New Mexico Mercury

On September 22, we asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to order the State Engineer to dismiss a massive speculative water appropriation application from Augustin Plains Ranch, LLC. We live next door to the Ranch, which has spent almost eight years trying to appropriate a massive amount of water in Catron County.  This attempted appropriation threatens the towns, ranches and homes of the entire San Augustin Plains region, all of which are wholly dependent on wells and groundwater.

Bruce Frederick of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC) filed a petition on our behalf for a writ of mandamus.  In the petition, we ask the Court to compel the State Engineer to “promptly” reject the Ranch’s most recent application for 54,000 acre-feet of water per year.

We and more than 80 of our neighbors, with the legal assistance of the NMELC, and backed by almost a thousand other individuals and organizations, have for almost eight years fought the Ranch’s application.  It was denied by State Engineer Scott Verhines and a District Court in 2012 on the grounds that it was “vague, over broad, lacked specificity, and the effects of granting it cannot reasonably be evaluated.”  The Ranch then in 2014 submitted a new application.  But this “new” application was just like the first application.  Both applications seek to appropriate 54,000 acre-feet of water per year, and both fail to indicate exactly how or where the water will be used, as required by the state Constitution.  By keeping the intended use vague, the Ranch apparently hopes to speculate in future water markets and ultimately sell to whomever the highest bidders may be in seven counties.

Until this summer, the people of Catron County were winning this battle to keep corporate speculators’ hands off of our water supply. In fact, in August, we were preparing to attend a hearing before the state Court of Appeals, where we hoped that the State Engineer would defend his decision to deny this attempted appropriation.  Instead – two days before the hearing – we learned that, in light of the “new” application, the case was dismissed at the joint behest of the Ranch and the State Engineer. We believe that they dropped the case to avoid setting a precedent that may have appropriately limited the State Engineer’s discretion and dissuaded investment in APR’s speculative water project.

As NMELC attorney Bruce Frederickson has indicated, under state law the State Engineer has a non-discretionary duty to dismiss applications that fail to specify a particular purpose or place of use of water or end user.  The Ranch has failed to do this.  Nevertheless, State Engineer Verhines stated that, even though the two applications are substantively identical, and even though a court had sustained his decision on the first application, he would nevertheless evaluate the 2014 Application without regard to his prior denial of the 2007 Application.  That is why we have asked the state Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus to compel the State Engineer to dismiss the 2014 application on the same grounds that he dismissed the 2007 application.

We love New Mexico and the quiet beauty of the high country where we live.  When the Ranch filed its first application in 2007, neither we nor our neighbors wanted to get involved in what turned out to be a drawn-out process. But we have stuck with it because it was, and is, a profound threat to our home and to the entire Augustin Plains community.  We hope the Supreme Court will step in and stop this scheme once and for all, not only for the people of west-central New Mexico, but for the people in our state's other rural communities. Because this is going to be a big problem for them too if the State Engineer opens the door to this water grab.