to be relatively price inelastic, but income elastic. Grower returns to promotion are calculated with an equilibrium displacement model of price changes and producer surplus. Changes in producer surplus provide a base-scenario benefit:cost ratio of 14.73.

A structural latent variable model of apple variety demand is used to analyze the effect of variety specific newspaper advertisement characteristics on variety attraction (preferences), and in turn on variety demand. The influence of advertisement size, the use of color and the Washington apple logo were analyzed. The estimated variety attraction variable is important in explaining demand. Model specifications which exclude this variable tend to understate demand elasticities. Advertisement size has a positive impact on Granny Smith, Fuji, and Gala sales. Red Delicious sales are positively influenced by color ads, but negatively affected by ads with the Washington apple logo.

Proposals for reform of the federal multiple-peril crop insurance program for specialty crops seek to change fees for catastrophic insurance from a nominal fifty-dollar per contract registration fee to an actuarially sound premium. Growers argue that this would cause a significant reduction in participation rates, thus impeding the program’s goals of eventually obviating the need for ad hoc disaster payments and worsening the actuarial soundness of the program. The key policy issue is, therefore, empirical one - whether the demand for specialty crop insurance is elastic or inelastic. Previous studies of this issue using either grower or county-level field crop data typically treat the participation problem as either a discrete insure / don’t insure decision or aggregate these decisions to a continuous participation rate problem. However, a grower’s problem is more realistically cast as one of simultaneously making a coverage level / insurance participation decision. Because the issue at hand considers a significant price increase for only one coverage level (50%), differentiating between these decisions is necessary both from an analytical and econometric standpoint. To model this decision, the paper develops a two-stage estimation procedure based on Lee’s multinomial logit-OLS selection framework. This method is applied to a county-level panel data set consisting of eleven years of the eleven largest grape-growing counties in California. Results show that growers choose among coverage levels based upon expected net premiums and the variance of these returns, as well as the first two moments of expected market returns. At the participation-level, the mean and variance of indemnities are also important, as are several variables measuring the extent of self-insurance, such as farm size, enterprise diversity, or farm income. The results also show that the elasticity of 50% coverage insurance is elastic, suggesting that premium increases may indeed worsen the actuarial soundness of the program. These increases will also cause a significant adjustment of growers among coverage levels.

“Commodity promotion” consists of many activities, each designed to contribute to a consumer’s product knowledge or influence tastes. However, both knowledge and tastes are unobservable, or latent, variables influencing demand. This paper specifies a dynamic structural model of fresh fruit demand that treats promotion and other socioeconomic variables as "causal" variables influencing these latent variables. Estimating this state-space model using a Kalman filter approach provides estimates of both the system parameters and a latent variable series. The results show that these latent effects contribute positively to apple and other fruit consumption, while reducing banana consumption.