Jay I. Moyes

Jay Moyes has been a leader in Arizona water and power policy development for 35 years. He was one of the three co-founders of the Environmental and Natural Resources Section of the Arizona State Bar Association.

Jay was heavily engaged in the significant legislative refinements to the Arizona Groundwater Management Act during the first several years after its passage in 1980. He represented real estate developers, landowners, agricultural districts, and a diverse range of other water providers and users encountering the new filings and regulatory compliance requirements of the far-reaching 1980 Act. He represented the extensive Rio Rico development in Santa Cruz County, Arizona and teamed with counsel for the City of Nogales to successfully persuade the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Arizona Legislature to create the Santa Cruz Active Management Area separate from the Tucson Active Management Area. He was a key participant in policy negotiations addressing many other legislative additions to the 1980 Act, such as the Groundwater Transportation Act.

Jay has extensive experience dealing with electric power generation and transmission matters, particularly federal preference hydropower resources and related transmission systems. In the mid-1980′s, Jay began representing a number of Arizona irrigation and electrical districts that did not receive preference power from Hoover Dam under contracts with the federal Western Area Power Administration and the Arizona Power Authority. Jay challenged the initial allocation scheme, then successfully negotiated improved allocations and contracts for those districts, including a “Hoover B recapture” provision for his clients’ districts and other public power utilities that were not recipients of Central Arizona Project water. He has continued to represent multiple district and municipal utilities since the 1980′s in dealings with those agencies on federal preference power matters. Jay has negotiated long-term wholesale supplemental power generation, transmission and distribution agreements with other public and private utilities. Jay has testified before Congressional oversight committees; he has also lobbied at the federal and state levels regarding legislative and regulatory initiatives dealing with multiple aspects of the integrated water and power business in Arizona.

Jay represented multiple clients as co-counsel in successful litigation against Arizona Public Service Company. In Hohokam Irrigation and Drainage District v. Arizona Public Service Co., he successfully defended a large group of agricultural districts against a counterclaim filed by Arizona Public Service seeking to restrict the service area rights of the districts. Consistent with Jay’s legal argument, the Arizona Supreme Court strengthened and clarified earlier precedents and held that irrigation districts may provide power to non-district customers so long as such action was in furtherance of the district’s primary purpose.

Jay has handled a number of water rights marketing and/or transfer transactions, including complex multi-party negotiations and contracting involving national conservation organizations, Native American tribes, irrigation districts, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Arizona State Land Department, farmers, land developers, and water banking or marketing organizations. These cases dealt with Colorado River water, Arizona “grandfathered” groundwater rights and “non-AMA” groundwater, Central Arizona Project contract rights, and other surface water appropriative rights.