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Green Valley's biggest water company is proposing to nearly double the size of a planned pipeline to import Central Arizona Project water into the growing area, as part of an agreement to bring in CAP water for the Rosemont mine.

The proposal released last week calls for a pipeline that would bring in more than quadruple the amount of water the original pipeline would have brought — 30,000 acre-feet compared with 7,000.

That would eliminate or come close to eliminating the groundwater overdraft now plaguing the Green Valley area because of pumping for mines, farms, homes and golf courses. The overdraft has been pegged at 30,000 to 40,000 acre-feet. The newly proposed pipeline, about 9 miles long, would be 36 inches in diameter compared with 20 inches in the original proposal.

But the pipeline proposal faces a big unknown: making sure it stays full as population growth brings more water-users into Arizona over the next 20 years. That will put more pressure on the CAP's Colorado River supply, which already is over-allocated. The pipeline's backers hail this as a landmark opportunity to bring in a new water supply.

The Community Water Company of Green Valley hopes to get engineering and permitting work for the pipeline done this year, start construction next year and have the pipeline on line by 2010, said Arturo Gabaldon, the company's president. The pipeline would allow use of CAP water instead of groundwater pumping that is lowering the water table by about 2 feet per year, according to various studies. The CAP water would be recharged in the Green Valley area and also offset the effects of future Rosemont mine pumping.

Augusta Resource Corp. has agreed to pay the pipeline's $15 million to $18 million tab, said Jamie Sturgess, the company's vice president.

"With the water tables going down and water issues in our area, it seems very important that the sooner we can have water being recharged in our area, the better," Gabaldon said Thursday.

That shouldn't be much of a problem over the next few years, even though Community Water is the only Green Valley-area user with a CAP allocation — 2,858 acre-feet.

Various municipalities, farmers, mining companies and others feeding off this pipeline would mainly buy excess CAP water — water available from the 300-mile-long-canal but not being used. This year, nearly 900,000 of the project's 1.5 million acre-foot total is excess because cities, farms and Indian tribes that have rights to this water aren't using it. An acre-foot can supply up to three families with enough water for a year.