What it means
The Water Users’ Association, in full the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, is the organization that made the modern Valley possible, and most people who live here have never heard its name. They know it as SRP, the utility on their power bill or the owner of the canal behind the house. The Association is the older, quieter half of that institution: the landowners’ corporation that guaranteed a federal dam in 1903 and still delivers the river water today.
You will hear the name in three places. Historians and old newspaper files call it “the Association” or “the Water Users.” Real estate and water documents refer to “shareholders” and “on-project” land, meaning acres inside the 1903 boundary that carry Salt River water rights. And every other April, landowners get a ballot for the Association’s council and governors, weighted by the acre.
The utility’s full story, from the canal to the data centers, is in the site’s SRP guide. This page is about the name and the bargain behind it.
Where you’ll meet it
In histories of 1903, on SRP election notices, in water-rights language in a property title, and along the Arizona Canal Path, where the water the Association delivers still runs past Scottsdale backyards.
Where the word came from
The name is descriptive and was meant to be: an association of the people who used the water. By 1900 the Salt River Valley had canals but no storage. The great flood of February 19, 1891 had torn out the Arizona Canal’s diversion dam, and a drought from 1898 left farms dry. Private reservoir companies never raised the money.
The Reclamation Act of 1902 offered a federal dam on one condition: the landowners had to form a single body that pledged their land to repay it. Judge Joseph H. Kibbey drafted the plan, and in February 1903 about 4,800 landowners, Scottsdale’s farm families among them, incorporated the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association under territorial law and pledged more than 200,000 acres. The project was among the first five the Secretary of the Interior approved that March 14. Benjamin A. Fowler, the Phoenix publisher who had lobbied for the act, became its first president and signed the repayment contract with Interior Secretary Ethan Hitchcock on June 25, 1904.
The dam named for Theodore Roosevelt was dedicated on March 18, 1911, and on November 1, 1917, the federal Reclamation Service handed operation of the dam and canals to the Association. For two decades the Water Users simply were the Valley’s water system.
What it is not
It is not the whole of SRP, and it is not a government. The Association is a private corporation. In 1937, with Depression-era farmers unable to keep up payments, it transferred its property to a new public body, the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, which could sell tax-exempt bonds. The District runs the electric utility; the Association handles water. “SRP” is the name for both, which is why the SRP versus APS question and the water question have different answers.
The fine print
The founding bargain was arithmetic. Each pledged acre secured the same share of the federal debt, so each acre got one vote. That rule passed into the 1937 District, survived the final payment on the original works in October 1955, and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the District’s acreage-based elections 5 to 4 in Ball v. James in 1981. Smaller lots get fractional votes, renters and corporations get none, and turnout is low.
The Association’s own government is layered: a president and vice president, a ten-member board of governors and a 30-member council, all elected by landowners. Its water rights attach to land, not to people, which is why SRP water in Scottsdale goes only to the on-project acres south of the Arizona Canal, the land pledged in 1903, and why newer neighborhoods to the north rely on the Central Arizona Project and groundwater instead. The Scottsdale Water guide explains the blend, and the water law guide explains why rights work that way.
The record has a few soft spots. Sources disagree on whether the Association’s birthday is February 7 or February 9, 1903, and the shareholder rolls that would show which Scottsdale families signed are held in SRP’s archives rather than published.