Eight people, one watershed, five subsystems.

How we started

The crew started in 2018 in Tucson Water's rebate-installer training cohort that ran out of the Watershed Management Group Living Lab on East Speedway. Marisol Reyes — at the time a three-year journeyman plumber working under another contractor — sat through eight Saturdays of Brad Lancaster's field-installed examples, came home, walked her own back yard with a transit she had borrowed, and put eleven hours into her first basin and curb cut. The basin held the August storm. The mesquite over it grew six feet in two summers. She quit the contractor in February 2018 and put the truck on a Bay 3 lease at South 6th and 27th Street that May.

The first calendar year was forty jobs, all greywater stub-outs and basins. The second year was eighty, half of them tank installs that piggybacked on the rebate program. Antón Quezada — formerly a heavy-equipment operator on Pima County Flood Control crews — joined in early 2020 to handle earthworks, which we had been outsourcing badly. June Walden, a retired SCADA technician from Tucson Water's production division, came on in 2024 to tighten the controllers and write the rain log. We have not advertised. The work has come from neighbors, the Watershed MG installer list, and a 2023 Arizona Daily Star piece by a reporter who watched us excavate her own front yard.

Why five subsystems

We do five things: passive earthworks, active cisterns, branched-drain greywater, AC condensate capture, and foundation-perimeter detailing. Together they cover roughly 95% of the residential rainwater-and-greywater work in Tucson. The 5% we don't do — pressurized greywater systems with filtration and storage, full-blackwater-treatment compost-toilet integrations, large rooftop catchment for in-house potable use — is real, useful, and someone else's specialty. We refer those out to the names listed on the Watershed MG installer directory.

A practice that promises everything ends up doing nothing very well. The Arizona Registrar of Contractors lets a residential plumbing license holder run almost anything wet, but the field knowledge for branched-drain alone — slope tolerances, surge volumes, pipe size and emitter spacing for the laundry-to-landscape ordinance — takes about fifty installs to internalize. Add active pressurized greywater on top and you have a team that does both badly. We picked the five we picked because Tucson's climate, code environment, and lot sizes make them the right ones.

Licensing & insurance

We carry an Arizona Registrar of Contractors R-37R Plumbing license (commercial and residential, including water and gas piping, fire protection, sewage treatment systems, and related fixtures, vents, and devices) plus an R-1 General Residential license for the earthworks and small structural work that surrounds the plumbing scopes. Both are listed on the AZ ROC public registry under license number 347291. We carry a $200,000 per-occurrence general liability policy, $1M aggregate, and Arizona statutory workers' compensation. Bond is held with a surety listed on the ROC bond requirements page.

For greywater work, we file under the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Type 1 Reclaimed Water General Permit, which covers private residential gray-water reuse under 400 gallons per day at no cost when the system meets the Title 18 conditions: human contact avoided, water contained on the property, no surface application on food crops other than citrus and nut trees, and no standing water. Pima County publishes its own gray-water reuse pamphlet with the same conditions in plain English. We give every greywater client a copy.

Who we hire

Plumbers come to us in two ways. The first is through the Pima Community College Plumbing program, which Marisol has guest-taught in for three semesters; Daniel Padilla joined us in 2024 from the second-year cohort, started as an apprentice, took his journeyman exam in March 2026. The second is through the UA Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 469 referral list when we have a journeyman seat open.

Earthworks crew comes from Pima County Flood Control alumni, where Antón originally worked, and from the Watershed Management Group co-op installer cohort. Controls — the SCADA tie-in for cisterns over a few thousand gallons — comes through the Tucson Water retiree network. We are explicitly small. We do not subcontract earthworks. We do not have a sales team.

What we won't do

We will not run pressurized greywater with storage tanks. The maintenance load on filtration is real and we are bad at being good at it; Brad Lancaster's site lists the systems we'd recommend instead.

We will not install rainwater for in-house potable use. The first-flush, filtration, and disinfection requirements for potable rainwater are governed by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and require a different operator skill than ours.

We will not install a system that would not work. If the lot grades wrong, the trees are too close to the slab, the soil percolation is below 0.05 in/hr, or the homeowner's planting plan is mostly Bermuda grass, we say so on the site walk and refund the $0 site-walk fee, which is to say we shake hands and leave.

We will not install solely to harvest a rebate. The Tucson Water residential rainwater harvesting rebate tops out at $2,000 and is structured to be cheaper for the city than the alternative of stormwater infrastructure. It is not a way to make a system pencil that wouldn't otherwise. We will tell you when it doesn't.

Where we work

Twenty-mile radius from Bay 3 at South 6th Avenue and 27th Street. That covers all of Tucson proper, the Catalina Foothills, Tanque Verde, the west side out to Tucson Mountain Park, the south side to Drexel Heights, and Sahuarita south on I-19. We don't take work in Marana or Oro Valley unless we already have an active project within a half-mile (we sometimes do). We don't take work in Green Valley, period — the soil chemistry there is outside our experience and Pima County's wastewater service map is structured differently.

We work in seven Tucson neighborhoods most often, in rough rank by the volume of work we've seen there: Sam Hughes, the Catalina Foothills, Barrio Viejo, the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood, Elmwood, El Encanto, and Armory Park. The lot sizes, building footprints, and grading constraints in each are different enough that we treat them as separate practice contexts.

Pricing & rebates

Site walk: free. Proposal: free, delivered within seven days. Materials at cost; labor at journeyman or apprentice rate (clearly billed). Permits and bonds at cost. Yearly maintenance walk: $185, which we typically schedule for May before monsoon onset.

Rebates we file on your behalf, free of charge, after the system passes Tucson Water's inspection: up to $2,000 residential rainwater rebate, $200 greywater rebate (on Tucson Water residential accounts only), and the Storm-to-Shade tree-planting credit when applicable. The rebate is paid as a credit on your Tucson Water bill, not as a check; this is occasionally a surprise and we mention it on the site walk.