New Mexico Mercury

Editor's note: This article is part of the Utton Center's latest Environmental Flows Bulletin written by Laura Paskus.  As the drought continues and water supplies dwindle, this remains a developing story.

If you’ve been on the Middle Rio Grande this spring—or even peered over one of Albuquerque’s bridges—you’ve seen a lot of mud. With New Mexico in its third consecutive year of drought, storage in reservoirs is dwindling, and even the spring snowpack melt didn’t significantly boost the river’s flows. And now, at the very end of May, it’s clear that the river through Albuquerque is about to dry.

The drought’s effects are visible along the Rio Grande valley’s ditches and canals, too. This year, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) is not running water continuously through the majority of its canals and ditches. Rather, it’s rotating water based on irrigators’ needs. It also curtailed deliveries to its Water Bank users, about 275 people who have sold or transferred their water rights but still lease water from the district. Deliveries were halted in mid-April, resumed briefly due to a surge of water past the Otowi Gage, then halted again in mid-May. According to Tom Thorpe, MRGCD’s public affairs officer, as of mid-May, there was still enough native water in the Rio Grande for regular irrigators. At that time, the district also had 20,000 acre feet of supplemental San Juan-Chama water in storage. The district, says Thorpe, may start tapping that supply in June.

Meanwhile, biologists are struggling to protect a rare fish, the Rio Grande silvery minnow. First protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1994, the fish has seen its numbers rise and fall along with the river’s flows. Since 2001, a group of federal, state and local water managers and users have also been meeting to determine how best to balance the needs of water users with those of the fish. But unless river conditions change—and soon—wild populations of the silvery minnow will likely disappear from the Middle Rio Grande. 

Punting the BO

Under federal law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) must determine how proposed actions by a federal agency might affect rare species protected under the ESA.  Based on input from the action agencies, as well as scientific studies of the species, FWS then develops what’s called a Biological Opinion (BO).

The FWS had originally planned to release its 2013 BO for the silvery minnow last fall. Now, officials with the agency’s Ecological Services Office say they will release a draft at the end of the year. That means water management agencies are still bound to the 2003 plan, which requires that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (“Reclamation”) keep water flowing through the Albuquerque stretch of the river during certain times of the year.

While FWS officials say they’re still awaiting documents from Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, both those agencies are also waiting for the Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Act Collaborative Program to complete its transition to a Recovery Implementation Program (RIP). But after more than a decade of working together, tensions still remain between the federal and non-federal agencies in the program.

When asked to update the program’s executive committee (EC) meeting in May, FWS’s Assistant Regional Director, Michelle Shaughnessy, punted and said she didn’t have an update on the draft BO, a “pre-decisional” document that the FWS will not release to the public. Her one-sentence response to the committee elicited plenty of response: representatives from the Attorney General’s Office, the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC), and the MRGCD pointed out problems with what they’ve seen of the draft BO and its schedule.

Assistant Attorney General Steve Farris called for a special meeting on the BO in June, which FWS suggested be closed to the public. “Years ago, I thought we were closer to resolving this than we are now,” said Farris. “This is a big deal, and it has to be resolved.”

The ISC and the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) are dissatisfied with what they’ve seen of the draft BO; they’re also wary of the “Hydrologic Objectives” FWS may include within the RIP.  In this document, FWS has developed a way to determine how water releases might support a wild silvery minnow population in the Middle Rio Grande.

According to ISC/OSE Public Information Officer, Lela Hunt, ISC and OSE have a number of concerns, including the achievability of those objectives, based on hydrological realities and the data FWS is using to tally the number of minnows present in the river. She adds that the hydrologic objectives have not been subjected to “scientific scrutiny” by the collaborative program or been independently peer-reviewed.  The state’s criticism is a long-standing one. For years the state agencies and MRGCD have disagreed with FWS’s data—and have hired consulting scientists to supplement, and sometimes counter, the work of the federal biologists.

During the May EC meeting, ISC’s Rio Grande Basin Manager, Rolf Schmidt-Peterson, repeatedly objected to the FWS’s data collection methods. In an email, Hunt followed up with more details: “The non-federal members think management and recovery is impaired when one sampling technique is unilaterally imposed by one agency on a Program that is supposed to be collaborative,” she writes. The current method—called “catch per unit effort,” or CPUE, and commonly used by fisheries biologists nationwide—produces “huge errors that make it difficult to accurately assess number and population trends.”

Swimming upstream

Meanwhile, on the same mid-May day that EC members again tussled over details and calculations—and officials with FWS’s Ecological Services Office remained mum on the BO—FWS’s biologists were out on the river.

New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office biologist Thomas Archdeacon got the call around 6 a.m. A small surge of water downstream of Isleta was causing silvery minnows to spawn.

Before the Rio Grande was so drastically altered by dams and diversions, the fish’s buoyant eggs would float downstream a few hundred meters, or perhaps a kilometer. Now, they are often blown out of the system before they can develop—and biologists rush to collect them for use in hatcheries.

Currently, silvery minnows are raised at three different facilities: FWS’s Southwestern Native Aquatic Resources and Recovery Center in Dexter, NM; the City of Albuquerque’s BioPark; and the ISC’s Los Lunas Silvery Minnow Refugium. However, earlier this year, the Los Lunas fish manifested abnormal swim behavior described as “spinning.” Scientists conducted studies, classified the fish as “high risk,” and recommended against stocking them in the wild. As a result, in April, more than 5,000 silvery minnows had to be euthanized.

Without hatchery fish, the silvery minnow would likely be extinct in the Middle Rio Grande.  Biologists have been monitoring the fish’s numbers at 20 sites since 1993. Last October, there were no minnows at any of the sites. “There are still wild fish out there, but they didn’t find any,” says Archdeacon. “That’s the first time that’s ever happened. What that tells you is they are really, really, really rare.”

Then, in November, the FWS stocked 276,000 hatchery minnows in the Isleta and San Acacia reaches of the river. Surveying the river in December, biologists found fish at 13 of the 20 sites—and almost all of them were marked as hatchery fish.

If this were a good water year—or if water managers kept the river wet until at least July—Archdeacon believes the fish might rebound from last year’s low numbers. However, 2013 is shaping up to be anything but a good water year. “There may be some that survive through the summer,” he says, noting that they’ll be few and far between. “They may not actually be extinct,” he says, “but functionally? They would be pretty close.”

Archdeacon adds that biologists anticipate the river will dry even before June 15—the date after which Reclamation can legally let the river dry, according to the 2003 BO.  As that happens, biologists head out to the river, seining puddles and re-releasing silvery minnows into a stretch of the river still flowing. This year, salvage efforts may begin within the next couple of weeks—and river drying will extend north into the Albuquerque reach. Extended river drying within the fish’s critical habitat will lead to new challenges, including, he says, figuring out where to release those salvaged fish.

Meanwhile, at just about the time Archdeacon and other FWS biologists were collecting eggs from the river, MRGCD’s hydrologist, David Gensler, was presenting the Minnow Action Team’s (MAT) recommendations to the program’s EC.

In addition to meeting regularly and awarding contracts and grants for everything from data collection to restoration projects, the committee also formed the ad hoc MAT to determine how water managers might meet the minnow’s needs with limited water supplies. On the heels of two years of severe drought, 2013 is proving to be the worst year on record for the Middle Rio Grande’s water supplies. This year, flows throughout the river have been 18 to 24 percent of average.

At the meeting, Gensler presented the team’s seven recommendations, which range from trying to manage river drying within certain stretches and relocating salvaged fish to facilities such as the Albuquerque BioPark and the Los Lunas Silvery Minnow Refugium to engaging in a “flexible, interagency decision-making process.”

“We’re going to try to get them to survive this year, and maybe try and do something better next year,” said Gensler at the meeting. He added that, if water managers continue trying to meet the 100 cubic feet per second flows—required by the 2003 BO for the Albuquerque reach of the river, Reclamation will exhaust its supplemental water supplies by mid-summer.

It’s worth wondering if the team’s efforts are worthwhile. The EC will consider them, but the FWS’s Ecological Services Office may or may not incorporate them into the BO.

And while the FWS's New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office is responsible for minnow operations—overseeing everything from egg collecting to salvage operations when the river dries—it is not currently involved in writing the agency’s 2013 BO. Nor are any of its biologists participating in the Minnow Action Team.

Too little, too late

Citing the failure of water managers to implement the 2003 BO, WildEarth Guardians recently filed a 60 day Notice of Intent to sue Reclamation and the Army Corps for violations of the Endangered Species Act. 

In particular, the group says agencies have violated flow requirements, neglected to remove or modify dams and bridges that fragment river habitat and harm the minnow, not implemented adequate restoration activities, and failed to release enough water to spur springtime spawning. Although the notice names the two federal water management agencies, the environmental group also points to chronic problems within the collaborative program.

“I think there’s definitely a place for collaboration, and everyone was hopeful the collaboration would result in decisions and solutions,” says WildEarth Guardians Wild Rivers Program Director Jen Pelz. “But all it has served to do in the past ten years is insulate the status quo.”

Pelz points out that Reclamation, for example, has spent about $10 million in the past ten years acquiring supplemental water to release for the minnow. “And look where we are today,” she says. “They don’t have enough water or money after ten years, and the minnow isn’t doing better, but worse.”

Given the severity of the drought, Pelz acknowledges that this is a tough year. But agencies and the collaborative program have had more than a decade to implement the 2003 BO and pursue solutions. Instead, they have neglected to take steps like creating an agricultural leasing program or working with the pueblos to release unused irrigation water earlier in the year, rather than in November or December for the purpose of meeting New Mexico’s compact obligations to Texas.

“Everyone is very complacent in their roles and in their ability to find new sources of inspiration—to try to save the species but also save the river,” she says. “We would like to come out of this crisis better than we’ve gone into it, in terms of commitments from the parties and how we go about protecting the river—and make sure that, ten years from now, we aren’t doing this all again, but with no minnows in the river.”

San Juan-Chama’s no silver bullet

Over the past decade, water managers have been relying upon San Juan-Chama water—water that has been diverted from the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, and piped via tunnels into the Chama River, which drains into the Rio Grande—to meet the needs of cities, irrigators and the fish. The project began operating in the early 1970s and was estimated to yield more than 96,000 acre feet each year.

Reliance on San Juan-Chama water has become especially important in recent years as the Rio Grande’s native flows have dwindled. (In May, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority voted to lease Reclamation another 40,000 acre feet of water—at a cost of $4 million.)

But even San Juan-Chama water isn’t guaranteed to solve problems in the Middle Rio Grande. In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences released a report showing that extended drought is a reality for the Colorado River Basin; temperatures will continue to rise for the foreseeable future and urban demands for water will make it increasingly difficult for the region to deal with drought and water shortages.

Now, projections for San Juan deliveries to the Chama, via the Azotea Tunnel, show a steady decline in annual average flows. According to a study from Sandia National Laboratories and Reclamation, the problem will worsen. According to the study, “Climate Change Impacts on San Juan-Chama Project Reliability,” the project will likely see supply shortages through the 2020s and beyond.

According to the study’s simulations, the San Juan-Chama project experiences supply shortages in more than 10 percent of simulation years in the 2020s, more than 25 percent of simulation years in the 2050s, and more than 35 percent of simulation years in the 2090s.
San Juan-Chama water is stored in the Chama’s Heron Reservoir. According to the study, “In 2013, for the first time in the 42 years of operation of the San Juan-Chama project, Heron project supply was insufficient on January 1st to support a complete initial allocation.” 

That’s a problem water managers will continue to face. As the report concludes:

What is worrisome however, are the trends in reduced SJC supply suggested by the [Upper Rio Grande Impact Assessment] simulations as climate change sets in. If these trends are realized to any degree, Reclamation’s current firm yield estimate for the San Juan-Chama project will need to be reconsidered. Contractors of San Juan-Chama will hope that these trends do not materialize, but will be well served to consider them as possibilities in water resources planning.

Summertime blues

No one doubts this summer will be a tough one. The past 24 months have been the driest on record in New Mexico—and even the string of dams, diversions, and reservoirs can’t defend against such a severe and long-running drought. Reclamation estimates it can only acquire 65,000 acre feet of supplemental water this year for irrigators and the endangered fish. As of mid-May, it has already released 15,000 acre feet of that.

According to Mike Hamman, manager of Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area office, to meet the 2003 BO’s flow targets—which would keep water flowing through the silvery minnow’s critical habitat in the Middle Rio Grande—Reclamation would need 85,000 acre feet. And even that number, he says, assumes there would be “monsoon support.”

Managing the river this year is a challenge, and everyone is doing things a little differently, says Hamman. Considering the reality of climate change, he says, structural changes are likely necessary. As precipitation patterns change—snowpack will move higher in elevation and further to the north—managers will have to look at how to more efficiently capture and store summertime runoff.

And while “climate change” isn’t a phrase typically mentioned at collaborative program meetings, Reclamation is acknowledging that reality. As part of its 2011 SECURE Water Act report, the agency evaluated climate change impacts and projections for the Rio Grande Basin. According to the report, changes in the basin will include a 5 to 6 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase during the 21st century, a 2.3 to 2.5 percent decrease in annual precipitation by 2050, and a 7.3 to 14.4 percent decrease in mean annual runoff by 2050.

The agency has also identified potential impacts, including a decrease in the ability to meet irrigation demands, a decrease in groundwater recharge, increased stress on fish such as the silvery minnow, increased water demands for instream flows, and increased invasive species infestations. 

Under the direction of Commissioner Michael Connor, Hamman says Reclamation is intent on knowing what’s happening and trying to get in a better position to adapt to the changes. “Until we get our arms around it,” he says, “we’re still in survival mode.”

Considering the year’s poor water projections, “survival” is probably a good word.  Last year, the minnow barely survived the river drying that occurred between mid-June and late October; on the worst day, 53 miles of the Middle Rio Grande dried south of Albuquerque. This year, it’s anyone’s guess how many miles will dry.

Important Links:

Monthly Drought Monitor Status Reports for New Mexico:
http://www.nmdrought.state.nm.us/dtf_workgroup.html

NOAA National Climatic Data Center U.S. Palmer Drought Indices:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/prelim/drought/palmer.html

National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center’s U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/expert_assessment/seasonal_drought.html

USGS Current Water Data for New Mexico, including stream flow and groundwater data:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nm/nwis/rt

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Rio Grande Schematic (with distribution and gage information):
http://www.usbr.gov/pmts/rivers/awards/Nm2/rg/riog/schematic/SCHEMATICriogrande.html

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation 24-hour Rainfall Map:
http://www.usbr.gov/pmts/rivers/awards/Nm2/rg/riog/rgindexnt.html

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Reservoir Storage Data:
http://www.usbr.gov/pmts/rivers/awards/Nm2/rg/riog/schematic/SCHEMATICmrgsjcopr.html

(Feature image: The Rio Grande at the Alameda Bridge at the end of May, 2013.  Photo by Laura Paskus)