Stakeholder Perspectives and Responsibilities

Each party in this conflict carries distinct responsibilities within the assessment process. City officials are responsible for granting the facilitation team access to planning documents and council proceedings, and for committing publicly to act on the assessment's findings rather than allowing the report to sit unread once it is complete. The Arizona Department of Water Resources is responsible for providing transparent technical briefings on aquifer capacity so that the assessment's factual foundation is not disputed later by any party seeking to discredit the process. Homebuilders are responsible for participating in interviews in good faith rather than treating the assessment as an extension of their ongoing litigation strategy.

Existing residents, renters, and rural or tribal stakeholders near proposed water sources are responsible for engaging with the process once it is made accessible to them, which requires the facilitation team to lower participation barriers through evening forums, translated materials, and outreach conducted through trusted local institutions such as the Buckeye Civic Institute, which already works to develop local leaders who actively participate in community decision-making (City of Buckeye, n.d.-a). Data center developers, as a newer and less publicly visible stakeholder group, are responsible for disclosing their own water use projections so that residential and commercial demand can be compared on equal terms rather than negotiated behind closed doors (Circle of Blue, 2025).

This disclosure responsibility matters more than it might first appear, because the technical facts of data center water consumption are themselves contested in ways that map directly onto Wehr's distinction between facts-based and interests-based disagreement. The city of Buckeye has publicly emphasized that newer closed-loop liquid cooling systems fill once at construction and then recirculate the same water internally, a design the city argues can cut freshwater consumption by up to 70 percent compared to older evaporative cooling methods, with air-cooled systems using no water at all (City of Buckeye, n.d.-b). If accurate and consistently applied, this would substantially change the water calculus for any future data center sited in Buckeye, and it gives the facilitation team a concrete, verifiable claim to test rather than a vague industry assurance. At the same time, some water researchers caution that framing a system as closed-loop can understate its actual draw, since periodic makeup water, evaporative backup during peak heat, and the water embedded in the electricity a data center consumes are not always captured in a simple recirculation claim (Ren, 2026).

For the purposes of this assessment, the point is not to adjudicate which claim is correct. It is to treat the closed-loop cooling question as exactly the kind of fact-based dispute Wehr's mapping guide instructs facilitators to isolate and resolve through shared data before moving on to the interests and values questions underneath it (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, & Miall, 2016, p. 104). The facilitation team should require any data center developer participating in the process to disclose actual metered water use data once operational, not only projected design specifications, since the gap between a system's intended performance and its measured performance is often where public trust breaks down.

Facilitators themselves carry a distinct responsibility as well. Following Lederach's insider-partial model, they must resist the temptation to position themselves as detached technical experts and instead build the kind of sustained local relationships that allow residents to trust the process enough to speak candidly, particularly residents who may fear retaliation from landlords or employers for criticizing city or developer decisions (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, & Miall, 2016).