Watch a county hearing on a proposed groundwater withdrawal and then watch one on a proposed apartment building. Close your eyes for either and you will not be able to tell which is which.
The structure is identical. An applicant with capital arrives with a technical study. Residents arrive with concerns about a shared resource and a suspicion that the study was commissioned to reach its conclusion. An elected body with limited technical staff must decide, and it decides on the politics, because the politics is the part it understands.
The arguments rhyme down to the phrasing. Character of the community. Cumulative impact. Who was here first. Why should we bear the cost of growth that benefits somebody else. These are not bad arguments. They are the arguments people make when a decision affects them and they have no other lever.
What is different is the physics. A zoning fight lost is a building that gets built and a neighbourhood that adjusts. An aquifer overdrawn does not adjust. Land subsides, wells deepen, and the water that was there is not there in any timeframe a county board can plan around.
That asymmetry argues for deciding these questions at a level above the county, on hydrological boundaries rather than political ones, with technical staff that the applicant does not pay for. It is also the argument that has failed in every western state that has tried it, for the same reason regional zoning fails: nobody wants to be governed by a body they cannot vote out.