Managing water

New Mexico Business Journal, Sept, 2000 by Frank Titus

We must learn to deal with the problems resulting from our limited water supply

We in the West have a tradition. We've always decided what we want, and then gotten the water to support it. To many development advocates that still is the only procedure considered. Fortunately for the Middle Rio Grande region, the thinking of the public, the bureaucrats, and the politicians is slowly changing toward managing our limited water.

Municipal planners and developers seem to see smart growth in terms of efficient land-use design, mixed-use environments, optimized transportation modes and routes, etc. From this perspective, water is just another resource needing management. By this thinking, each of the planned and more or less balanced communities of Mesa del Sol, Westland, and Black Ranch might be offered as representing smart growth.

Smart growth from a water perspective, however, raises different considerations. First, one must accept that the available volume of water in the Middle Rio Grande Valley is fixed, and that ultimately it will not meet our perpetually increasing demands. Most people will buy this concept. But many are dismayed when told that based on averages, we are already at the point where satisfying any new demand for water requires forsaking an old one. This fact is easily shown with hydrologic data.

Is there any way to continue to grow without increasing water consumption? Yes. We could provide only apartments, condominiums and townhouses for our residents, and that, coupled with strict limitations on golf courses, trees, grassy medians, and commercial-industrial water consumption, might well allow us perpetual growth. But I don't propose that we are ready for that yet.

We all know and prize our river, and most probably know there are strict limits to how much we can diminish its flow. Since the 1960s and '70s, we actually have been augmenting the flow of the Rio Grande. Albuquerque has been vigorously pumping groundwater from parts of the aquifer far from the river, then discharging the recycled portion into the river. We also have been importing water into the Rio Grande from the Colorado River system through the San Juan-Chama Diversion System. The annual effect of these two activities has been to increase water in the river in the vicinity of Albuquerque by more than 10 percent. In addition to these augmentations, we've enjoyed the good fortune of having somewhat greater than normal precipitation and stream flows for the past 20 years. None of the aforementioned can continue much longer.

Albuquerque's water managers plan to build engineering works in the near future to take water out of the river itself for direct delivery to its customers, rather than continuing to supply them from groundwater. The city has rights to half of all the water imported through the San Juan-Chama Diversion system.

The principal concern that needs to be understood here is that if the city were to implement its plan, it would significantly reduce the actual flow of the Rio Grande, presumably permanently. New Mexico's state engineer, who administers all water rights in the state, has serious reservations about allowing the city's plans to proceed. Any reduction in actual river flow would seriously damage our ability to deliver water to downstream users in compliance with the Rio Grande Compact, which determines how much water New Mexico, Texas and Colorado can draw from the river. Nevertheless, Albuquerque probably will prevail to some degree, and the flow of the river likely will be reduced. Scary, but under average conditions, probably not fatal.

Unfortunately, that doesn't address the whole threat. We must also be prepared to contend with a drought. We don't know when a drought will come, but anyone familiar with the history of Southwestern water knows it will happen.

During the 1950's drought, Texas, and those New Mexico citizens below Elephant Butte Dam, allowed New Mexico to exceed the compact limits to its legal water debt without suing the state to enforce those limits. That won't be overlooked again. Since then, several pivotal conditions have changed. The cities of El Paso and Juarez both have become dangerously short of deliverable municipal water. El Paso has become legally insistent that New Mexico accede to demands that El Paso's share of Elephant Butte water be delivered by pipeline or canal, to protect its water quantity and quality.

Texas sued New Mexico to recover its share of Pecos River water when New Mexico failed to meet delivery requirements of the Pecos River Compact. The suit went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in losing, new Mexico was ordered never again to fail to make its deliveries. Texas has begun developing a substantial fund to support litigation against New Mexico if and when our Rio Grande deliveries fall short.

If there is a good chance (drought or no) that in the future Albuquerque could have difficulty acquiring the water needed to supply each of the three presently planned community developments (Mesa del Sol, Westland and Black Ranch) plus the many groups of 10 to 40 or so houses continually being built to fill in vacant plots within existing neighborhoods, wouldn't it be wise to develop some priorities for providing water to new developments? Which is to say, shouldn't some entity decide which development should have the highest priority, the next highest, and so on, to the water?