Editor's note: This report was prepared by Lisa Robert for the New Mexico Water Dialogue.
Decrying the trend of inactivity since completion of the last regional plan in 2008, New Mexico Water Dialogue President Mary Murnane says, “The absence of planning does not mean that the problems go away.” On the contrary, decisions that involve growing populations, aging infrastructure, groundwater declines, unworkable delivery obligations, incapacitating drought and the uncertainties of global climate change all get more challenging the longer they’re deferred.
In recognition of that fact, the state’s network of water planners periodically reassesses what’s been done, and what still needs doing, for as Dialogue participants have always recognized, there’s ever a need to transmit the insights gleaned from planning to fresh ears, and to continually engage new players. Though a quarter century of data accretion and document development haven’t guaranteed solutions to all the state’s water dilemmas, the lessons of connectedness gained in the process surely point in the right direction.
Is the Past a GuIde to our Water Future?
John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal, who writes about water in the state and across the Southwest, says he recently came upon a 1903 USDA report by subsequent Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Elwood Mead. The report contained the following paragraph, which Fleck believes “succinctly frames the core quandary for every arid region”:
All studies of irrigation lead to one conclusion, that some public control of the water supply is necessary to the best use of the resources of an arid country. In the very nature of things, conflicts will arise, and when they do, some power beyond the conflicting parties must come in to define their respective rights. The most important question in irrigation in this country is, ‘Who shall be the arbiter when such conflicts over water arise?’
Fleck has watched that exact situation play out on the Colorado River, where centuries of tree ring data indicate extreme variability in flows at Lee’s Ferry, “a good proxy for all the water in the basin,” he says, and in general, the entire Southwest.
The early 20th century, when the majority of western river allocations were decided, was an unusually wet period, but the cambium record also bears evidence of recurring, severe, long-term droughts. Finding ways to fulfill compact promises during such exceptionally dry times is imperative on the Colorado, where since the late 1990s, more water is being used than nature is providing.
For years, the river’s largest downstream consumer, California, increased its urban water use based on a theoretical surplus, and even peripheral basin cities like Albuquerque and Santa Fe grew more dependent on Colorado water. Then, in January of 2003, the Bureau of Reclamation assumed the role of arbitrator so presciently proposed in the 100-year-old Mead report, and California’s junior water uses were sharply curtailed in favor of older agricultural rights. Since then, California has managed to operate within its legal allotment, suggesting, says Fleck, “that when you have mechanisms in place to genuinely enforce shortage and sort out the need to share, communities in the West can use less water.”
Fleck believes what is missing is an ongoing forum “where all major water resource players meet regularly to talk about large-scale problems. Whether they solve the problems or not, the conversation needs to be underway between people with skin in the game.”
Steve Harris, of Rio Grande Restoration, whose hobby is “going to water conferences,” has been involved with three different regional water plans. It’s a process “with promise” he believes, because it brings the community together, and brings competing interests together, even though “15 years later, we’re still talking about how to implement some of the things we decided are important.”
Regional planning has chiefly been a response to El Paso v. Reynolds (“Can Texas develop a water supply based on New Mexico groundwater?”) and the plans aimed to demonstrate that no, every drop is needed here in our own state. Harris thinks what’s missing is agreement on a set of problems we’re trying to solve, some sort of “public philosophy of water management (emphasis on ‘philosophy’) that cuts us off at the pass,” preventing layers of promulgated rules, regulatory response, and increasingly complex administration. “A philosophy would enable us to weigh any alternative management scenario against our vision. It would also save us from relying on our rather shaky court system to make water policy.”
Harris says the water problems we face are “endemic to the landscape” and are essentially the same ones our forbearers grappled with in 1890: how can we stretch supply? “We either rattle our sabers until a federal water master ends up running the Rio Grande, or we can come together and agree on some basic principles.”
Harris notes that even the state water plan stops short of implementation and is indicative of Western individualism. “We don’t think collectively. We can’t hold in our minds that ‘water is private property’ at the same time as ‘water is a public good.’ …Where we’ve fallen down is with the ‘voiceless parties,’ like future generations, the idea of sustainability, other critters, ecosystems, and rivers themselves. They all need to be represented… We need to plan as if we were going to manage according to it.”
John Shomaker, a local hydrologist and educator, says of the big picture for water planning, “One fundamental issue for us is the fact that the curves for supply and demand are crossing, just as the data on the Colorado indicates… We know the population is growing, and the consumptive irrigation requirement is going up, even if the amount of land in irrigation isn’t, and that this is occurring while the supply is going down.”
New Mexico’s constitution says water belongs to the public, but, Shomaker says, “it turns out that it only belongs to the public so that the right to use it—and in using it, to destroy it by evaporating it— belongs to whomsoever shall first snatch it away. That’s prior appropriation. And after enough of that snatching away, we have nearly fully appropriated our streams, and we’ve found that our law didn’t quite control water as effectively as we thought it did. First came the interstate compacts, and then the Endangered Species Act, and now we’re considering whether our rivers should just be ‘plumbing,’ or whether there is a community interest to be looked into…We’re thinking there might be reasons for rivers that are not contemplated in Section 72...”
Shomaker doesn’t see an alternative to “negotiating our way out” of the problem of more owners than there is water. Litigated settlements involving all parties, as was attempted in the Pecos, may be the answer, although Shomaker admits that couldn’t have been accomplished by people in the basin: it required “encouragement from outside,” in the form of millions of dollars and the threat of “draconian enforcement by the state engineer.” He suggests that water planning should invoke the question, “In what sense do we own water?” “We think of water ownership as a property right, enshrined in the constitution just like the ownership of land, but in reality, a water right is an authorization to capture something as it’s passing by. Even groundwater…is something that’s moving from one place to another…and conditions change all the way along that path.”
The concept of planning is deeply incompatible with the doctrine of prior appropriation, Shomaker believes. “Under genuine prior appropriation, there is no reason to plan. The juniors just don’t get any, and that’s that.” Trying to administer according to priority in a place where higher value uses tend to be served by junior groundwater, and where the physical relationship between ground and surface flow includes a time lag between pumping and its effects on the river, “makes every priority call a futile call,” Shomaker adds.
It would be easier to solve supply problems, he thinks, if water were instead distributed more along the lines of a commodity and on a shorter-term basis. Beyond settling competing claims, his suggestions for increasing the amount of water available include expanding the concept of conjunctive management, so that groundwater could be managed as a non-evaporative reservoir for a stream system; engineering more capture of precipitation and more artificial recharge; and taking compact deliveries in winter and storing them in the ground to stem evaporative losses from lowland reservoirs.
Shomaker predicts that more “reprehensible” actions, such as lining the channel of the Rio Grande, will again be up for debate in the future. A lined channel would facilitate the passage of water for compact deliveries, he says, and it would lower the water table to make room for more underground storage, but, “if you lowered the water table sufficiently, the whole river would dump into it, and you wouldn’t be able to make downstream deliveries at all.”
Regional Water Planning Successes
Michael Benson of the San Juan Region and the Navajo Nation’s Water Resources Department has effusive praise for the State of New Mexico and it history of multiculturalism and inclusiveness. He cites the Navajo’s excellent cooperative relationship with the Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission, and lauds the importance of going to the grassroots to build support for whatever is planned. “Planning is what you want to have happen,” he says. “When you put a plan into words, it comes closer to reality.”
To emphasize that point, Benson notes how familiarity with planning made a difference in the way the states of New Mexico and Arizona settled Navajo water claims. Because of their decades-long participation in regional water planning, New Mexico’s Navajo chapters “felt informed and were more open to negotiating water rights with state officials than their counterparts in Arizona.” That, Benson believes, ensured the success of the New Mexico Navajo San Juan settlement.
He observes, too, that when the Colorado River Compact was negotiated in the early 1920s, New Mexico was apportioned a far greater amount of Colorado River water than what would have been the state’s share based on the tiny part of it that lies within the Colorado drainage. That’s because compact signatories “anticipated a Navajo water rights settlement,” Benson says. He recalls the words to a sad song of hope which the Navajo people composed while imprisoned by the United States at Ft. Sumner, New Mexico: “Where I come from is beautiful. I want to go home now. I want to go home now. I am going now. I am going now.” “Plans and words cause things to happen,” he encourages, “so if you want something to happen with water, put it into words. It is thanks to plans and the written word that Navajos now have a homeland and water.”
Simeon Herskovits of the Taos Region says an ambitious and controversial Public Welfare Statement delayed consensus on the regional water plan, making it the last to be submitted to the Interstate Stream Commission in the summer of 2008. After a year of dormancy, the County began devising processes for implementation, and also for revising both the plan and the public welfare statement.
In regard to implementation, a review committee was established in 2010 to “provide more information on the implications of Public Welfare to the county, the public, and ultimately, to the OSE.” Protests have been filed on two different appropriation and/ or transfer applications in the region, and now there is a broad desire, Herskovits says, to “restore meat to the Public Welfare Statement.”
Through a slow, iterative process, a subcommittee of the original Regional Planning Committee is “adding details back in,” and in general, sharpening and streamlining the PWS. That process has “led/forced leaders to examine other aspects of the Regional Water Plan,” and there is renewed desire to promote implementation, to refine the plan’s goals and objectives, and to gather additional data about local water supplies, uses and needs.
The challenges Herskovits sees in going forward include establishing “institutional continuity” for both the public welfare review and the regional planning committees; traversing intra-regional and interregional politics; using new information gained in the review process to “inform and influence decisions”; and obtaining funding to continue plan updates and revision processes, and to accomplish specifics such as groundwater mapping, infrastructure projects, and creation of an accessible local repository for information on water resources.
John Jones of the Estancia Basin Water Planning Committee says the successes of his region “stand out.” The committee was formed by an MOU between Santa Fe, Bernalillo and Torrance Counties, with weighted membership based on use, impact, and access to water within the Estancia Basin. Torrance has the most members, and Bernalillo the fewest. A wide range of interests is represented on the committee, and the members are tasked with specific functions in addition to having created the regional water plan in 1999, and overseeing its update 10 years later.
One of the committee’s strengths is “corporate memory,” Jones says, with two or three of the original members still serving after 20 years. The committee maintains a well-monitoring program, with 15 sites that can be used to track trends. Committee review of development plans is sometimes requested, and committee members have been influential regarding legislation to prevent exportation of water from the basin.
The committee has also provided input to the counties on “double dipping,” and as a result, Bernalillo County recently adopted a resolution disallowing development served by domestic well on agricultural lands from which the water rights have been transferred. Jones paraphrases Dwight Eisenhower, conceding that the plan itself may prove worthless, but the planning process is critical and vital because whatever assumptions you’ve made “aren’t necessarily the facts… It’s planning as a process that allows you to adapt, persevere and overcome.”
Dutch Salmon of the Southwest New Mexico Region says his area is “close to achieving that most rare and desirable of water management templates: sustainability.” Unlike most places in the West with a quantity of clean, available water, southwestern New Mexico has not experienced a population boom, meaning it has not yet overtaxed its water resources. Salmon notes that the Mimbres basin contains a “sea” of groundwater with an estimated storage of as much as 74 million acre-feet.
Agriculture is the largest water user, and between 1995 and 2005, basin depletions were reduced by some 55,000 acre-feet per year (afy) through conversion to drip irrigation. The northern part of the Mimbres may actually be approaching equilibrium, Salmon says, with recharge exceeding depletion. The region’s two largest municipalities have both adopted water plans: Silver City has “plenty of resources to handle the growth that never seems to come,” and Deming has “bought up sufficient water rights from nearby farms that it is now set with a 40-year water plan to meet projected growth.”
To the west, across the Continental Divide, the region’s other principal watershed is the Gila/San Francisco. “During the 1960s,” Salmon says, “Special Master Simon Rifkind used the doctrine of ‘equitable apportionment’ to grant New Mexico 31,000 afy from the Gila/San Francisco watershed... New Mexico has opined ever since that it was shorted,” but that claim is mitigated, Salmon believes, “by the reality that we have 31,000 afy for a portion of the State that holds little more than 5,000 people.” Some 4,000 afy of the allotment goes unused, while basin residents without a water right are restricted to in-home use. One possible solution, Salmon thinks, would be for the State to buy some of those fallow rights at fair market value and sell or lease them in quarter-acre-foot quantities to qualified homeowners.
Responses to “Reviving Water Planning in New Mexico”