In the case of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, two conflicting conditions can both be true at once. On one hand, the year has brought much more rain than is typical. With more than an inch of rain over the weekend, the San Luis Valley has seen more than 10 inches of total precipitation so far in 2024, or 3 inches above what’s normal, according to the National Weather Service. On the other hand, low snowpack in the San Juans and Sangre de Cristos from a winter ago left Valley farmers with less than a normal water year for irrigation. On May 6, the Rio Grande Basin had half of the typical snowpack, according to the Colorado Climate Center, and we know the unconfined aquifer relied on by so many irrigators remains a major problem. The state currently has a five percent curtailment on groundwater wells in the San Luis Valley. In calculating its downstream water obligations to New Mexico under the Rio Grande Compact, Colorado is anticipating the Rio Grande to finish the irrigation season at 78 percent of what’s normal for flows and 80 percent on the Conejos River, according to Craig Cotten, division engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
New conservancy district forms
Winding its way through Colorado Division 3 Water Court is an application from a group of Valley irrigators to form the Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Groundwater Management Subdistrict. The initial board of directors would be Art Artaechevarria, William Meyers, and Les Alderete, according to the application submitted to state water court in Alamosa. The formation of a new water conservancy district will allow the group of farmers to manage their own affairs when it comes to meeting Colorado’s rules governing groundwater pumping in the San Luis Valley. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its subdistrict formations, the new SOCO Water Conservancy District would impose a mill levy tax upon the farms operating within it to pay for its operations and strategy to adhere to the state’s groundwater pumping rules. The Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District has membership among farmers in Saguache, Rio Grande and Alamosa counties. The new water conservancy district will include approximately 250 wells, and in its application it tells the water court that the subdistrict plans to obtain approximately 6,000 acre-feet to augment depletions from wells and estimates it will cost $40 million to obtain the water. There’s a lot more to this developing water story. More in the coming week.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Hearing this week on Rio Grande Compact case
The decade-long Rio Grande Compact case of Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado will have a hearing before retired Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith on Wednesday, Oct. 23, in Denver. Smith, who retired as chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021, was appointed new Special Master in the case by the U.S. Supreme Court in July. The appointment came after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the U.S. Department of Interior and denied a consent decree that the states had negotiated which would have settled the case. Smith now takes over the case and is expected to set a course of action during the hearing this week.
Bouncing along the bottom. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
October 4, 2024
Sept. 30 marks the end of the “water year,” an accounting milestone that gives us an opportunity to take stock.
The change in total water storage year-over-year is one way to do this, to help understand if we took more water out of the reservoirs than the climate put in. The graph above is actually based on Sept. 20 year-over-year (the Reclamation data updates lag a bit), but it’s enough to give us a feel for two things.
First, we’ve seen no real reversal of the long term pattern – a huge reduction in storage in the early 21st century, and then basically dragged the bottom of the reservoirs ever since.
Second, on a shorter one- or two-year time scale, total storage is down ~350,000 acre feet at the end of water year 2024 compared to the end of 2023. Over a two-year time scale, we basically burned through the bonus water from a wet 2023 and are back where we were at the end of 2022.
Rio Grande flow this year at Otowi in north-central New Mexico has been 63 percent of the period of record mean, going back to the late 1800s.
New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.
hen the state of Colorado created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for recovering the aquifers of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, there was an intention to steer a good portion of the money toward irrigators working in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
Whether the strategy will work is under question. Last month’s reading of the unconfined aquifer storage levels shockingly showed it at its lowest point, despite millions in tax dollars that have been spent to retire groundwater wells.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
The motivation behind Senate Bill 22-028 was to use state tax dollars to continue to dry out farming fields located in the most productive area of the San Luis Valley because that’s where the depleted unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin runs through. For the past two decades the state Division of Water Resources has been working with Rio Grande Water Conservation District and the farmers and ranchers who operate in Subdistrict 1 to reduce the amount of groundwater they pump each growing season to help recover the struggling aquifer.
The 2022 state senate bill would bring new money into the effort. Of the $30 million allocated from Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund to the Upper Rio Grande Basin, nearly $14 million has been directed to retire 44 more groundwater wells in Subdistrict 1, with more money likely to come to further the strategy.
The state monitors the amount of groundwater pumped with flow meters tied to center pivot sprinklers which water the fields. The meter reading will tell the farm operator how many acre-feet of water they’ve used during the irrigation season, and each fall figures from those flow meters are reported to the state.
The assumption has been that by reducing the amount of groundwater pumped from the unconfined aquifer, the aquifer would recharge over time. Over the past decade, it appeared the strategy had validity with the aquifer at times showing a bounce back.
Then came the reading from this August which showed the unconfined aquifer storage near its lowest level, and state and local water managers found themselves scratching their heads in disbelief and frustration.
“It is disappointing to see that the aquifer has dropped lower this year. We had hoped to see an increase in aquifer levels, but another lower-than-average river flow year meant that less water was available to recharge the aquifers,” said Craig Cotten, the state division water engineer in the San Luis Valley.
The continued decline in unconfined aquifer levels is the reason the state engineer this year approved a new Groundwater Management Plan that is included in the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management. The plan was more than a year in the making and still needs approval from the state water court to go into effect. That won’t happen at the earliest until sometime in 2026.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
“It is very concerning, especially given that Subdistrict #1, under its current plan, has just seven more years in which to recover the unconfined aquifer to a sustainable level. If the aquifer has not recovered by then, and if the subdistrict is still operating under its current Groundwater Management Plan, then the State Engineer will have no choice but to curtail all of the non-exempt wells in this area,” Cotten said.
There are several “ifs” in that scenario, all of which should get addressed when the state water court takes up the new Groundwater Management Plan for Subdistrict 1. But again, that’s not until 2026, and the clock, as Cotten mentions, is ticking.
Amber Pacheco, deputy general manager for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said there are 3,614 wells included in the Subdistrict 1 annual replacement plan. The idea that the state would come in and shut those down because farmers couldn’t recover the unconfined aquifer to a sustainable level is the constant worry Subdistrict 1 farm operators work under.
“There is no specific timeline in which the Subdistrict will meet its objective to reach a Sustainable Water Supply by reaching an Unconfined Aquifer Storage Level between 200,000 and 400,000 acre-feet below that storage level that was calculated to exist on January 1, 1976, but it may be 20 years or less depending on the hydrologic conditions following the period the new plan is implemented,” Pacheco said.
Take a drive down County Rd E or any of the other country roads that cross through Rio Grande and Alamosa counties and you’ll notice the Valley’s potato harvest in full swing. Take a bit closer look, and in the midst of the harvested fields is a growing amount of agricultural acreage once productive that is now intentionally dried out to save on the groundwater below.
The last days of the potato harvest. Photo credit: The Alamaosa Citizen
With the unconfined aquifer showing little to no bounce back after years of attempted recovery, the expectation is that the western and northern ends of the San Luis Valley will see more dry fields in the growing seasons to come. The money spent through the state’s Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund to retire more groundwater wells will begin to show up in the 2025, 2026 planting seasons and beyond.
As Cotten said, Subdistrict 1 is “one of the most productive irrigated farming areas in the state.”
Farming with a struggling aquifer is making it less so.
The U.S. Air Force has a plan for cleaning up a decades-old jet fuel spill from a base near Albuquerque.
However, the local water authority said last week that the plan is inadequate, in part because it scales back current remediation efforts and doesn’t mention how the Air Force will address sudden issues.
In 1999, officials discovered a fuel leak, assumed to be more than 24 million gallons, in the jet fuel loading facility at Kirtland Air Force. The leak could be twice the size of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, according to the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice.
It’s unclear when the leak – the largest underground toxic spill in U.S. history – first occurred, but it had been spilling fuel into the ground for decades by the time it was discovered, according to Kelsey Bicknell, environmental manager at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.
An Air Force report says existing measures have prevented further migration of the fuel contaminants and that officials are regularly taking groundwater samples to ensure that drinking water remains safe both on and off-base.
Bicknell said there are concerns with the way the Air Force plans to go forward, including a lack of forward-looking analysis and the absence of a “trigger action plan” that identifies possible changes and prescribes a response to those changes.
She told the water authority’s Technical Customer Advisory Committee that the fuel soaked its way through almost 500 feet of soil, and ultimately reached the water table, where rock wouldn’t permit it to drop further. Then, she said, it began to pool underground.
Bicknell said the fuel not only contaminated the groundwater but also released volatile vapor into the nearby atmosphere.
She said the Air Force used a vapor extraction system to clean up more than a half-million gallons of fuel.
“This was a really successful system,” Bicknell said, adding that the program was shuttered after about a decade.
Bicknell said the Air Force is now using a groundwater pump-and-treat system that targets the dissolved fuel components that have moved away from the source of the leak and area. There are also four extraction wells, brought online between 2015 and 2018; they draw out and treat groundwater.
Bicknell said the Air Force has announced plans to turn off two of the wells. But that was done without input from the water authority and without including the agency in decision-making.
Air Force representatives did not immediately respond to phone and email requests for comment.
Bicknell said the goal now is to try to get the Air Force to reverse its decision before the wells are shut down. State and federal regulators have jurisdiction over the cleanup plan, she said, but the water authority cannot veto what the Air Force wants to do.
“Ultimately, we’re the water carrier, the ones that are impacted,” Bicknell said. “If the Air Force messes up, it is our source water that’s impacted, and it’s us that lose out on access to a supply source, so including us in the room and in project discussions and decision-making is something that is paramount.”
On a cold, wet Monday morning, hidden away in a tall aspen stand, Rosalee Reese and Connor Born whisper so they don’t disturb the nearby rehabbing bears and bobcats. They walk into a large chain-link enclosure. In one corner sits a stock tank filled with murky water. In the other corner is a den-like structure of hay. A piece of plywood is laid over the top. Reese, Born and two employees of the Frisco Creek animal rehab center use sticks and their wits to corral five beavers into kennels.
Credit: Owen Woods
These beavers are part of the Beaver Translocation Program and are the third group this year to be relocated from the Valley floor to the Rio Grande National Forest. “Problem” or “nuisance” beavers are more often than not, just killed. When their dam building collides with agriculture or when they are perceived to be displacing water levels or threatening water rights, beavers are seen as pests and are treated as such. The hope is that this program will eventually lead to less conflict and more coexistence.
The future, Reese and Born say, is coexistence.
From Frisco Creek to Rios de los Piños
The Beaver Translocation Program is a part of the Rio Grande National Forest Wet Meadows Restoration Project. The Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project and the Forest Service have partnered on a new pathway for beavers to be placed higher in the mountains where they can have more direct influence on the watersheds and avoid the nuisance label. Projects like these have sprung up over the United States and in Canada, but work really didn’t start in Colorado until about two years ago.
“There’s always going to be conflicts on the Valley floor,” said Born, stewardship coordinator for the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Program. “I think of this as much a service to irrigators and water rights holders in the Valley as it is a benefit to the forest.”
Beavers play a vital role in watershed health; their impacts on the environment as a whole are widespread and well-known. However, where beavers excel in some places, they can be real problems in others. Particularly on the Valley floor, where their work and the work of farmers and ranchers collide.
“If you have suitable habitat for beaver, you’re going to continue to have problems with beavers,” said Reese, forest fisheries biologist for the Forest Service. “If we come and trap them out and move them, if you shoot them, the likelihood is that they’re going to come back at some point.”
She said that coexistence and making areas resilient against the beavers can “make your life easier because you’re not going to be dealing with the same issue over and over again. Because you’re not going to be able to eliminate beaver from the Rio Grande Basin.”
There are ways to create cohabitation, but it takes time and it takes money. The money, though, won’t come out of the pockets of those in conflict with the beavers. In fact, Born said, the approach is to offer funds to encourage people not to kill nuisance beavers and allow the animals to be relocated.
Credit: Owen Woods
Reese and Born, with two adult beavers, two yearlings and a kit, load into a Forest Service truck and drive the length of the Valley until they are high in the Rio Grande National Forest. For those few hours, the five beavers traveled faster and further than they ever have before.
Beavers are nature’s engineers, second perhaps only to humans. Yet there is an age-old tension between us and them that has forced us to think differently about what techniques can reduce conflicts and make sure that the Rio Grande National Forest’s watersheds and the Rio Grande stay healthy.
Overgrazing and drought are two factors at play that threaten watersheds and streams. The relocated beavers will call the Rios de los Piños home and even though their future is somewhat cloudy, they have been given another shot at life and an opportunity to do their jobs.
If there’s enough habitat, they’ll stay together as a multi-generation family unit. But if there’s limited food or habitat they’ll move away.
At the release site, Reese and Born pull on their waders. Reese comforts the beavers who at this point have huddled into the corners or against the gates of the kennels, eyes wide and hearts racing.
Credit: Owen Woods
Reese and Born tie two ratchet straps around the kennel and thread two wooden poles on either side. They take three trips from the truck to the drop off site, up to their thighs in water, carrying the beavers on makeshift gurneys.
The summer rains have created a swift and flowing rush of water.
The three kennels sit side by side. Reese and Born open the gates and coax the beavers with words of encouragement. Nothing happens for a moment. The animals are afraid and a little camera shy.
The kennels are tipped up and lightly shaken. The first beaver to take a swim is the baby. Then one by one, the other four beavers make their way into the water, where they slide in and slip under the surface.
And just like that, the job is done.
Credit: Owen Woods
The Forest
Beavers are considered an Aquatic Focal Species or Aquatic Priority Species. This means biologists and experts can look to them as an indicator of watershed health.
“So then we monitor a beaver and do the beaver relocation program as a metric of monitoring our watershed and riparian health and hopefully improving it in areas where we can re-establish them,” Reese said.
The beavers are being introduced to some areas they inhabited 20 to 30 years ago, but were pushed out due to drought or overgrazing, food and habitat pressures, or even simply by being killed.
In the short term, beavers are most threatened by predation, mostly by bears and mountain lions.
In the long term, besides climate change and overgrazing, human conflict remains the biggest threat to beaver populations.
Reese said that even when problem beavers are moved up into the mountains, they can still be seen as a problem and killed. And there’s not really a lot anyone can do about it.
“They’re just getting killed,” she said. “We have to change people’s perspectives on beavers. Humans are going to be one of the major issues for recovering larger beaver populations.”
Beavers are a protected species in Colorado, but if beavers are damaging property or causing problems to irrigation or agriculture they can be killed under state law.
Not all farmers and ranchers are so eager to kill beavers. Some are quite understanding of beavers’ role in nature, but just don’t want them gunking up agricultural gears. Born said that some landowners who are willing to participate in the relocation program are also willing to wait until next season to have their problem animals removed.
Understanding beavers’ role in the ecosystem is half the battle.
However, it doesn’t mean that people like Reese and Born won’t continue to try and give the watersheds and the beavers another shot. In the national forest, there’s no shortage of good places for beavers to be left alone to do their work. Particularly in meadows.
In the meadows that beavers occupy, their dams act like sponges, soaking up water and dispersing it far and wide. Born said, “You have this whole mini-aquifer of groundwater that if the beaver dam is there is just full. And that sponge is going to help release water longer into the season and keep the river wet. It’s just the same as the Rio Grande and the aquifers here.”
There’s a direct relationship between beavers and water health.
Credit: Owen Woods
“If the stream is cut off or forced to one side of the Valley,” he said, “that sponge is no longer fully wet so you’re more prone, if there’s no rainfall or low snowpack, then all of a sudden you lose flows completely or greatly reduced.”
On the car ride to the Rio Grande National Forest office in Del Norte, Born tells The Citizen that because of this mini-aquifer effect, some people may take it a step further and say that beavers and processed-based restoration have a potential to create a “second run off.”
“I don’t exactly like that terminology because I think it really overplays the potential,” he said.
Thinking on a stream-by-stream basis, he said, “we are so, so far from having any kind of meaningful influence on a river like the Rio Grande or Conejos. These are small streams that we’re doing habitat improvements for fish, for riparian habitat, and the groundwater recharge is almost secondary in these projects.”
On a statewide level, specifically through the Colorado Water Conservation Board, there is an effort to determine the exact influence that beaver structures have on streamflows.
Born said that would entail installing groundwater transducers and streamflow gauges before and after one of these restoration projects. That has never really occurred in the San Luis Valley before. The hope, he said, is to show that they are either increasing flows or doing very little.
The Valley Floor
Born said no one knows how many beavers live on the Valley floor. It would be a tough number to gauge. He thinks that there are far fewer beavers on the Valley floor than there are up in the national forest.
However, to give The Citizen an idea of just how often beaver conflicts occur, Born said that a farmer just a few miles upstream from Alamosa killed nearly 70 beavers in 2023. That number is normally around 30 to 40 a year.
“Alamosa proper might have a lot more beaver conflict if he wasn’t there. Ultimately, you have this philosophical issue of beavers are ecosystem engineers, we are the top ecosystem engineers. Beavers are pretty much number two. Which is really awesome. But we don’t like sharing.”
There are ways to create cohabitation. One of those methods is through the use of a “beaver deceiver.”
The most common and most frustrating headache beavers cause is building dams up against culverts. Using hog panel fencing, about six or so feet offset from the culvert, the beavers would be able to build a dam around that fence but wouldn’t limit the ability of the culvert to pass water.
Beaver deceivers aren’t always successful, Born said. “There’s always going to be a place for trapping and relocating.” He said there are many more beavers on the Valley floor than they are able to deal with, meaning they have to be “pretty choosy.”
That typically means establishing a priority list and going after the beavers giving people the most trouble and going after the largest colonies.
To do that, you’ve got to have someone who knows how to humanely trap beavers. Their trapper, who works through the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, works pretty much alone and often has to trap animals other than beavers – like mountain lions, for example.
Because there is only one trapper, that priority list is important as the team doesn’t want to waste his time with beavers that aren’t quite a big enough problem.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife permits trapping beavers for this relocation program from June 1 to Sept. 1, but work doesn’t really kick off until closer to July. The team wants to make sure that the kits are grown enough to be able to survive and to make sure that mothers aren’t pregnant. Due to the Valley’s limited window of warm days, it leaves about eight weeks to trap, quarantine, and release.
Credit: Owen Woods
Beavers are good vectors. The Rio Grande Cutthroat trout is a threatened species and is currently seeing a resurgence in the Rio Grande’s watersheds, but it is a sensitive species, particularly to Whirling Disease. When beavers are taken from one water source to another they have to be quarantined for three days and have their water changed every 24 hours to ensure they won’t be carrying any diseases with them.
They are also quarantined to avoid the spread of Chytrid fungal disease, which affects amphibians.
All of these precautions are taking place because Reese and Born want to see these animals thrive and they want to ensure the health of the environment. Again, beavers are second only to humans in their ecosystem engineering. They are the water’s guides, and despite their conflict with humans, are a keystone species that we would sorely miss.
What comes out of this program has yet to be seen, but it’s promising. Whatever data and answers can be drawn will be shared for years to come.
Even if the success rate is 30 to 50 percent and not every beaver released doesn’t make it, Reese said she still feels “like the effort we’re putting in is worthwhile for the potential benefits of having more beaver on the landscape.”
Four years after a high-profile dam restoration project was completed in the scenic headwaters of the Rio Grande, promises to deliver water for fish during the winter and other recreational benefits have not been met, environmental groups charge.
The Rio Grande Reservoir Project was funded by state loans and public grants provided by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which often bases financing approvals, in part, on a project’s ability to serve multiple purposes, including water for fish, habitat and kayakers.
“The Colorado Water Conservation Board … provided $30 million in the form of loans and grants to complete the project,” the CWCB said In a project update posted on its website. “Benefits include: instream flow enhancement; channel maintenance; outdoor recreation opportunities; terrestrial and aquatic wildlife habitat; irrigation, augmentation; and storage to comply with the Rio Grande Compact between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.”
The public-private project was completed in 2020.
The CWCB declined an interview request for this story, but said in an email that there were no specific conditions in the loans and grants tied to providing environmental benefits.
“CWCB does not have the ability to impose extra terms on the recipients of funds that are not articulated in the funding agreements. In the case of the Rio Grande Reservoir Rehabilitation, the final deliverable was completion of the project,” a spokesperson said.
Still Kevin Terry, southwest program director for Trout Unlimited, said the project would likely never have been funded without assurances that the dam would be operated differently to help the river, including releasing water in the winter to aid the fish and changing the time water is released throughout the summer to keep the river cooler and healthier during prime fishing and kayaking season.
“There were lots of environmental benefits touted before the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the roundtable,” Terry said, referring to the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. The roundtable is one of nine public groups across the state’s major river basins that help address local water issues and funnel state grants to projects they approve.
The San Luis Valley Irrigation District, which owns and operates the dam, serves farms around Center and has delivered water from the dam since 1912, according to its website. Neither District President Randall Palmgren nor Superintendent Robert Phillips responded to numerous requests for comment.
The district uses the reservoir to store water for irrigators. Trout Unlimited and others aren’t asking for any water, they say, just that existing water that would be released anyway be sent downstream at times that are beneficial to the river.
Screenshot from Google Maps
Among key complaints by environmentalists is that the irrigation company is not allowing water to flow out of the rehabilitated dam during the winter, something that would benefit young fish and allow them to grow larger for the next fishing season.
Terry said the irrigation district has said it can’t deliver that winter water because it is difficult to operate the new equipment in freezing winter weather. But Terry said he doesn’t understand how the project could have been built without the ability to deliver in cold weather, something that occurs routinely in other reservoirs in the valley.
Jim Loud, a Creede resident and avid angler who lives on the river, said he and others are tired of waiting for the river to receive the benefits many believed would have been delivered by now.
“All we want is to get them to do what they said they were going to do,” said Loud, citing numerous CWCB documents dating back several years outlining the environmental benefits of the project. Loud is part of the Committee for a Healthy Rio Grande.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
The old days weren’t fun
The conflict comes as the Rio Grande Basin, which begins high above Creede and flows south to the Gulf of Mexico, continues to struggle with declining aquifer levels due to heavy agricultural use and low stream flows due to drought and climate change. In Colorado, the Rio Grande waters a potato industry that is one of the largest in the nation.
The last days of the potato harvest. Photo credit: The Alamaosa Citizen
Creede local Dale Pizel, who owns a ranch on the river and caters to the fishing community, said river conditions have improved some since the dam was rebuilt. Prior to the project, the irrigation company would routinely dry up the river for weeks during the high summer tourist season to make repairs to the dam.
“That doesn’t happen anymore,” Pizel said. He too serves on the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable, which also approved some grants for the project.
“I voted for that project knowing it would have environmental benefits, and it did,” Pizel said, because there is no need for the irrigators to dry up the river to repair a failing dam anymore.
Still, he said, if environmental promises are being made publicly, the state needs a better way to make sure they are kept.
Trout Unlimited’s Terry said for years he was hopeful that the rehabilitated dam would serve as another multiuse storage project in the water-short valley helping farmers and the environment.
“We are so disappointed in the delivery of what was promised and the lack of the CWCB holding the irrigation district accountable in any way,” he said.
Altering the dam’s new equipment so that winter releases can occur will likely require spending about $5 million, according to Terry.
Pizel and others hope a resolution between the farmers and the environmentalists can occur without legal action.
“We don’t want to start thumping each other in the chest,” Pizel said. “That’s the way it was in the old days. It was not fun.”
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) today announced more than $1.5 million in grants to restore, protect and enhance aquatic and riparian species of conservation concern and their habitats in the headwaters of the Colorado River and Rio Grande watersheds. The grants will leverage over $1.8 million in matching contributions for a total conservation impact of more than $3.3 million.
The grants were awarded through the Southwest Rivers Headwaters Fund, a partnership between NFWF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Walton Family Foundation and the Trinchera Blanca Foundation, an affiliate of The Moore Charitable Foundation, founded by Louis Bacon.
“Communities in the Southwest have grappled with challenges to the long-term sustainability of their rivers,” said Jeff Trandahl, executive director and CEO of NFWF. “These grants demonstrate how investments in stream and meadow restoration in our headwaters can increase the climate resiliency of these critical water resources while supporting the Southwest’s many unique fish and wildlife species.”
The projects supported by the six grants announced today will address a key strategy for species and habitat restoration in headwaters streams of the Colorado River and Rio Grande: restoring and enhancing riparian and instream habitat.
“Consistent with the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act, the selected restoration projects within the forests, streams and riparian areas of the National Forests in Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado are a significant step to maintain and improve riparian and aquatic ecosystems into the future in the face of changing climates,” said Steve Hattenbach, Deputy Regional Forester, USDA Forest Service Southwestern Region. “Streams and riparian areas are key to ensuring sufficient water to maintain the ecological integrity of watersheds that support life in the beautiful Southwest.”
NFWF’s Southwest Rivers Program was launched in 2018 to fund projects that improve stream corridors, riparian systems and associated habitats from headwaters to mainstem rivers in the Southwest. Through the Southwest Rivers Headwaters Fund, the program funds projects that produce measurable outcomes for species of conservation concern in the wetlands and riparian corridors of the headwaters regions of major southwestern rivers. In 2022, the Fund expanded from the Rio Grande watershed to include to include priority headwaters watersheds of the Colorado River Basin in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
A complete list of the 2024 grants made through the Southwest Rivers Headwaters Fund is available here.
Eighty years ago, the United States and Mexico worked out an arrangement to share water from the two major rivers that run through both countries: the Rio Grande and the Colorado. The treaty was created when water wasn’t as scarce as it is now. Water from Mexico flows to Texas’ half-billion-dollar citrus industry and dozens of cities near the border. On the Mexican side, some border states like Baja California and Chihuahua are heavily reliant on the water that comes from the American side of the Colorado River.
Now, those water-sharing systems are facing one of the biggest tests in their history. Mexico is some 265 billion gallons of water behind on its deliveries to the United States. Unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, growing populations, aging infrastructure and significant water waste have left both countries strapped for water and have escalated tensions along the border. Maria-Elena Giner is the U.S. commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission, the binational agency that oversees the 1944 water treaty and settles disputes. Mexico is “at their lowest levels ever” in the treaty’s history, Giner said. The treaty operates in five-year cycles, and the current deadline for deliveries isn’t until October 2025.
But “the question is that they’re so far behind, it will be very difficult, if not statistically impossible, for them to make up that difference,” Giner said…
To address the water scarcity in Texas, officials last year proposed a solution: a treaty “minute,” or amendment, that would allow Mexico to pay water directly to South Texas instead of giving two-thirds to the Mexican state of Tamaulipas first, as currently specified in the treaty. But quenching the thirst in South Texas ahead of its own citizens was likely a nonstarter ahead of Mexico’s presidential election this year. Negotiations on the treaty changes were completed and both countries were set to sign last December, but Mexico has yet to receive official authorization to do so, said Giner, of the International Boundary and Water Commission.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Spend any time around Jason and Josh Cody and their dad, Wayne, and you’ll quickly appreciate the farming ingenuity that has gone into turning the Colorado Malting Company on County Road 12 into one of America’s leading malt providers for craft beers and spirits.
There is a lot to say about the success of Colorado Malting Company and how the Codys were at the forefront of turning their 300 acres of barley, wheat, and rye fields into malt and how they found markets for their value-added ag products in big cities, small towns, and the world around. You can hear Jason Cody tell the story in this episode of The Valley Pod.
Credit: Owen Woods
It’s a company that can brag about being the first in the United States of America, as Jason likes to say, to craft malt and sell to craft spirits and beer makers. The San Luis Valley Straight Rye Whiskey made by Laws Whiskey House or many of the original New Belgium Beers are testament to that.
The Codys can also say they were founding members of the Craft Maltsters Guild, which now includes hundreds of malt houses around the country and up to 300 members. At one point in its early days, Colorado Malting Company had 187 craft breweries on a waiting list to buy its malt, and Jason and Josh are treated as royalty on their many trips outside the San Luis Valley, including some abroad, to preach the gospel of craft malting and how they figured out a different system to malt with fewer steps from their farm outside of Alamosa.
Credit: Owen Woods
Credit: Owen Woods
But to focus solely on the success and upcoming expansion of Colorado Malting Company would be a disservice to the brilliance of Wayne Cody and his sons and how each has lent his own expertise to the success of the family business, and the hard labor that’s gone into all.
It’s a story that has its roots in the Valley’s dairy industry and the Cody family operating one of those dairy farms up until 1995, when they sold the cows and got out of the business. The story picks up in 2007 when Wayne Cody came into the family house and presented a contract to his mom to sell the farm. Her response: she had $60,000 in savings and could they continue to grow their grain crops and try another year?
“That was the beginning of the malting company,” Jason Cody said. “So then the image to consider is me out in that old dairy barn tearing all that stuff out and pulling it out into the driveway and saying, look, there’s an opportunity.”
Credit: Owen Woods
The opportunity was figuring out how to make malt to sell into the growing craft brewing industry that was blowing up in big cities around the time Grandma Cody refused to sign the selling papers. So the Codys took the stainless steel dairy tanks and converted them to make finished barley malt.
“Just made it work,” is how Wayne Cody describes the farm conversion from dairy to malting. “You just go,” he said, standing in another building on the farm that the Codys converted into their malt storage warehouse.
Wayne Cody suffered a traumatic brain injury in a four-wheeler accident in 2012, and it was a few years after that son Josh relocated with his family to Alamosa. At the time Josh Cody was a professor at Concordia University in Wisconsin. He now serves as the creative director of both the Colorado Malting Company brand and the brand of the Colorado Farm Brewery, which the Codys own and operate alongside the malting company.
Credit: Owen Woods
Josh is also the family brewmaster, responsible for the craft beers on tap at the Colorado Farm Brewery. His latest is a craft rye beer that is light and crisp and flavorful.
The rye grain has come into its own as an ingredient in craft beers and spirits, and the need to grow more rye is what led Jason Cody to the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable this summer.
The Rio Grande Basin Roundtable is a quasi-government entity that works on water management issues and water-related projects. One of its board members, Heather Dutton, is one of the brains behind the Rye Resurgence Project, which promotes San Luis Valley-grown rye as one of the Valley’s best sustainable crops for the simple fact rye uses less water to grow and the uniqueness in flavor the grain takes when grown at the Valley’s high altitude.
Credit: Owen Woods
“The San Luis Valley has a variety of rye that has been here among the farming community since we think probably the Dutch settlers,” said Jason Cody. “There’s no name for this variety of rye. It’s just if you go to buy the seed, they call it ‘VNS rye’, which is ‘Variety Not Stated.’
“What we found out, and it was all through trial and error and experimentation, was when we grew VNS rye in soil types we have out here, which are much more clay, much higher calcium soil, that the flavors that we were getting in the distillate off of those ryes were different than the flavors that you’d get with other varieties and other soil types.”
To meet demand for its rye malts, the Colorado Malting Company will need to grow and harvest 1,700 tons; it currently uses 500 tons of rye. It is that expansion and explanation to area farmers that prompted the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable to approve awarding $111,500 to help with expansion of Colorado Malting Company.
Credit: Owen Woods
Credit: Owen Woods
It was a unique ask of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable from a private farmer to grow a private business, but one most members of the organization thought was important in its effort to get farmers to grow fewer water-intensive crops and to back an operation that literally is putting San Luis Valley rye on the map.
“You can taste it most prominently in San Luis Valley rye whiskey, which is because it’s a hundred percent almost our rye and there’s a specific flavor that we’ve all learned and look for in that rye whiskey now. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just something we discovered,” Jason Cody said.
The company’s expansion will result in three new buildings on the Cody farm, one to serve as the new malthouse with three automated drum maltings, another as a new warehouse, and a third to serve as a place to clean the grains.
Credit: Owen Woods
Credit: Owen Woods
Speciality smoked malts, including smoked barley for single malt scotch, is the newest twist and the new malthouse will help the Colorado Malting Company meet that demand.
“Everything will change,” said Jason Cody, his dad and brother standing nearby in the existing warehouse which the Codys figure will be converted into a shop to “repair and build things” once the new malthouse with the automated equipment is built.
“When Jason and I were boys we played street hockey in here,” said Josh Cody. “My grandfather used it to hold equipment, my dad and grandfather. They parked the combines and tractors and everything in here in the winter,” said Josh Cody.
Credit: Owen Woods
“It was filled with Coors barley once,” Wayne Cody said.
The day is getting on and the Colorado Farm Brewery will open for another Friday night in a few hours. The Codys head inside the brewery to sample Josh’s new rye beer and to plan more for the coming expansion of their Colorado Malting Company.
Great Sand Dunes National Park San Luis Valley. Prairie sunflowers and dunes in warm early morning light, August 27, 2024. With a continued wet summer, flowers are abundant in the park and preserve! Credit: NPS, Patrick Myers
While the rest of the state is melting in heat, Alamosa and the San Luis Valley have been soaking in rain. But that’s not unusual for August when you look back at this century.
What is unusual is four consecutive months of measurable precipitation, which the Valley has felt this spring and summer going back to the 1.7 inches of rain in May. In fact, 2024 is going down as one of the wettest summers on record since the year 2000.
Between May and August there has been a total of 6.14 inches of rain on the Upper Rio Grande this year. Two wetter four-month periods were in 2001 when 7.13 inches of rain accumulated between May and August, and 2022 when 7.08 inches of precipitation was measured.
This much rain, particularly in August, can be both a blessing and hindrance to the Valley landscape and way of life. A benefit to the flows of the Upper Rio Grande and overall desert environment; a detriment to the farmer looking to sell hay or barley crops.
This wet hay isn’t so good for the dairy farmer looking to purchase, and barley grown in this much rain can cause the buying brewery to turn away.
September through November looks like a drying-out period overall with above-seasonal high temperatures. If that’s the case, a snowy Christmas and New Year will be in order to keep the gains in the Upper Rio Grande from the steady summer rains.
WET YEARS (May through August)
2001: 7.13 total 4 month total
2022: 7.08 inches 4 month total
2024: 6.14 total 4 month total
2017: 5.68 inches 4 month total
July and August are typically the rainiest months of the year. Here’s how the two months compare
A Rio Grande sign at Isleta Blvd. and Interstate 25 on Sept. 7, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court appointed a new special master to oversee the case, after their June ruling blocking a proposed deal. (Photo by Anna Padilla for Source New Mexico)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
August 26, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court appointed a new judge to oversee the Rio Grande water dispute between Texas and New Mexico.
The case will continue on after the high court’s June ruling dismissed a deal between New Mexico, Colorado and Texas, as five justices sided with objections from the federal government to the deal.
Justices appointed Judge D. Brooks Smith, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from Duncansville, Pennsylvania, to replace federal appeals Judge Michael Melloy as the special master in the case in July.
A special master acts as a trial judge, decides on issues in the case and prepares reports to inform the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultimate opinions in the case.
Smith, 72, has a long career in law, first starting in private practice and as a prosecutor. He donned the robes in 1984 as both a Court of Common Pleas judge in Blair County, Pennsylvania, and an administrative law judge.
In 1988, he was appointed by President Ronald Regan and confirmed to a federal position for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
In 2002, the Senate confirmed his appointment by the Bush administration to the federal appeals court, where he’s served since.
This is the third special master for the case, called Original No. 141 Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado.
In a complaint filed in 2013, Texas alleged that pumping in New Mexico below Elephant Butte Reservoir was taking Rio Grande water owed to Texas under a compact from 1939.
That 85-year old document governs the Rio Grande’s use between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, and also includes provisions for sending water to Mexico under 1906 treaty obligations and acknowledges regional irrigation districts.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to allow the federal government to join the case, accepting the arguments that New Mexico’s groundwater pumping threatened federal obligations to deliver water to Mexico and two irrigation districts.
After months of negotiations and a partial trial, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico proposed a deal to end the yearslong litigation. The federal government and regional irrigation districts objected to the deal, saying that it imposed unfair obligations and was negotiated without their agreement.
Melloy recommended the court ignore the federal government’s objections and approve the state’s proposed deal.
In June, the high court released a narrow 5-4 ruling siding with the federal government’s objections and blocking the state’s deal.
It’s unclear what comes next in the case under the new special master, but the parties could return to the negotiation table to hammer out another deal or return to the courtroom.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
The Central Arizona Project canal passes alfalfa fields and feedlots in La Paz County, Arizona. The fields are irrigated with pumped groundwater, not CAP water. Source: Google Earth.
Imagine that you’ve set off for a hike in the desert of western Arizona, hoping to get up high so you can get a view of the juxtaposition of alfalfa fields against the sere, rocky earth. But you somehow get disoriented, the sun reaches its apex and beats down on you, the temperature climbing into the triple digits. The ground temperature becomes so hot you can feel it through the soles of your Hoka running shoes. Your water bottle is empty. Feeling certain you are going to die you pick a direction and stagger in as straight a line as you can manage, rasping for help. And then, just when you’re about to curl up under a rock and surrender, you see, coming straight out of a hillside, a virtual river. It must be a mirage, you think, or a hallucination, you run toward it, climb the fence, and dive into the cool, deep water.
This is not a fantasy scenario. There is, in fact, a place in the western Arizona desert where a lost traveler could stumble upon a giant canal emerging from the earth.
The Central Arizona Project’s Mark Wilmer pumping plant at Lake Havasu. The 14 plants on the CAP system push water across more than 300 miles with a vertical gain of 3,000 feet. Moving water requires enormous amounts of power, making the CAP the state’s largest single electricity user, with annual power bills totaling $60 million to $80 million. Source: Google Earth.
Central Arizona Project canal daylighting at the Buckskin Mountain Tunnel. Source: Google Earth
The outlet of the San Juan Chama Project runs into Willow Creek west of Los Ojos before running into Heron Lake. Source: Google Earth
The Rio Blanco intake for the San Juan-Chama Project, which takes water from three upper San Juan River tributaries and ships it across the Continental Divide to the Chama River watershed and, ultimately, the Rio Grande. Source: Google Earth
It’s just one of the crazy plumbing projects along the Colorado River and its tributaries. And they can look pretty weird when you stumble upon them in remote places. That’s what happened to me the other day — virtually. I was using Google Earth to chart the 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition’s path when, near Chama, I came across a large volume of water emanating from an arid meadow. After some thought I realized it was the outlet for the San Juan-Chama Project that diverts about 90,000 acre-feet of water annually from three tributaries of the San Juan River, sends it through the Continental Divide via a tunnel, and delivers it to Willow Creek and Heron Reservoir. From there it can be released into the Chama River, which runs into the Rio Grande, which is used by Albuquerque and Santa Fe to supplement groundwater and the shrinking Rio Grande.
The Big Thompson Project sucks water out of the Colorado River near its headwaters and siphons it through the mountains via the Alva Adams Tunnel. The water feeds reservoirs that feed Front Range cities and is used to generate hydropower. Adams tunnel inlet at Grand Lake. Source: Google Earth
The Big Thompson Project sucks water out of the Colorado River near its headwaters and siphons it through the mountains via the Alva Adams Tunnel. The water feeds reservoirs that feed Front Range cities and is used to generate hydropower. Penstocks and powerplant at Flatiron reservoir on the right. Source: Google Earth
These things aren’t only unsettling in a visual way, but in a conceptual way as well. One would expect cities and agricultural zones to rise up around where the water is and to grow according to how much water is locally available. Instead, cities rise up in places of limited water and grow as if there were no limits, importing water (and power and other resources) from far away.
The Julian Hinds pumping station, near Desert Center, California, lifts water from the Colorado River Aqueduct 441 feet as it makes its way toward Los Angeles. Source: Google Earth
The Southern Nevada Water Authority was forced to build a third water intake from Lake Mead that was able to draw water as the reservoir continued to shrink. The pumping plant is pictured. Source: Google Earth
An aerial view of the Jemez Watershed on June 28, 2024. (Photo by Danielle Prokop / Source NM)
Click the link to read the article on the SourceNM.com website (Danielle Prokop):
July 29, 2024
If approved, the settlements would bring in more than $3.7 billion in federal funds and end decades of water rights litigation
The Navajo Nation president and leaders from Acoma, Ohkay Owingeh and Zuni Pueblos joined tribal leadership from across the nation on Capitol Hill, offering testimony about the benefits of $3.7 billion federal dollars in six proposed water rights settlements across New Mexico.
The deals would settle tribes and Pueblos’ water rights in four New Mexico rivers: the Rio San José, the Rio Jemez, Rio Chama and the Zuni River.
Another bill would also correct technical errors in two previously ratified water rights settlements: Taos Pueblo and the Aamodt settlement Pueblos of Nambé, Pojoaque, Tesuque and San Ildefonso. Finally, a sixth bill would add time and money for the Navajo-Gallup water project to construct drinking water services.
New Mexico representatives presented a record six settlements for Pueblos and tribes at a subcommittee hearing Tuesday, the first step in getting needed Congressional approval to end decades of litigation. Companion proposals from the Senate were heard Friday in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Mescalero Apache Tribe President Thora Padilla was introduced to senators with support for the settlements.
As climate change reshapes the Southwest into something hotter and drier, with more strain on its water resources, approaching water collaboratively means communities have a chance to stay, and tribes can exercise their sovereignty.
In front of House members on Tuesday, Ohkay Owingeh Gov. Larry Phillips Jr. said the settlement of the Ohkay Owingeh’s rights on the Rio Chama will offer a means of long-awaited restoration.
“The U.S. bulldozed our river, it destroyed our rivers and bosque,” he said. “This needs to be fixed, the settlement gives us the tools to do that.”
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) said tribes and Pueblos gave up certain acreage that they are entitled to, and worked out drought-sharing agreements to benefit everybody in the region.
Leger Fernández sponsored five of the bills, and Rep. Gabe Vazquez (D-N.M.) sponsored a sixth that was heard on Tuesday.
Additionally, she said the funds will enable more infrastructure, bosque restoration and ensuring water rights protections for neighboring acequias.
Acoma Pueblo Gov. Randall Vicente told the committee that making concessions in the settlement was crucial to preserving water for future generations.
“It is better to have adequate wet water, than paper rights without a water supply,” he said.
Even if the Pueblo enforced having the oldest water right, Vicente said the Rio San José’s system is so damaged, it would take decades for water to reach Acoma.
The settlements can help redress the federal government’s injustices towards Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, Phillips said. He pointed to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s channelizing of the Rio Chama and the building of Abiquiu Reservoir in the 1950s, which moved water away from the Pueblo.
“Both of these actions resulted in depriving us of our bosque and waters necessary for a proper river,” he said. “We entered into the settlement in order to protect, preserve our water resources and the bosque.”
The loss of water not only impacts the health of Pueblo communities, Phillips said, but it splits people from their lands and means the loss of sacred bodies of water and ceremonies to celebrate them.
Water offers a lifeline to traditional ways and offers prosperity, said Zuni Pueblo Gov. Arden Kucate.
Zuni Pueblo will work to build new drinking water treatment systems and restore waffle garden irrigation practices, a technique used for generations until the turn of the 19th century, when settlers diverted water and clearcut the Zuni River watersheds.
“It will usher in, what I sincerely believe, will be a new chapter for our tribe, allowing us to protect and sustainably develop our limited water resources, to restore traditional agriculture and facilitate much-needed economic development,” Kucate said about the settlement.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren also spoke, celebrating water rights settlements with both New Mexico and Arizona.
Some of the settlement agreements are already two years old.The administration supports all of the New Mexico settlements, said Bryan Newland (Ojibwe), the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
“Any delay in bringing clean, drinkable water to communities is going to harm the people who live in those communities,” Newland said. “We also know from our experience that these settlements only get more expensive, and implementation only gets more expensive the longer we wait.”
Tribal water rights are not entirely settled in New Mexico, most notably on the Rio Grande, where a federal assessment team started addressing water claims issues in 2022. Leger Fernández said she hopes the six water rights settlements in other watersheds will provide a model for collaborative management of water rights on New Mexico’s largest river.
An aerial view of the Jemez Watershed on June 28, 2024. (Photo by Danielle Prokop / Source NM)
“These water rights settlements provide the framework for future water rights settlements, which include those involved in Rio Grande,” Leger Fernández said.
Leger Fernández said the moment was still momentous, even if it’s only the first step.
“There’s never been this many settlements at one time,” she said. “There has never been a hearing that was this big.”
What’s the process?
The House Committee on Natural Resources held a legislative hearing on 12 water rights settlements across the U.S. with a projected cost of $12 billion.
The hearing consisted of testimony from federal agencies and heads of tribal governments.
The settlements can now head into a process called mark-up and means they can be added to legislative packages moving forward. Both of New Mexico’s senators sponsored companionate bills.
It’s just the first step in the process, but Leger Fernández said she’s looking to face the biggest hurdle of cost head-on. She and members of the Department of the interior testified that continuing to fight court battles will cost the federal government more money, and that waiting isn’t an option.
“The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be,” she said.
New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.
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EDINBURG — The Rio Grande is no longer a reliable source of water for South Texas.
That’s the sobering conclusion Rio Grande Valley officials are facing as water levels at the international reservoirs that feed into the river remain dangerously low — and a hurricane that could have quenched the area’s thirst turned away from the region as it neared the Texas coast.
Although a high number of storms are forecast this hurricane season, relief is far from guaranteed and as the drought drags on.
For now, the state’s most southern cities have enough drinking water for residents. However, the region’s agricultural roots created a system that could jeopardize that supply. Cities here are set up to depend on irrigation districts, which supply untreated waters to farmers, to deliver water that will eventually go to residents. This setup has meant that as river water for farmers has been cut off, the supply of municipal water faces an uncertain future.
This risk has prompted a growing interest among water districts, water corporations and public utilities that supply water to residents across the Valley to look elsewhere for their water needs. But for several small, rural communities that make up a large portion of the Valley, investing millions into upgrading their water treatment methods may still be out of reach.
A new water treatment facility for Edinburg will undoubtedly cost millions of dollars but Tom Reyna, assistant city manager, believes the high initial investment will be worth it in the long run.
“We see the future and we’ve got to find different water alternatives, sources,” Reyna said. “You know how they used to say water is gold? Now it’s platinum.”
For Edinburg, one of the fastest growing cities in the Valley, the need for water will only grow as their population does. While the city hasn’t faced a water supply issue yet, the ongoing water shortage in South Texas combined with the growing population has put local officials on alert for the future of their water supply.
The Falcon and Amistad International reservoirs feed water directly into the Rio Grande. And while water levels have been low, cities and public utilities have instituted water restrictions that limit when residents can use sprinkler systems and prohibits the washing of paved areas.
Cities have priority over agriculture when it comes to water in the reservoirs. Currently, the reservoirs have about 750,000 acre feet of which 225,000 acre feet are reserved for cities.
A former channel of the Rio Grande, or resaca, winds through agriculture fields near Los Fresnos, on Wednesday. The Rio Grande Valley is facing a drought, greatly affecting farmers in the region. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Of those 225,000 acre feet, each city or public utility or water supply corporation can purchase what are known as “water rights” which grants them permission from the state to use that water.
But without water for farming, more and more of the water that they own is being lost just in transporting the water to their facilities and that’s directly due to the loss of water for farmers.
This relationship with the agriculture industry arose because irrigation districts were created here first. Cities came after and because they used less water, they were set up to depend on irrigation districts.
Water meant for residential use rides atop irrigation water to water treatment plants. Without irrigation water, cities start to use water they already own to push the rest of their water from the river to a water treatment facility. It’s referred to as “push water.” Much of that water is lost for this purpose.
When water levels at the reservoirs got dangerously low in in the late 1990s, the average city would only get about 68% of the water it owns because the rest would be used as push water, according to Jim Darling, board member of the Rio Grande Regional Water Authority and chair of the local water planning group, a subset of the Texas Water Development Board.
The board is tasked with managing the state’s water supply.
Darling, a former McAllen mayor, has been trying to get cities to think of ways to increase their water supply.
As cities try to temper water demand by issuing restrictions on water usage, Darling said public utilities need to think about the drought not just from the standpoint of managing demand but also by increasing supply.
Jim Darling, chair of the Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group and former McAllen mayor, points at rivers and tributaries shown on a map at the South McAllen Water Plant, in McAllen, on Monday. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Darling has been floating the idea of creating a water bank of push water so that water districts can get by without having to go through the process of obtaining approval from the state for more water.
These discussions have been ongoing with the watermaster from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, who ensures compliance with water rights. The talks are still preliminary, but a conversation with the watermaster’s office in early July revealed that three or four of the Valley’s 27 irrigation districts were out of water.
“Something needs to be done,” Darling said.
Edinburg’s proposed water plant is still in the early planning stages, but the goal is to stave off water woes by turning their attention to water sources underground.
Their plan is to dig up water from the underground aquifers as well as reuse wastewater. The two sources of water would be blended and treated through reverse osmosis.
Reserve osmosis consists of pushing water through membranes, large cylinders that filter the water. This is done several times until the water is pure and meets drinking water standards set by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
This method isn’t new.
By implementing this practice, Edinburg is following in the footsteps of the North Alamo Water Supply Corporation, a utility that supplies water to eastern Hidalgo County, Willacy County, and northwestern Cameron County.
Filtered groundwater is desalinated through reverse osmosis at the Southmost Regional Water Authority brackish groundwater treatment facility in Brownsville on Monday. The facility treats water to distribute to its five partners, including the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, its main customer and is seeking funding to expand the facility in order to address the region’s drought and water shortage. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
After the drought in 1998, North Alamo turned to reverse osmosis in the early 2000s.
Their facilities currently treat about 10 million gallons of water per day through reverse osmosis which represents one-third of all the water they treat. The rest is surface water from the river but they aim to switch that split, treating two-thirds through reverse osmosis and have a third of surface water.
“We’ve got that mindset that we have to get away from the river,” said Steven P. Sanchez, general manager of North Alamo. “We have to start going to reverse osmosis.”
Hidalgo County officials are trying to take a more “innovative” approach to the area’s water problems.
In April, county officials touted a proposed regional water supply project, dubbed the Delta Water Reclamation Project, that would capture and treat stormwater to be used as drinking water.
The project, expected to cost $60-70 million, started off as a project to mitigate flooding by drawing water away from a regional drainage system. But now, plans include a water plant that would take daily runoff and treat it through reverse osmosis.
“We are the first drainage district to do something like this and of course that’s an exciting thing for us, to be able to do something that’s so innovative and green,” said Hidalgo County Commissioner David Fuentes who sits on the drainage district board. “But it comes with a lot of obstacles and a lot of unknowns.”
One challenge will be financing the water plant. Drainage districts are limited on the bonds they can issue in exchange for a loan. Obtaining funds from the Texas Water Development Board would also be an uphill battle since a drainage district doesn’t fit the usual metrics that a water supply corporation does.
County leaders made the case for their project before a Texas Senate committee hearing in May on water and agriculture, requesting that legislative leaders direct the water development board to give a higher consideration to projects like theirs or to provide a grant program their project would qualify for.
The county drainage district already completed a pilot test of the project and those results are now under TCEQ for review. They expect TCEQ will give them the green light as well as instructions on how to design the plant and steps they need to take to ensure water quality.
Fuentes said they expect that review to be completed early in the legislative session, which would give them a better idea of what they need to ask legislators for.
If the project becomes a reality, the county would sell to water corporations like North Alamo.
Members of the public listen to Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. as he begins to lead a water conservation meeting with various stakeholders across the Rio Grande Valley at the county courthouse on Tuesday in Brownsville. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
In Cameron County, located on the east end of the Valley, the Brownsville Public Utilities Board was also motivated by drought conditions to reduce their dependence on the river. With help from their partners in the Southmost Regional Water Authority, the public utilities board spearheaded the construction of a desalination facility that also employs reverse osmosis.
Despite its growing popularity in the Valley, desalination has its drawbacks. The process has faced pushback from environmentalists over the disposal of the concentrated salts and because the process requires a lot of energy.
Southmost and North Alamo hold permits from TCEQ to discharge the concentrate, or reject water, into the Brownsville Ship Channel and a drainage ditch that flows to the Laguna Madre, respectively.
Representatives for both entities said the salinity of the concentrate is less than the salinity of the bodies of water that are receiving that discharge.
“All the aquatic life that’s there, the plant life and everything that feeds off that water is not being harmed at all,” Sanchez said. “We monitor that.”
Sanchez said other solutions would be drying beds, a process of evaporating the water into sludge, and injecting the water about 20,000 feet back into the ground.
North Alamo has also made improvements to their energy consumption. In May, the water corporation upgraded their 16-year-old water filtering equipment, reducing the amount of energy used to create the pressure to push the water through their filtration system.
Sanchez said reverse osmosis has also been more efficient for North Alamo.
North Alamo Water Supply Corporation General Manager Steven P. Sanchez at the NAWSC water treatment facility in Edinburg, on Tuesday. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Their surface water treatment plant treats about 2.7 million gallons of water daily while the reverse osmosis plant treats 3 million gallons. It’s also become cheaper in the last few years. Treatment of surface water costs them $1.21 per thousand gallons while reverse osmosis costs $0.65 per thousand gallons, according to Sanchez who said RO would still be cheaper even with depreciation.
This wasn’t always the case, he said, but the high cost of chemicals is driven up the cost in treating surface water. But where surface water treatment is cheaper is in the initial cost to establish it.
Sanchez estimated that the initial capital investment for reverse osmosis treatment capable of treating a million gallons per day would conservatively cost about $6-7 million while a surface treatment facility of the same capacity would cost $3-4 million.
Southmost’s plans to double their plant’s capacity would cost an estimated $213 million.
Reyna, the Edinburg assistant city manager, agreed that the initial investment would be the biggest cost for the city but believes it will end up paying for itself.
Not all cities have that as a viable option, though. That initial cost can be an insurmountable hurdle for smaller, rural communities that leaves them unable to invest in solutions. The state could possibly alleviate some of that cost.
During the last legislative session, lawmakers established the Texas Water Fund with a billion dollar investment that will go to a number of financial assistance programs at the Texas Water Development including one that has never had funding before called the Rural Water Assistance Fund.
This will be additional state funding to help rural communities with technical assistance on how to decide what kind of design and what kind of assistance is best for their community. This will help them navigate the process of applying for funding.
Rigoberto Ortañes looks at a rising pool of water, flooding the excavation site, as a crew works on upgrading pipes and valves at a North Alamo Water Supply Corporation water plant in Donna on Thursday. The utility company supplies water to eastern Hidalgo County, Willacy County, and northwestern Cameron County. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Plans for how the water development board will allocate funds to these new financial assistance programs will be released in late July.
Sarah Kirkle, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the Texas Water Conservation Association expects the state will provide interest rate reductions for loans that will be used on expensive projects.
However, the $1 billion allocated to the Texas Water Fund will not get very far.
“The needs for implementing this state water plan are something like $80 billion and those are outdated numbers that we’re looking to update in the new water planning cycle,” Kirkle said, adding that the plan doesn’t include the cost of wastewater or flood infrastructure.
She noted that the cost of water infrastructure is about two or three times what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic because of disruptions in the supply chain and additional federal requirements for federally-funded projects.
Many small communities also don’t have the resources to plan for their needs, Kirkle said, so many of them don’t participate in the water planning process, leaving no one to speak up for them.
“We really need to make sure that as we see additional water scarcity around the state, that our communities are engaged in planning for their needs and understand where they might have risks and where their water might not be reliable,” Kirkle said.
Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.
Big news: director and screenwriter Richard Linklater; NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher; U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-California; and Luci Baines Johnson will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
I’ve been
a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and
b) Thinking about Albuquerque’s aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater
(City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late ’50s as Albuquerque’s population and groundwater pumping began to grow. I use it for big picture attention because it’s reasonably well placed to give a good rough picture of what’s going on, and has a nice long time horizon.)
update:
City Well #2
USGS Groundwater Monitoring Well 350824106375301, better known as Albuquerque’s “City Well #2”
Map: John Fleck, Utton Center, University of New Mexico School of LawSource: USGSCreated with Datawrapper
The biggest water trials facing the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and local farmers are set for 2026.
Peter Ampe, attorney for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, told board members Tuesday that three major water cases are set for trial in 2026. The cases are:
The fourth Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 scheduled for six weeks starting Jan. 2, 2026
Sustainable Water Augmentation Group and its proposed alternative augmentation plan for a group of irrigators in Subdistrict 1 set for a six-week trail starting June 29, 2026
The city of Alamosa and its confined aquifer case set for a three-week trial starting on Oct. 19, 2026
Each of the cases is subject to settlement ahead of any trial. Ampe said the city of Alamosa’s case to guarantee itself more water for future expansion has the best chance of agreement before a trial would begin.
The fourth Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 is a key document that outlines future strategies to recover the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin. Farmers in the subdistrict, which covers parts of Alamosa County around Mosca-Hooper and Rio Grande County, are under pressure from state water managers to restore the aquifer.
The subdistrict’s updated water management plan has been approved by the state engineer and needs approval from the District 3 Water Court to go into effect.
The alternative augmentation plan proposed by the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group had the start of a water trial in 2023 only to have the trial come to a sudden end when the group withdrew its application. The application withdrawal came after the town of Del Norte terminated an agreement to lease water to the SWAG farmers as a replacement source for groundwater pumping by SWAG members.
Greg Higel, board chair of Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said the board will have to prioritize spending on attorney fees in its annual budgets. MORE: Alamosa Citizen maintains an extensive archive of water stories.
Construction crews attempt to repair the El Vado dam along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The federal government has been unable to find a way to stop seepage behind the steel faceplate dam. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
July 15, 2024
Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?”
My answer:
We seem to be living through a grand convergence of aging water infrastructure failure on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande this year.
We’ve talked in this space before about El Vado – built in the 1930s, unusable today. But it is only one example among many right now. If we are frank in recognizing that the main Rio Grande channel is a human artifact, dug in its current place and form in the 1950s, the list right now is long. The Flood Control Acts of 1948 (Public Law 80-858) and 1950 (Public Law 81-516) established the Middle Rio Grande Project and assigned the Bureau of Reclamation the job of performing Rio Grande channel maintenance.
Side channels were excavated by the Bureau of Reclamation along the Rio Grande where it passes through the Rhodes’ property to provide habitat for the endangered silvery minnow. (Dustin Armstrong/U.S. Bureau Of Reclamation)
The channel is infrastructure.
And it’s not just human water use that has optimized around the infrastructure. I was very careful in my comment to Jake – “entire human and natural communities” have optimized around the temporal and spatial flow of a century of altered river systems. When we taught together in the UNM Water Resources Program, my friend and collaborator Benjamin Jones spent significant time on the concept of “coupled human and natural systems”. This is that.
Here’s my current list, feel free to add your favorites in the comments.
The Army Corps of Engineers has had to curtail releases out of Abiquiu Dam on the Rio Chama because sediment has plugged the river. That means decreased flows downstream. They’re working like crazy to dig a pilot channel. It is not yet working.
CORRALES SIPHON
The Corrales Siphon, built (like El Vado) in the 1930s as part of the early Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District works is (like El Vado) broken. The district has installed temporary pumps, but with the reduced flows out of the Chama, there’s not enough water in the Rio Grande to feed the pumps, which means irrigators in Corrales have no water.
LOWER SAN ACACIA REACH
The Rio Grande’s Lower San Acacia reach, heavily altered by channel reconstruction and management from the 1950s onward, is – I believe the technical term is “a fucking mess”. It’s increasingly difficult to get water through this reach to users downstream who depend on it. Lots more on this situation here.
LOW FLOW LEAK
The Low Flow Conveyance Channel (Yay 1950s engineering!) sprang a kinda big leak the early 1990s. It’s still leaking, much to the delight of endangered willow flycatchers – to the human water users not so much.
New Mexico Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District are working together on federal legislation that would call for a limited study of the Rio Grande Basin.
The involvement of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its attorneys comes after Stansbury attempted a similar push in 2022 when she introduced the Rio Grande Water Security Act. That effort was ultimately doomed after pushback from Colorado and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
Now the Rio Grande Water Conservation District is trying to steer Stansbury to focus on New Mexico’s portion of the Rio Grande only and not draw in Colorado as part of any federal study.
“She is very determined to introduce federal legislation to call for a study of the Rio Grande. I understand that her real impetus is that she does not feel that enough is being done in New Mexico to aggressively and innovatively manage the water resources within New Mexico,” attorney David Robbins said in remarks this week to board members of Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
“On behalf of the district and the Valley and the state we have been pursuing an effort to convince the congresswoman and her staff that Colorado doesn’t need federal agencies studying its water resources,” Robbins said.
David Robbins and J.C. Ulrich (Greg Hobbs) at the 2013 Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention
“Colorado has already studied its water resources. We have a state water plan, we have all of the plans you could ever want in the form of subdistrict replacement plans, plans of water management in our Valley. We have water court processes and decrees that specifically designate what federal authority exists through the water court system and over water in the Valley, and we don’t intend to compromise one thing if it would have any impact on our obligations.”
Stansbury’s office has not responded to calls and emails seeking comment.
Colorado delivers water at the Lobatos Bridge in Conejos County to send downstream into New Mexico to comply with the Rio Grande Compact. New Mexico, in turn, is obligated to deliver water from the Rio Grande to the Texas state line at El Paso.
Stansbury has been successful in securing federal funding to support New Mexico’s efforts along the middle Rio Grande. She was elected to represent New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District through a special election in 2021 to replace Deb Haaland, who was confirmed as U.S. interior secretary under President Biden.
Haaland in May announced $60 million in funding for New Mexico and West Texas to address how climate change is affecting the middle Rio Grande. The money was the first disbursement from the Inflation Reduction Act for a basin other than the Colorado River Basin, a fact not lost on conservationists working on Upper Rio Grande Basin projects in Colorado.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Colorado Open Lands have identified $400 million in total funding needed to improve water resilience and security on the Upper Rio Grande. The organizations made a funding request of $50 million to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation through the Inflation Reduction Act but were never given a response to their request.
Alex Funk, director of water resources with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said the Rio Grande needs its own dedicated federal funding source so that it’s not pitted against the better-known Colorado River Basin to address drought and less water.
“The Rio Grande, like the Colorado River Basin, has been experiencing long-term drought conditions. It’s seen huge reduction in its water availability. Everything shows that those flows will continue to get lower and lower where we have several compounding water challenges,” said Funk.
Funk and Sally Weir were recent guests on The Valley Pod and discussed the funding needs for the Rio Grande and their pitch for money to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau of Reclamation had earmarked $4 billion to address drought mitigation in the Colorado River Basin and other watersheds like the Rio Grande facing comparable levels of drought.
Robbins, the attorney for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said it’s important that any federal legislation introduced by Stansbury steers clear of involving Colorado and its management of the Rio Grande.
“We don’t intend to compromise one thing if it would have any impact at all on our obligations at Lobatos. That is what we are going to work by. We’re not going to change the timing (of water delivery), we’re not going to change the quantity, we are simply going to say ‘You got what you got, so you don’t need to study it.’
“That’s very important to me that we take that position because one of the things that the states retained (under the Rio Grande Compact) was the right, which has been recognized for more than a century, to manage the water resources within their boundaries. So I think it is foolishness to get ourselves into a situation where federal agencies are meeting and studying and making recommendations about what is actually your collective responsibility and right to manage.
“If that’s what they want to do in New Mexico, fine. We’re going to work hard to try to be sure that Congress doesn’t provide authority to a separate or new federal agency or commission or committee or whatever it is to come into Colorado and make recommendations about what you have all sweated and argued and arm wrestled over for the past 100 years.”‘We have a state plan’: RGWCD works to limit any federal study of Rio Grande.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
We’re currently 121,500 feet behind in deliveries, up from basically zero six years ago. If our debt rises above 200,000 acre feet, according to the letter:
To be clear, this is separate from the ongoing Texas v. New Mexico litigation on the Lower Rio Grande. This is the scary new Compact threat that Norm Gaume and others have been warning about as the Compact debt creeps inexorably higher.
The full letter is included at the tail end of Monday’s (7/8/2024) MRGCD board packet, and is on the agenda for a possible discussion at that meeting.
El Vado Dam and Reservoir back in the day. Photo credit: USBR
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Jake Bittle):
July 6, 2024
Mark Garcia can see that there’s no shortage of water in the Rio Grande this year. The river flows past his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. The rush of springtime water is a welcome change after years of drought, but he knows the good times won’t last.
As the summer continues, the river will diminish, leaving Garcia with a strict ration. He’ll be allowed irrigation water for his 300 acres just once every 30 days, which is nowhere near enough to sustain his crop of oats and alfalfa.
For decades, Garcia and other farmers on the Rio Grande have relied on water released from a dam called El Vado, which collects billions of gallons of river water to store and eventually release to help farmers during times when the river runs dry. More significantly for most New Mexico residents, the dam system also allows the city of Albuquerque to import river water from long distances for household use.
New Mexico water projects map via Reclamation
But El Vado has been out of commission for the past three summers, its structure bulging and disfigured after decades in operation — and the government doesn’t have a plan to fix it.
“We need some sort of storage,” said Garcia. “If we don’t get a big monsoon this summer, if you don’t have a well, you won’t be able to water.”
The failure of the dam has shaken up the water supply for the entire region surrounding Albuquerque, forcing the city and many of the farmers nearby to rely on finite groundwater and threatening an endangered fish species along the river. It’s a surprising twist of fate for a region that in recent years emerged as a model for sustainablewater management in the West.
“Having El Vado out of the picture has been really tough,” said Paul Tashjian, the director of freshwater conservation at the Southwest regional office of the nonprofit National Audubon Society. “We’ve been really eking by every year the past few years.”
Surface water imports from the El Vado system have generally allowed public officials in Albuquerque to limit groundwater shortages. This echoes the strategies of other large Western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, which have enabled population growth by tapping diverse sources of water for metropolitan regions and the farms that sit outside of them. The Biden administration is seeking to replicate this strategy in water-stressed rural areas across the region, doling out more than $8 billion in grants to support pipelines and reservoirs.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
But the last decade has shown that this strategy isn’t foolproof — at least not while climate change fuels an ongoing megadrought across the West. Los Angeles has lost water from both the Colorado River and from a series of reservoirs in Northern California, and Phoenix has seen declines not only from the Colorado but also from the groundwater aquifers that fuel the state’s cotton and alfalfa farming. Now, as Albuquerque’s decrepit El Vado dam goes out of commission, the city is trying to balance multiple fragile resources.
El Vado is an odd dam: It’s one of only four in the United States that uses a steel faceplate to hold back water, rather than a mass of rock or concrete. The dam has been collecting irrigation water for Rio Grande farmers for close to a century, but decades of studies have shown that water is seeping through the faceplate and undermining the dam’s foundations. When engineers tried to use grout to fill in the cracks behind the faceplate, they accidentally caused the faceplate to bulge out of shape, threatening the stability of the entire structure. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dam, paused construction and is now back at the drawing board.
Without the ability to collect irrigation water for the farmers, the Bureau has had no choice but to let the Rio Grande’s natural flow move downstream to Albuquerque. There’s plenty of water in the spring, when snow melts off the mountains and rain rushes toward the ocean. But when the rains peter out by the start of the summer, the river’s flow reduces to a trickle.
“We run really fast and happy in the spring, and then you’re off pretty precipitously,” said Casey Ish, the conservation program supervisor at the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the irrigation district that supplies water to farmers like Garcia. “It just creates a lot of stress on the system late in the summer.” The uncertainty about water rationing causes many farmers to forego planting crops they aren’t sure they’ll be able to see to maturity, Ish added.
Construction crews attempt to repair the El Vado dam along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The federal government has been unable to find a way to stop seepage behind the steel faceplate dam. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
The beleaguered dam also plays a critical role in providing water to the fast-growing Albuquerque metropolitan area, which is home to almost a million people. As the city grew over the past 100 years, it drained local groundwater, lowering aquifer levels by dozens of feet until the city got a reputation as “one of the biggest water-wasters in the West.” Cities across the region were mining their groundwater in the same way, but Albuquerque managed to turn its bad habits around. In 2008, it built a $160 million water treatment plant that allowed it to clean water from the distant Colorado River, giving officials a new water source to reduce their groundwater reliance.
The loss of El Vado is jeopardizing this achievement. In order for Colorado River water to reach the Albuquerque treatment plant, it needs to travel through the same set of canals and pipelines that deliver Rio Grande water to the city and farmers, “riding” with the Rio Grande water through the pipes. Without a steady flow of Rio Grande water out of El Vado, the Colorado River water can’t make it to the city. This means that in the summer months, when the Rio Grande dries out, Albuquerque now has to turn back to groundwater to supply its thirsty residential subdivisions.
This renewed reliance on groundwater has halted the recovery of local aquifers. The water level in these aquifers was rising from 2008 through 2020, but it slumped out around 2020 and hasn’t budged since.
“We have had to shut down our surface water plant the last three summers because of low flows in Albuquerque,” said Diane Agnew, a senior official at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which manages the region’s water. Agnew stresses that aquifer levels are only flattening out, not falling. Still, losing El Vado storage for the long run would be detrimental to the city’s overall water resilience.
“We have more than enough supply to meet demand, but it does change our equation,” she added.
The Bureau of Reclamation is looking for a way to fix the dam and restore Rio Grande water to Albuquerque, but right now its engineers are stumped. In a recent meeting with local farmers, a senior Reclamation official offered a frank assessment of the dam’s future.
“We were not able to find technical solutions to the challenges that we were seeing,” said Jennifer Faler, the Bureau’s Albuquerque area manager, in remarks at the meeting.
The next-best option is to find somewhere else to store water for farmers. There are other reservoirs along the Rio Grande, including one large dam owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, but repurposing them for irrigation water will involve a lengthy bureaucratic process.
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Reclamation told Grist that the agency “is working diligently with our partners to develop a plan and finalize agreements to help alleviate the lost storage capacity” and that it “may have the ability to safely store some water” for farms and cities next year.
In the meantime, farmers like Garcia are getting impatient. When a senior Bureau official broke the bad news at an irrigation district meeting last month, more than a dozen farmers who grow crops in the district stood up to express their frustration with the delays in the repair process, calling Reclamation’s announcement “frustrating” and “a shock.”
“If we don’t have any water for the long term, I have to let my employees go, and I guess start looking for ramen noodles someplace,” Garcia told Grist.
Even though there are only a handful of other steel faceplate dams like El Vado in the United States, more communities across the West are likely to experience similar infrastructure issues that affect their water supply, according to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico.
“We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure we’ve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended,” he said.
As the West gets drier and its dams and canals continue to age, more communities may find themselves forced to strike a balance between groundwater, which is easy to access but finite, and surface water, which is renewable but challenging to obtain. The loss of El Vado shows that neither one of these resources can be relied upon solely and consistently — and in an era of higher temperatures and aging infrastructure, even having both may not be enough.
The headwaters of the Rio Grande River in Colorado. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
by Priscilla Totiyapungprasert, El Paso Matters June 27, 2024
CLINT, Texas – When pecan farmer Guadalupe Ramirez glanced up at the overcast skies last Friday morning, he felt a sense of relief. The drizzle that came wasn’t much, he said, not like the burst of rainfall parts of El Paso received earlier that week. But still, he welcomed the light sprinkle of rain and cooler temperatures – a break, finally, from the relentless stretch of dry, 100-plus degree weather.
“The skies were gray, but not gray in sadness,” Ramirez said. “I thought ‘Oh, this is nice. It’s going to be a nice day.’”
Ramirez was flood irrigating his trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm that morning. The family-run farm, located in the small town of Clint east of the El Paso city limits, has 300 trees whose fruit are small and green in the summer. As the pecans ripen, the husks will turn brown and crack open, ready for harvest in late fall and winter.
But if the trees don’t get enough water, the pecans drop too early. Last summer’s brutal, record-breaking heat could even affect the quality of this year’s pecans if the orchard doesn’t experience a decent monsoon season, Ramirez said.
New pecans, tiny and green, appear in the foliage of trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. Co-owner Lupe Ramirez says that o save resources, a tree stressed by heat and drought may drop its pecans early, leaving him with a far-reduced crop. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
As climate change and human activities cause higher temperatures, longer heat waves and lower water levels, local farmers have no choice but to adapt if they want to keep their crops alive.
Longer stretches of hotter days “not a one-time deal”
About 9 miles north of Ramirez Pecan Farm, the Loya family also received a sprinkle – not the amount of rain they wanted. Ralph and Marty Loya manage Growing with Sara Farms in Socorro, selling fruit and vegetables from their farm store Bodega Loya, as well as through Desert Spoon Food Hub in El Paso.
Their farm has lost a couple rows of squash already. Workers will have to replant the lost crops, which requires more seed and compost, Marty said.
This June, workers had to harvest crops more quickly because the food can’t sit out in the sun, Marty said. Some food will dry out. Other foods, such as okra, grow bigger and harder. Timing is more critical than ever.
Ralph Loya finds ripe tomato on the vine at Growing With Sara farm, where he employs growing practices he learned from his father and grandfather. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
It’s not just the timing of harvest. The timing of planting has also affected some crops, said Raymond Flores, farm assistant at La Semilla Food Center in Anthony, New Mexico, just west of El Paso.
Last year the first crop of corn planted in early spring didn’t do well, he said. The area experienced a streak of more than five consecutive weeks of triple-digit temperatures in June and July. Prolonged heat stress sterilized the pollen and affected the flowers, which couldn’t produce much corn.
The second planting around the end of May fared better, Flores said. The extreme heat wave had begun to subside by the time the corn stalks began flowering.
Tomato fertility is also particularly sensitive to the heat, he added. Last year’s tomato harvest came later than usual because the plants couldn’t produce until it cooled down. Workers use shade covers for the tomatoes.
Farmers in general are resilient and have already made changes because of the ongoing drought,” said Tony Marmolejo, operations development manager at Desert Spoon Food Hub. But the duration of last year’s high temperatures caught people off guard.
“When we got hit with the heat wave last year, everyone knew it wasn’t a one-time deal,” Marmolejo said. “Local farmers started making adjustments before this one came about.”
A basket of locally-grown carrots at Desert Spoon Food Hub on May 31, 2023. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Marmolejo coordinates with suppliers, mostly organic farms in El Paso and New Mexico, to place orders based on what they have available.
Desert Spoon Food Hub would usually get baby carrots around this time from a farm in Vado, New Mexico. But the carrots came earlier in the year and for a shorter time, Marmolejo said. So far, he’s seen less tomatoes and asparagus coming in. The squash and peaches aren’t coming in as early either.
“Not everybody got rain,” Marmolejo said of the recent break in weather patterns. “They have to use more water because there’s less moisture in the air, less moisture in the soil. But there’s less water supply, so it’s a no-win situation here.”
The El Paso area normally receives an inch of rain from May through June, but has only received 0.07 inches in the past two months, according to National Weather Service data.
Dwindling water supply also a concern
While most of the Ramirez farm is dedicated to pecan trees, it also grows alfalfa for livestock. But Ramirez said they stopped planting alfalfa in the last couple years because they need to save all the water for the pecan trees.
A grackle flies through an irrigated orchard at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. The water that floods the orchards attracts animals in the summer heat. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
To plan ahead, workers trim down the trees in the winter so, come summer, there’s less branches to hydrate. It’s a balancing act of quantity and quality. When water is limited, Ramirez has to be efficient if he wants his trees to produce quality pecans.
Ramirez waters his trees through flood irrigation every two to three weeks.
Letting the soil get too dry and start cracking will stress the roots and make it difficult to retain moisture, he said. Older trees have deeper roots that can tap into the underground water basin, but if it’s a dry year, the water basin level also goes down.
If he receives less water from his allotment, he reduces irrigation to just enough to keep the trees alive, but that’s not enough to have the healthiest trees, he said.
His water allotment fluctuates depending on water levels at Elephant Butte reservoir in New Mexico. The reservoir feeds the Rio Grande canal system from which he and other El Paso farmers draw their water.
Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, shows the size difference between what he says is an average-sized pecan leaf and a leaf whose growth is stunted by heat and drought, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Rain helps in ways beyond water conservation. Rainwater has a different profile of nutrients, which includes nitrates, a form of nitrogen, Ramirez explained. The rain also knocks down pests such as aphids from the leaves, he added.
“Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” Ramirez said. “I’m hoping for a good wet season, but climate is changing.”
Monsoon, when the region normally receives the majority of its rainfall, runs from June 15 to Sept. 30. Last year, El Paso received 4 inches of rain, below its historic annual average of 9 inches.
His wife, Marty, said they’re considering putting more shade structures on their produce fields as well as a new cover on their greenhouse next year. The shade creates cooler temperatures, which help the soil retain moisture.
Ramirez said he has a shallow well and has thought about installing a deeper well. But wells come with a hefty price tag and don’t address tightening water restrictions, he said.
Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, poses for a portrait in front of his farm store, where he sells homemade pecan candies and baked goods and raw, unshelled pecans, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
If drought and extreme heat waves continue, small farms with less capital and access to resources could get pushed out of the industry, Flores said.
“The best time to take action against climate change is as soon as possible, but there’s only so much we can do,” Flores said. “It’s a giant system. It’s going to take the collective effort of everyone to change.”
This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Water is vital for life in the West. In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, it’s so essential that, for generations, some communities — called acequias — have treated it as a communal resource that’s meant to be shared.
Through the project, law students work hand-in-hand with lawyers and professors to provide an estimated $300,000 worth of free legal services to the roughly 130 acequia communities in Colorado.
Not only does this pro bono work help keep a historic water distribution philosophy alive, but it gives students a chance to put theory into practice — and experience how natural resources law can affect real people.
“Water in the West is at a critical point right now, where climate scientists are predicting increased aridication in Colorado, which will likely result in less water,” said Mary Slosson (Law’24), one of the project’s student deputy directors. “It’s one thing to study these problems from a legal standpoint in the classroom, but it’s entirely another thing to talk about climate change with a small family farmer while walking their land.”
Acequia means “water bearer” in Arabic. The practice — which centers on a network of irrigation channels — originated in Northern Africa, then spread to Europe during the Middle Ages. From there, the Spanish brought the concept to the New World, where it took hold in Mexico and what is present-day New Mexico and Colorado.
But an acequia represents much more than just the physical infrastructure: It’s a way of life. In acequia communities, water is divvied up as equitably as possible — and landowners pitch in to help maintain the ditches.
This philosophy stands in stark contrast to the way water is distributed elsewhere in Colorado. The state’s water laws are based on “prior appropriation,” which means that whoever has the oldest water rights gets first dibs on water, according to Gregor MacGregor (IntlAf’12; Law’19), who participated in the project as a law student and now serves as its director. In times of scarcity, this approach — also known as “first in time, first in right”— means there may not be enough water for those with the youngest water rights, he added.
“In an acequia system, there aren’t shares — it’s one landowner, one vote,” said MacGregor. “The way they allocate water is more personal and values-driven. People on the acequia system are tied to the water and the land.”
For more than a century, Colorado’s legal framework did not recognize acequias. But in 2009, the state legislature passed a law that allowed acequias to incorporate while continuing to operate in their traditional way. To help acequias take advantage of this new recognition, Peter Nichols (MPubAd’82; Law’01) launched the project with Colorado Law professor Sarah Krakoff in 2012.
“The fact that we have this population that was more or less ignored for 150 years is a huge environmental justice issue,” said MacGregor. “This is a great way to use our very particular set of skills to right the wrongs of the past in a very meaningful way that empowers these communities to chart their own future.”
Law students help acequia communities by drafting bylaws and governance documents, representing them in water court and negotiating the sale of water rights. They also conduct extensive research to help acequias incorporate, as they did with the historic Montez Ditch in San Luis, Colorado.
“The Acequia Project has become part of our community,” said Charlie Jaquez, a former Montez Ditch commissioner whose ancestors were some of the original settlers of San Luis in 1851. “They have been very, very helpful — and very generous. Especially in areas like Conejos and Costilla counties, these communities just do not have a whole lot of money. The ditch would’ve just kept on going the way we did before, decade after decade, but now it’s been placed on solid legal footing.”
The Vinton stretch of the Rio Grande just north of El Paso at Vinton Road and Doniphan Drive on May 23, 2022. The river below Elephant Butte Reservoir in Southern New Mexico through Far West Texas is dry most months of the year, only running during irrigation season. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM websilte (Danielle Prokop):
June 21, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the federal government to block the deal Texas and New Mexico proposed to end a decade of litigation over Rio Grande water.
The narrow 5-4 decision made Friday morning raises the question if the states and the federal government will go back to the negotiation table, or fight it out in the courtroom.
The order stated that the 2022 deal hammered out between New Mexico, Colorado and Texas to measure water deliveries at El Paso, and would officially allocate the river in southern New Mexico and far west Texas at a 57-43 split, and end a decades long dispute between the states over the Rio Grande.
The federal government argued that the proposed deal – called a consent decree – unfairly imposed conditions it did not consent to, and that it had the authority to object to the deal, pointing to treaty obligations to deliver water to Mexico, and contracts with two regional irrigation districts.
Justice Michael Melloy, a federal appeals judge overseeing the case as special master, recommended the U.S. Supreme Court approve the deal, over the federal government’s objections.
The crux of the ruling was determining if the federal government could object to the deal, even if it was not a signatory on the Rio Grande Compact, the 85-year old legal agreement dividing the river.
In the majority decision, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court finds the states’ deal unfairly excluded the “unique federal interests.”
“We cannot now allow Texas and New Mexico to leave the United States up the river without a paddle. Because the consent decree would dispose of the United States’ Compact claims without its consent,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson pointed to the court’s prior recognition that the federal government had valid claims under the 1939 Rio Grande Compact when allowing them to intervene as a party in 2018.
“Our 2018 decision leads inexorably to the same conclusion today: The United States has its own, uniquely federal claims under the Compact. If it did not, one might wonder why we permitted the Federal Government to intervene in the first place,” Jackson wrote.
Justices John Roberts,Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined Jackson in the majority.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his dissent, wrote the court should have followed the recommendation of the Special Master to approve the deal, but instead, overturned years of water law precedents.
“The Court’s decision is inconsistent with how original jurisdiction cases normally proceed. It defies 100 years of this Court’s water law jurisprudence,” he said.
Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett joined Gorsuch in dissent.
State Engineer Mike Hamman, New Mexico’s top water official, who retires at the end of June, said in a statement he was disappointed in the court’s decision.
“We need to keep working to make the aquifers in the Lower Rio Grande region sustainable, and lasting solutions are more likely to come from parties working together than from continued litigation,” he said in a written statement.
Rio Grande water stored in Elephant Butte and Caballo resevoirs is released downstream to southern New Mexico and Texas on June 1, 2022. (Photo by Diana Cervantes by Source NM)
The original lawsuit was brought in 2013 by Texas. In the complaint, Texas alleged New Mexico’s groundwater pumping below Elephant Butte reservoir was taking Rio Grande water owed to Texas under the 1939 compact.
With another hot summer looming, Mexico is behind on its water deliveries to the United States, leading to water cutbacks in South Texas. A little-known federal agency has hit a roadblock in its efforts to get Mexico to comply.
NOTE: According to Robert Salmon Mexico is not behind in deliveries. He is a former Commissioner of the International Boudary Waters Commission and was speaking at last week’s Getches-Wilkinson/Water and Tribes Initiative Colorado River Conference in Boulder, Colorado.
This story was reported with a grant from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
EL PASO—Maria-Elena Giner faced a room full of farmers, irrigation managers and residents in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas on April 2.
The local agricultural community was reeling. Reservoirs on the Rio Grande were near record lows and the state had already warned that water cutbacks would be necessary. The last sugar mill in the region closed in February, citing the lack of water.
But Mexico still wasn’t sending water to the U.S. from its Rio Grande tributaries, as a 1944 treaty requires the country to do in five-year intervals.
“We haven’t gotten any rains or significant inflows,” said Giner, the commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission. “It’s not looking good.”
The IBWC, based in El Paso, implements the boundary and water treaties between the two countries. Giner’s team had spent 2023 working to reach an agreement with Mexico to ensure more reliable water deliveries on the Rio Grande. In December, she was confident the U.S. and Mexico would sign a new agreement, known as a minute. But at the final hour Mexico declined to sign.
The impasse left farmers and communities in the Rio Grande Valley facing down another hot summer with limited water supplies. The state of Texas and members of Congress joined the supplications to Mexico: Start sending the water you owe. But with the political opposition in Mexico calling for the water treaty to be renegotiated—and presidential elections approaching in June—Mexican officials waited.
Immigration, trade and drug trafficking dominate much of the U.S. diplomatic agenda with Mexico. But in recent months water has become a more urgent topic, rising to the “upper echelons of the Department of State,” in Giner’s words. The 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs water distribution on both the Rio Grande and Colorado River. Drought, climate change and politics are increasing tensions over treaty compliance.
As of May 20, United States ownership of water at the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs was at 20.1 percent of normal conservation capacity. South Texas farmers and municipalities are figuring out how to make do with less this summer.
Texas Republican Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and members of both parties in the House are pushing for the State Department to withhold funds for Mexico.
Giner, who herself grew up between the two countries in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, remains convinced the neighboring nations can work out their differences over an 80-year-old treaty to manage shared rivers.
“[This minute is] the tool that we have at the IBWC,” Giner said during the April meeting. “Mexico is a sovereign country. And our tool is influence.”
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Rio Grande Valley Farmers Fear More Losses
The Rio Grande starts its 1,900-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico high in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. But the water that flows through the Texas Rio Grande Valley mostly originates in tributaries in Mexico. The most important is the Rio Conchos that flows from the Sierra Tarahumara through the agricultural heart of Chihuahua before joining the Rio Grande at Presidio, Texas.
The 1944 water treaty commits the U.S. to send Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year. On the Rio Grande, Mexico is expected to send an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water from the Mexican tributaries each year over a five-year cycle for a total of 1.75 million acre-feet. This water flows to the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs, which store water for the farms and communities of the Rio Grande Valley and the downstream Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León.
The last five-year cycle ended in conflict in 2020, with farmers in Chihuahua protesting water deliveries to the U.S. In a last-minute deal, known as minute 325, Mexico agreed to transfer water stored at the international reservoirs to the U.S. to end the cycle without a deficit.
The current cycle ends on October 25, 2025. Well into the fourth year, Mexico has sent less than 400,000 acre feet of water. At this rate it is unlikely that Mexico can meet its obligations.The main reservoirs on the Rio Conchos are at low levels, with La Boquilla at 28 percent capacity and Francisco Madero at 25.8 percent, as of May 16. The entire state of Chihuahua is currently in a drought.
With irregular water deliveries hampering agricultural production, the last sugar mill in Texas, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, closed for good in February.
“I just don’t see a means by which sufficient water could be delivered right now in time to save the agricultural production for this year,” said Carlos Rubinstein, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Rio Grande watermaster and consultant. “So the water is going to have to come from Mother Nature this year, which is a bad spot to be in.”
Towns and cities in the Rio Grande Valley that rely on the river for their water could also face shortages this year. Municipalities may be forced to buy additional water or speed up plans to develop alternative water supplies, like desalination.
The Delta Lake Irrigation District diverts water to municipalities including Raymondville and Lyford. Water for these communities is conveyed through irrigation canals; if there is no irrigation water the municipal water can’t move through the canals.
“We’re at a point where within the next 60 days if we don’t get substantial rainfall or Mexico releases some water… I don’t know what my municipalities that I deliver water to are going to have to do,” said general manager Troy Allen in early May.
“We’ve already lost the sugar industry in the Rio Grande Valley,” Allen said. He worries the citrus industry will be next. “That’s my big fear.”
Negotiations Advance Then Falter in 2023
State and federal officials tried to avoid this.
Minute 325, signed by the U.S. and Mexico in October 2020, set the goal of signing a new minute by December 2023 to increase “reliability and predictability” in Rio Grande water deliveries.
The Rio Grande Minute Working Group formed in 2022 with representatives from IBWC, the TCEQ, the Department of State, Mexico’s IBWC, known as CILA, and Mexico’s National Water Commission, known as CONAGUA.
In Mexico, water is federal property. But once that same water is delivered to the U.S. in the international reservoirs, it falls under the purview of the state of Texas. TCEQ’s Rio Grande Watermaster then manages deliveries to irrigation districts and other users. While IBWC handles direct negotiations with Mexico, the agency must work closely with TCEQ.
Giner wrote to TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka, a member of the working group, in January 2023. She wrote in an email, provided by TCEQ in a records request, that she looked forward to “achieving a minute signing that will lead to predictability and reliability in the Rio Grande.”
TCEQ has urged IWBC to do more, and political tensions on the border have bled into the water dispute. “IBWC must hold Mexico accountable,” wrote the director of the agency’s Office of Water at the end of January 2023.
In late June 2023, IBWC took issue when Texas Governor Gregg Abbott ordered floating buoys designed to stop migrants to be installed in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. IBWC denounced the move, saying they were not consulted and the buoys could violate treaty agreements. Tensions with Mexico flared; Mexico’s top diplomat lodged a complaint with the U.S. government, warning the buoys violated the 1944 treaty and were possibly in Mexican territory. The U.S. Department of Justice later sued Texas. (That case is now in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On July 18, 2023 IBWC foreign affairs officer Sally Spener notified TCEQ that Mexican officials had postponed a meeting because of the incident, according to emails obtained by Inside Climate News.
“We were able to continue our negotiations through all of that last year,” Spener said in a May 2024 interview, referring to the buoy controversy. “But it was a distraction.”
Spener said by the second half of 2023, the working group put “concepts on paper” and drafted a minute laying out what the two countries agreed on.
On December 5, the IBWC presented details of the draft minute to stakeholders in the Rio Grande Valley. Irrigation districts and farmers in the valley don’t always agree with the federal government’s approach to working with Mexico, so their buy-in was important. Commissioner Giner explained how key points in the minute would resolve long-standing disagreements about the treaty.
Some irrigation districts and politicians in Chihuahua argue that Mexico should only allocate “wild water,” or water that overflows the country’s domestic dams, to fulfill the treaty. The draft minute would reinforce the importance of Mexico releasing water from its domestic reservoirs, settling that debate.
Mexico’s San Juan and Alamo Rivers have previously been used to supplement the five tributaries named in the treaty. The draft minute affirmed that, when the U.S. agrees, Mexico could allot water from these rivers to meet its obligations.
The draft also included a new “projects” working group that would focus on increasing water conservation in the drought-impacted watershed. A separate “environment” working group would focus on the Big Bend and increasing water flow in an area that runs dry much of the year.
“There was some of it that we didn’t agree with, but it was a start,” said Troy Allen of the Delta Lake Irrigation District of the draft minute. “[Commissioner Giner] is very transparent and I think she is really trying her best to help us out.”
IBWC was poised to sign the minute in December. Suddenly Mexican federal officials backtracked, saying they needed to “undertake additional domestic consultations,” according to Spener. Until those consultations were complete, Mexico wouldn’t sign the minute.
Not everyone in Mexico wanted the new agreement. The heart of that opposition lies in Chihuahua.
Mexican Opposition Politicians Protest Water Deliveries
Mexican presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez took the stage in Camargo, Chihuahua, on April 14. She spoke just a few miles from La Boquilla, where Mexican farmers protested water deliveries to the United States in 2020.
Those same farmers were out in force for Gálvez, who is backed by Mexico’s three main opposition parties, the PAN, PRI and PRD. Her opponent from the MORENA party, Claudia Sheinbaum, is the successor to incumbent president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In 2020, López Obrador sent the National Guard to the La Boquilla reservoir in anticipation of opening the floodgates to send water north. Protesters pushed out the National Guard and a protester was killed in the confrontations.
The Boquilla Dam in Boquilla, Chihuahua is photographed with a drone in September 2023. The dam was built at the beginning of the twentieth century. A view of the La Boquilla Dam along the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, Mexico. Credit: Omar Ornelas
Gálvez opened her speech this spring discussing water. “We are in the worst drought in many years,” she said, before launching into criticisms of MORENA’s agricultural policies.
“The treaty payment to the United States in 2025 has to be renegotiated,” she said to cheers. “I promise I will defend the water of Chihuahua.”
Chihuahua governor María Eugenia Campos Galván also opposes water deliveries. Representing the PAN, Campos Galván is one of the few opposition governors in Mexico. For her, defending the water of Chihuahua means challenging the federal officials who send water to the United States.
Chihuahua Congressman Salvador Alcántar, also of the PAN, was instrumental in the 2020 protests. He is steadfast that the water stored at the reservoirs along the Rio Conchos should not be sent to the United States.
“We are in an extreme drought in Mexico. Right now it will be difficult to comply with the commitments in the treaty,” he said in an interview in Spanish. “No one is obligated to give what they don’t have.”
Texas and IBWC officials acknowledge that Mexico’s upcoming presidential election on June 2 cast a shadow over the minute negotiations. Sheinbaum is heavily favored to win. But the federal government is not expected to take action on the treaty or water deliveries in the interim.
“We continue to push for the minute,” said IBWC’s Spener. “And even without the minute [Mexico] can make water deliveries.”
CONAGUA, which manages water allocations on the Rio Conchos, did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.
Bad Weather and Bad Politics
Mexico alone doesn’t shoulder the blame for water shortages this year. A prolonged drought and climate change are pummeling the Rio Grande watershed and Mexican tributaries alike. Extreme heat is already taking a toll on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley. These trends are only expected to continue.
Temperatures throughout the Rio Grande basin are projected to increase by four to 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Higher temperatures decrease snow accumulation and snow melt. More water evaporates from reservoirs as temperatures warm.
The Rio Grande meanders through a balmy former wetland in Cameron County, Texas, as it nears the Gulf of Mexico, pictured in July 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
Drought and rising temperatures are also impacting the Conchos basin in Mexico. Annual runoff in the Conchos basin could decline by up to 25 percent by 2050 because of changes in precipitation and higher temperatures, according to the 2015 Mexico Water Vulnerability Atlas. A study in the Journal of Climate this year projected that Chihuahua is likely to “experience strong drying during the spring and summer months” this century.
Texas politicians are pressuring the Biden administration to take more decisive action to help the state’s farmers. On May 10, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, along with eight representatives, including Republicans Monica De La Cruz and Tony Gonzales and Democrats Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar, sent a letter urging the both the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on State and Foreign Operations to withhold designated funds from Mexico until the country “meets its obligations to resolve the ongoing water dispute.”
López Obrador spoke to the treaty on May 15 during his daily press conference. He said Mexico does not have a date to make a decision. “We support this compact,” he said. “We agree it shouldn’t be modified and we have a very good relationship [with the United States]. But as the weather gets hot and there are elections coming up, all these issues come to light.”
The Department of State referred questions about the treaty negotiations to IBWC.
Spener of the IBWC said they continue to encourage Mexico to deliver water. The minute working group held its most recent meeting in April in El Paso.
TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka wrote to Commissioner Giner on April 26, concerned that Mexico continued to allocate water to its irrigation districts without planning how to send water to Texas. He also opposed Mexico arguing that extraordinary drought prevented the country from complying with the treaty. “We are deeply concerned about these claims,” he wrote.
Irrigation districts in the Rio Grande Valley worry about trade-offs when the U.S. agrees to alternative measures—beyond the five tributaries named in the treaty—for Mexico to deliver the water it owes. Anthony Stambaugh, general manager of the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2., said Mexico “needs to be caught up first,” before the U.S. offers more concessions.
When the treaty clock runs out on October 25, 2025, both the U.S. and Mexico will have entered new presidential administrations. The incoming U.S. president will also appoint the IBWC commissioner. The tone of binational negotiations could change dramatically.
Mexicans go to the polls on June 2. Water issues, from Chihuahua to Mexico City, have taken on greater importance during the campaign. Water shortages are spreading to more neighborhoods in Mexico City as supplies dip. Frontrunner Sheinbaum is largely expected to continue her predecessor’s policies if elected. She has committed to making water management a priority and would consider a revision of the National Water Law. Meanwhile, her opponent Gálvez has said, if elected, she would modernize agriculture to make more efficient use of water.
Six months later, the United States will hold its presidential election. Water and the 1944 treaty are hardly top campaign issues north of the border. But, if elected, Republican candidate Donald Trump would likely take a more confrontational approach in his dealings with Mexico. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has invested heavily in water conservation in Western states, including in the Colorado River Basin and the Rio Grande. These investments, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, would likely continue if Biden is re-elected.
In the Rio Grande Valley, the immediate concern is how to get through a dry, hot summer with less water to go around. As water supplies dwindle—and the political divide widens—the immediate needs to secure water will take precedent.
Carlos Rubinstein, the former TCEQ watermaster, said resolving the root issues of water supplies on the Rio Grande requires continuous work, not just during the bad years.
“It’s bad weather and it’s bad politics,” he said. “So that’s a really tough place to be.”
This story was produced by Inside Climate News, in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Southwestern Colorado is left with 6% of its peak snowpack earlier than usual this season in part because of a rare, sudden and large melt in late April.
Snow that gathers in Colorado’s mountains is a key water source for the state, and a fast, early spring runoff can mean less water for farmers, ranchers, ecosystems and others in late summer. While the snow in northern Colorado is just starting to melt, southern river basins saw their largest, early snowpack drop-off this season, compared to historical data.
For Ken Curtis, the only reason irrigators in Dolores and Montezuma counties haven’t been short on water for their farms and ranches is because the area’s reservoir, McPhee Reservoir, had water supplies left over from the above-average year in 2023.
“Because of the carryover, the impacts aren’t quite that crazy bad,” said Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District. “If we hadn’t had that carryover, it would have been a terrible year.”
A terrible year like 2021, he added, when many irrigators who depend on water from McPhee only received 10% of their normal water supply.
The snowpack in the southwestern San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan combined basin peaked at about 18 inches April 2, then plummeted by 8 inches during the last half of April. It was the largest 14-day loss of snowpack before the end of April in this basin since the start of data collection in the 1980s, according to the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.
The basin still held onto 1.1 inches of snow-water equivalent, the amount of liquid water in snow, as of Wednesday. Typically, the snowpack is about twice as high in late May, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“The Rio Grande and the southwest basins, the snow is pretty much gone, and it’s going to be gone within days to a week at this point,” said Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist and CSU professor.
The Upper Rio Grande Basin, which spans the central-southern part of the state including the San Luis Valley, had 0.1 inch of snow-water equivalent as of Wednesday, much less than its norm for late May, which is about 1.5 inches.
Eastern and northern basins, like the South Platte Basin which includes parts of Denver, have held onto their snowpack for slightly longer than usual. These basins have above-average snowpack for late May, ranging from 119% to 162% of the historic norm, as of Wednesday [May 29, 2024].
The April decline in the southwest was caused by warm and dry conditions and sublimation, when snow and ice change into water vapor in the atmosphere without first melting into liquid water. Dust that darkens snow and speeds snowmelt also played a role, Schumacher said.
The spring runoff is a little faster than usual in the southern basins, but it’s within the realm of normal, said Brian Domonkos, snow survey supervisor for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which manages snow-measurement stations around the state.
“What we’re seeing right now is not something that I would be alarmed about,” Domonkos said.
Spring snowfall, storms and cooler temperatures have slowed the speed of snowmelt in some areas as well, he said.
In Durango, the Animas River’s flows were around 2,000 cubic feet per second Wednesday, lower than the late-May norm of 2,990 cfs.
When it comes to recreation, the lower flows might actually be a boon, said Ashleigh Tucker, who is planning a river sports event, Animas River Days, scheduled for June 1 and 2. Some races require participants to pass through hanging gates, moving both upstream and downstream through a whitewater park, she said.
“If the water’s super high, it makes it a lot harder to do. So as far as our events go, it’s a good level,” she said. “But there’s not much snow left, so that means we won’t really have much left for the rest of the year, which is kind of a bummer.”
She doesn’t expect the river’s slightly lower flows to impact attendance either: Only years with really low flows, about 1,000 cfs, have discouraged people from floating the Animas, she said.
Warm and dry conditions are likely to continue through June, then weather watchers will turn their gaze to the sky in July to watch for the monsoon season.
In the meantime, Curtis is watching inflow forecasts for McPhee Reservoir. The runoff has been lower than average so far, even after an average snowpack season, he said.
That means there might not be as much water left to carry over into 2025.
“The monsoons will have the next impact,” he said. “If you see everyone going on fire restrictions, you know the monsoons haven’t shown up.”
ALAMOSA, COLORADO – Meandering toward Boulder for this week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River conference, I stopped this evening in Alamosa, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley. I love the drive up the back way, through the San Luis Valley and into the heart of the Rockies, and I split it up into a couple of days this year to get some bike riding in.
Long western drives have always been a part of my process, quality thinking time, and the San Luis Valley is a great writing prompt. It’s broad, high, pan flat, and a really good place to grow alfalfa and potatoes. (There’s a flatbed of alfalfa in the Walmart parking lot next to my motel, headed for a dairy somewhere – future burgers and pizza cheese.)
When the railroad and the Mormons arrived in the 1800s, they starting growing a lot of stuff to export, reducing the flow in the Rio Grande which, through a series of knock-on effects, led us in central New Mexico to import Colorado River water via the San Juan-Chama Project, which is why I’m headed to Boulder. For want of a nail….
FOUNDATIONS OF THE LAW OF THE RIVER: SHAKY
It’s the San Juan-Chama linkage – critical to Albuquerque’s water supply – that got me started working on Colorado River issues nearly 20 years ago, which led to a couple of books (Water is For Fighting Over, Science be Dammed) a growing list of academic publications, and this crazy blog, which I’m happy to report Emily Guerin called “influential”! The second book was a collaboration with Eric Kuhn, and during the years working at it we more than once met up at the Holiday Inn Express in Alamosa, midway between his home in Glenwood Springs and mine in Albuquerque, holed up in the breakfast area working through chapters. Is it possible to have fond memories of a Holiday Inn Express breakfast area? I do.
The collaboration continues, joined by my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara, with a couple of new papers digging into the history of the development of the Upper Colorado River Compact and its implications for 21st century river management. A preprint of the first of the two papers, a deep dive into the negotiation history, went up over the weekend and I already blogged about it.
With the obligatory shovels in pre-softened dirt, a group of political leaders from the Navajo Nation, New Mexico state and local government, and water agencies this morning (Wed. 5/15/2024) formally inaugurated a new pipeline being built to connect the Navajo community of To’Hajiilee to the 3.5 million gallon reservoir in the picture – clean, piped water to a community that now has one working well and water so bad no one drinks it.
One of the oldtimers who’d been working on it for more than two decades walked up to me and said, “This is an impossible project.”
What he meant was that the project had overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the interactions between a welter of government agencies with overlapping jurisdictions and sometimes incompatible responsibilities.
I went to the event wearing two hats – as a member of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s Technical Customer Advisory Committee, and on behalf of the Utton Center, which has a long history of working on Native American water stuff. (I was literally wearing my ABCWUA gimme cap, I don’t have an Utton one.)
To’Hajiilee, 35-ish miles west of Albuquerque, has six water wells. Five have already failed. The sixth is regularly off line. When it’s down, they have to shut down school and the clinic. When it’s working, the water is awful.
The vision statement from the Universal Access to Clean Water For Tribal Communities project is simple: “Every Native American has the right to clean, safe, affordable water in the home ensuring a minimum quality of life.”
In this 1999 book Development as Freedom, the Nobel laureate economist and moral philosopher Amartya Sen explains freedoms as “the capabilities that a person has, that is, the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value.”
“Rights” are tricky political terrain, because they’re often framed in negative terms – the absence of coercion or interference from others, particularly the state. But Sen’s making an affirmative argument here. It is not enough for the collective to simply get out of the individual’s way. The collective has an affirmative moral obligation to create the conditions under which the individual can flourish – to pursue that which they “have reason to value,” to repeat Sen. That’s sorta what my friends at the Universal Access project are saying with their vision statement.
At the urging of a colleague, I’ve been reading Sen lately in an effort to make sense of the moral underpinnings of the collective choices we face as we cope with the reality of less water. (For those familiar with Sen, know that I am not reading the mathy parts – they’re impenetrable!)
THE PLUMBING – PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL
The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility’s 7W reservoir, the tan thing in the picture, sits on high ground midway between Albuquerque and To’Hajiilee, a perfect water source for the community. In eighteen months under the current construction schedule, we’ll have a 7 mile pipe from here to there.
If the tally in my notes is correct (don’t hold me to this, I’m not a real journalist any more), it’s a ~$20 million project, with a mix of federal, state, and Navajo Nation funding.
The actual water in the pipes is the result of a fascinating agreement between the Navajo Nation and the Jicarilla Apache Nation in norther New Mexico. The Navajo Nation will lease Jicarailla water, which will be wheeled down the San Juan River, into the Rio Grande, and then diverted by the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, treated, and pumped up to 7W.
THE STRUGGLES TO GET THIS DONE
Former Bernalillo County Commissioner Debbie O’Malley, speaking at the groundbreaking, told the story of the bare-knuckle politics it took to overcome the intransigence of a landowner that stood in the way of the project – Western Albuquerque Land Holdings. And for sure, O’Malley and the group she worked with deserve a ton of credit for the use of their knuckles at a critical point in the struggle to get the pipeline built.
But more important is the community of To’Hajiilee itself, people like Mark Begay, my colleague on the Albuquerque water utility’s Technical Customer Advisory Committee. For decades, Begay and the other leaders in To’Hajiilee acted on behalf of their community to pursue “that which they had reason to value” – water!
This is about the community’s own collective agency, “the result of collective processes and collective actions in which people’s interactions shape their common destiny.” (Oscar Garza-Vázquez)
It was a joy to share the celebration of their success. I’ll be back in 18 months when they open the taps.
Two key takeaways from Monday’s (May 13, 2024) Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board meeting:
El Vado Dam, crucial for managing irrigation, municipal, and environmental water through New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande valley, will be out of service indefinitely – for many, many years.
The vague structure of alternative storage options, using other existing dams, is beginning to take shape.
El Vado, built in the 1930s on the Rio Chama, has been out of service since 2022 for rehabilitation work by the US Bureau of Reclamation’s dam safety program. Challenges in fixing it have sent Reclamation’s engineering team back to the drawing boards. Work was supposed to be done by 2025. It’s now clear that the dam will be out of service for the foreseeable future.
Without the ability to store some of each year’s spring runoff for use in late summer and fall, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is at the mercy of summer rains, without which it will dwindle to near nothing every year unless or until El Vado is fixed or we sort out alternative storage arrangements.
More on this part – the status of trying to fix El Vado – in a separate post to come later (once I write it I’ll add a link here), because the more important bits at Monday’s meeting involved the first cagey public discussions about what we will do in the meantime.
EXPLORING WATER STORAGE ALTERNATIVES FOR THE MIDDLE RIO GRANDE
The always quotable Socorro farmer and MRGCD board member Glen Duggins offered a simple plea: “Just give us somewhere to park our water.”
Much of Monday’s discussion – sometimes explicit, sometimes in coded language – focused on this question.
If you look at the monthly reservoir storage graphic from Reclamation printed as a handout for Monday’s meeting (printed as a handout for every meeting), you’ll see there are two other reservoirs flanking El Vado upstream and downstream, and they have enough empty space in them to make up for most, if not all, of El Vado’s now unusable ~180,000 acre feet of capacity.
Abiquiu Reservoir currently has ~100,000 acre feet of available storage space
Heron Reservoir has ~300,000 acre feet of available storage space
But the details of using them for this new purpose, storing Middle Valley irrigation and environmental water, which is different than the purposes for which they were built, are staggeringly tricky.
Abiquiu
Abiquiu Reservoir, built in the 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Rio Chama as part of a massive federally funded project to protect the Middle Rio Grande Valley from flooding, is huge.
In 1981, Congress authorized a change in use to allow imported San Juan-Chama water to be stored in Abiquiu – up to 200,000 acre feet. (It requires an act of Congress.) Subsequent to that, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority got a storage permit from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer (Storage requires a state permit, I hope you can see what I’m doing with the parentheticals.) to store its SJC water in Abiquiu. Then in 2020 another act of Congress did something I’m a bit confused about that allowed native water storage, not just San Juan-Chama water, and maybe more than the 200,000 acre feet, I think (Note: Another act of Congress required.) And then the Army Corps of Engineers had to rewrite its water operations manual, which nearly four years later is just now being completed. (It requires not only an act of Congress to change the purpose of use at Abiquiu, but also a lengthy Corps process to rewrite its rules.)
My Utton Center colleagues are far smarter than I about these institutional nuances – Utton has long worked on the legal plumbing – but I wasn’t about to wake them up at 6 in the morning, so you’re stuck with me.
So yes, there is space in Abiquiu for us to park our water. But the rules tangle is of Gordian proportions.
Heron
Upstream, Heron Reservoir sits on a tributary to the Chama, built in the 1970s to store water imported beneath the continental divide from three Colorado River headwaters streams. It seems ill-suited for storing Rio Grande water.
It currently holds ~100,000 acre feet of imported San Juan-Chama project water, with room for another ~300,000 acre feet. (Note bene: I’m rounding all the numbers off here to one or a few significant digits.) The trick here is to hold the San Juan-Chama water in Heron and then do a series of carryover accounting and maybe native water swaps that I can’t begin to understand, let alone explain, in order to kinda sorta use Heron as well.
THE NEGOTIATIONS
One of the reasons the discussions about all of this at yesterday’s board meeting were kinda vague is that the three parties crucial to cutting the Gordian tangle – MRGCD, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority – are in negotiations about what sort of parenthetical agreements might be needed to make it all work.
They need space to sort out thorny incentive problems – the interests of the municipal water utility to protect and manage its own municipal supply will be key. In this regard alone, it my be in the water utility’s best interests to help. Low late summer river flows, which are inevitable without storage, force the utility to switch to groundwater pumping to get water to my tap. As a result, the aquifer recovery, of which we are rightly proud in Albuquerque, has stalled.
Also key will be the broader community interests of flowing ditches and a flowing river, which while not directly related to ABCWUA’s water supply nevertheless may be things the water utility’s board members – city councilors and county commissioners – care about.
The typically blunt Duggins was unusually cryptic at Monday’s meeting, but I infer this is what he was talking about when he said: “We’re neighbors. I don’t understand why it would take a year or two to get papers signed.”
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland today announced a $60 million investment from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for water conservation and drought resilience in the Rio Grande Basin. These resources will ensure greater climate resiliency and water security for communities below Elephant Butte Reservoir and into West Texas. Secretary Haaland made the announcement in Albuquerque following a briefing on the Rio Grande Project with state and local officials, irrigators, and other partners.
Through cooperative agreements with the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Bureau of Reclamation will work with the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and El Paso County Water Improvement District #1, the International Boundary and Water Commission, and local stakeholders to develop supplemental water projects or programs to benefit Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project and endangered species in the basin. The water savings from the proposed projects are anticipated to be in the tens of thousands of acre-feet per year.
“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to making communities more resilient to the impacts of climate change, including the Rio Grande basin and the people, wildlife and economies that rely on it,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “We continue to make smart investments through President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to safeguard water resources, invest in innovative water conservation strategies and increase overall water efficiency throughout the West.”
Stretching over 1,200 miles, the Rio Grande provides water supplies for agricultural food production as well as renewable drinking water to fast-growing cities and municipalities throughout New Mexico and Texas. The river supports eight federally recognized Tribes, habitat for migrating birds and other species, and a robust and highly profitable tourism and outdoor recreation industry. Despite improved hydrology in recent months, a historic 23-year drought has led to record low water levels throughout the basin. The Biden-Harris administration continues to deliver historic resources to address ongoing drought and strengthen water security across the region now and into the future.
Today’s announcement comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $500 million for water management and conservation efforts in areas outside the Colorado River Basin experiencing similar levels of long-term drought. Funding for other basins will be announced through the summer and fall. The Biden-Harris administration has already invested almost $59 million in the Rio Grande Basin, including more than $30 million for aging infrastructure repairs to improve water supplies and water delivery systems in the Rio Grande and Middle Rio Grande Projects through Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding.
“The Rio Grande, like many rivers in the West, has struggled with the impacts of severe drought for decades,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “This funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda gives Reclamation and our partners the ability to explore options for stormwater capture and other activities to ease the impacts of climate change.”
Southwestern Willow flycatcher
On the Rio Grande, this funding will help efforts to increase storage at existing sediment dams and new off-channel storage to capture stormwater. This water will be used to recharge the aquifer, reduce irrigation demands and improve and create riparian wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species like the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo and Southwest Willow Flycatcher. Other projects will improve irrigation infrastructure efficiency and fund forbearance and fallowing programs.
Adult Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Photo: Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren/Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)
Prolonged drought within the project area and heavy regional reliance on groundwater pumping has caused a reduction in surface water supply, resulting in a decrease in project efficiency and loss of wildlife habitat.
Implementation of these programs and projects will benefit Rio Grande Project farmers, residents within the counties of Doña Ana and Sierra in New Mexico, and El Paso County in Texas, as well as the Republic of Mexico. These communities are identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged and vulnerable to climate change based on the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
As we’ve covered in previousposts, the peak snowpack in Colorado’s mountains generally looked pretty decent this year, with the amount of water stored in the snow peaking pretty close to the long-term average in most areas. However, in the southern mountains, it’s been another year where the melt has happened a lot faster than it typically has in the past.
Snow water equivalent in Colorado’s mountains with respect to the 1991-2020 median value, on (left) April 6, 2024, and (right) May 6, 2024. Source: USDA NRCS Interactive Map.
As of early April (left image above), all basins in Colorado had above average snow water equivalent, as measured by the SNOTEL network. But a month later (right image), the picture is quite different. The northern basins still look good, with a string of April snowstorms adding to the snowpack there. But southern Colorado largely missed those storms, and warm, sunny conditions, assisted by layers of dust on snow, really accelerated the melt. Cooler conditions this week will slow down the melt a bit, and a storm this weekend will add some much-needed moisture. But once the snow itself gets warmer than 32°F, it’s hard to slow the melt too much. The Rio Grande basin now only has half of the snowpack it typically does on May 6.
The time series graph for the combined San Miguel, Dolores, Animas, and San Juan river basins in the southwest corner of Colorado illustrates this nicely:
Time series of snow water equivalent in the combined San Miguel, Dolores, Animas, and San Juan basins, through May 6, 2024, as measured by the SNOTEL network. Source: NRCS Colorado Snow Survey.
The trace for 2024 reached essentially an average peak, and right on time: the peak was 18.1″ of SWE on April 2, compared to an average peak of 18.6″ on April 1. It also stayed near that peak for about another 10 days, but then the melting progressed extremely quickly. In fact, it was the largest 14-day loss of SWE before the end of April in this basin since the start of SNOTEL data in the 1980s.
Before going into those numbers, a quick note on snowpack melt rates. In absolute terms, the fastest melts come in years when there are big snowpacks that linger late into May or early June, like 2019. Eventually that snow can’t stand up to the summer sun, and SWE goes away at a very fast rate. But in years like 2024, what we’re interested in is the snow melting quickly, and early.
So here, we’ll look at the largest two-week declines in SWE prior to the end of April, and we see that the combined southwest river basins lost over 8″ of snowpack from April 12-26 this year. That much melt so early hasn’t been observed before. The Upper Rio Grande and Arkansas basins also saw their largest 14-day SWE declines prior to April 30.
Table showing the largest 14-day declines in SWE prior to April 30 at the SNOTEL stations in the San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan; Upper Rio Grande; and Arkansas basins. Data source: NRCS Snow Survey.
If you look on the bright side, you can’t get rapid melts like this without a good snowpack to begin with. At least, unlike some really bad drought years, the water was there in the first place! But early melts have big implications for the timing of water availability. It means higher-than-normal streamflows in May, but then much lower streamflows later during the heat of summer, when the water is really needed, especially by those who don’t have access to water stored in reservoirs. And the overall water availability situation for this spring and summer isn’t looking great in southern Colorado, with the latest CBRFC forecast projecting only 90% of average flow into Blue Mesa Reservoir, 74% of average on the Animas, and 80% of average into Lake Powell.
And unfortunately, years like this have been getting more common, and that trend is expected to continue as the climate warms. These changes are addressed in detail in the water chapter of Climate Change in Colorado, so dive in to that for more details. But in general, the changes observed up to this point have been toward modest declines in peak snowpack, but robust trends toward earlier melting, and these changes have been most acute in southern Colorado. For the future, there is still considerable uncertainty about what will happen to winter precipitation: some climate projections show more winter snow, others less. But every one of them shows a shift toward earlier snowmelt, and earlier peak streamflow on the Colorado River, meaning changes to when and where our water supply is available. In other words, we might need to get used to the snowpack looking pretty good in the southern mountains in March, but being disappointed in the numbers when May comes around.
The Rio Grande flowing on a windy day. Winds in neighboring San Juans have been contributing to a quick snowmelt. Snowpack is down to 45 percent, meaning we should see peak streamflows on the Upper Rio Grande mid-Mayish or 2-3 weeks earlier than normal. #SanLuisValley#Coloradopic.twitter.com/YC4RCoPZjN
Snowmelt in the Rio Grande headwaters as of May 2, 2024, courtesy NRCS
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
April 29, 2024
A recent rapid warmup has brought high flows to the Rio Grande through New Mexico. But with a modest snowpack sitting in the mountains to the north, that means we should expect the early rise to be followed by an early drop.
Members of the Inkstain Rio Grande Rapid Response Team (IRGRRT) were busy over the weekend monitoring the river. (“Monitoring the river” actually just means “going for walks, bike rides, and boating the river” like we do nearly every weekend, but “monitoring the river” and “Rio Grande Rapid Response Team” sound cooler and more official than a bunch of river nerds goofing.)
Rio Grande, up out of the main channel, at the Rio Bravo Bridge in Albuquerque South Valley. Photo credit: John Fleck/InkStain
IRGRRT team members saw enough water through the Albuquerque reach to float over many of the sandbars, and flows in some of the overbank shallows beyond the main river channel. Those overbank flows are a mixed bag – important for ecological system function, less helpful for meeting Rio Grande Compact deliveries to our downstream neighbors with whom we share this river.
Last year, with a much larger snowpack, we saw sustained flows this high (and higher) through the end of June, when the Army Corps of Engineers slammed on the brakes. The tail end of the 2023 runoff sat behind the upstream dams at Abiquiu and Cochiti until Nov. 1, when the Corps began releasing it to meet our delivery obligations to our downstream neighbors. That won’t happen in 2024.
This year’s flow shot up with the big warmup two weeks ago melting off the snow in a hurry. That’s the rapid drop you see in the snowpack graph above. It may already have peaked, with flows hitting 3,600 cubic feet per second at Otowi (the gage above New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley). In response, the Corps has dropped releases at Cochiti. At Albuquerque, the peak hit ~3,200 cfs, and has now settled under 3,000 cfs.
Flows at Albuquerque, April 29, 2024. Graphic credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
April 10, 2024
The Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement at Monday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District that it is halting work on El Vado Dam repairs raises hugely consequential questions about water management in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley.
The short explanation for the halt is that the current approach to repairing the 1930s-era dam wasn’t working. (The meeting audio is here, though at “press time” for this blog post this week’s is not yet up.) I’ll leave it to others to suss out the technical and bureaucratic details of the repair project, and the endless finger-pointing that’s sure to ensue. My interest here is to begin to sketch out the implications here in the Middle Valley of an indefinite period – a decade or more? – without El Vado.
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District built El Vado (with substantial federal subsidy) in the 1930s to provide irrigation supplies by storing high spring runoff for use in summer and fall. But while its purpose was irrigation, it completely changed the Middle Valley hydrograph in ways that all the other water uses have adapted to, both human and ecosystem.
Without El Vado (or some interim replacement – see below), we should expect the Rio Grande to routinely go functionally dry in late summer unless propped up by monsoon rains, which are sporadic and unpredictable.
I see impacts in three areas, only one of which is related to El Vado’s initial purpose.
This is the obvious one. Until El Vado is repaired or some sort of replacement schemed out, irrigators should expect a high risk of low or no supply in late summer and fall. Alfalfa will remain a reliable if modest crop (it can hunker down and wait out the dry), but the few commercial operators who need a more reliable supply for their crops – think pecans and chile – will have to depend on groundwater, with all the problems that entails.
Albuquerque’s use of its imported San Juan-Chama water in summer indirectly depends on El Vado. Without MRGCD water, released from El Vado, as “carriage water”, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility has to leave its imported San Juan-Chama water parked in Abiquiu Reservoir, switching to groundwater. This is what we have done over the last few years, and our much-vaunted aquifer recovery has, as a result, stalled.
This poses a huge challenge for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.
Rio Grande Silvery Minnow via Wikipedia
3: ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS
The idea of an agricultural irrigation dam providing the water for environmental flows seems super weird. But that’s basically the way it’s worked for years here in the Middle Valley. Releases from El Vado, sent downstream to irrigators, provide environmental benefits along the way. For the last couple of years, without El Vado water to supplement flows in late summer, the Rio Grande has operated on a knife’s edge between flowing and dry through Albuquerque.
This poses a huge challenge for efforts to nurse the Rio Grande silvery minnow back from extinction.
Abiquiu Dam, impounding Abiquiu Lake on the Rio Chama in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, USA. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed the dam in 1963 for flood control, water storage, and recreation. By U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, photographer not specified or unknown – U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual LibraryImage pageImage description pageDigital Visual Library home page, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2044112
STORAGE ALTERNATIVES
First and foremost, there is a fast-moving and scrambling discussion about storage alternatives.
Abiquiu Reservoir, a flood control facility on the Rio Chama built, owned, and managed by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, is an obvious replacement. The part in italics yields knowing nods, or perhaps grimaces, from folks who work in Middle Valley water management, because the Corps is well known for an exceedingly cautious interpretation of its statutory mandates. “Filling in as a water storage facility to replace El Vado” is only sorta barely at the edge of that mandate. Getting the Corps on board to help with this fix will be key.
Heron Lake, part of the San Juan-Chama Project, in northern New Mexico, looking east from the Rio Chama. In the far distance is Brazos Peak (left) and the Brazos Cliffs (right), while at the bottom is the north wall of the Rio Chama Gorge. By G. Thomas at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1598784
Heron Reservoir, on a Rio Chama tributary, stores San Juan-Chama water imported through tunnels beneath the continental divide. It physically can’t replace El Vado because it’s in the wrong place. But discussions have already touched on the idea of doing it on paper via accounting swaps – hold back San Juan-Chama water, let SJC customers use native Rio Grande water via an accounting swap, then deliver Heron water as if it had been El Vado water.
Elephant Butte? Again, it’s in the wrong place, but accounting swaps here are also on the table.
INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK
The most important subtext is the institutional framework behind all of this. The loss of El Vado is not solely an MRGCD/Bureau of Reclamation problem. It implicates all the Middle Valley’s water stakeholders – especially Albuquerque’s Water Utility Authority, but also the Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service (because of ESA issues), the state water agencies, the communities on the valley floor that have avoided responsibility for any of this by depending on the state’s obscenely permissive domestic well statute.
New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.
Reservoir storage on New Mexico’s Rio Grande and Rio Chama on April 1, 2024. Credit: John Fleck
Click the link to read the article on the Inkstain website (John Fleck):
April 1, 2024
Inspired by Jack Schmidt’s monthly “how much water is in Colorado River storage” posts (see here for last month’s), I’ve been playing with a similar tool to help me think about the status of our reservoirs on the Rio Grande system here in New Mexico.
The graph above helps me with two important intuitions about how the system is functioning.
At the decadal scale, the water management shift in the early 2000s from a time of plenty to a time of not plenty is dramatic.
At the interannual scale, the decline in water kept in storage upstream of the middle valley (the red line above) goes from bad to worse beginning in the late teens.
Data choices
NORTH AND SOUTH
Based on a useful conversation with Jack about this, it makes sense here to split things up into two bins – the northern reservoirs (which hold the water available for our use here in New Mexico’s Middle RIo Grande Valley) and the southern reservoirs (which hold storage for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, El Paso and surrounds, and Mexico).
TIME SERIES
Because of a quirk in the data I have access to, and because I am too lazy to do the work to overcome the quirk, it makes sense to start the time series at 1980. But that also makes conceptual sense in terms of how I think about the system – our “modern era” of water management includes these two broad multi-decadal periods – the wet stuff 1980-2000, and the dry stuff ever since.
TIME STEP
I find it most helpful to plot this at an annual time step. How does storage right now compare to last year at this time? So the graph above is the storage as of April 1 (actually March 31). I’ve plotted it both ways (daily as well), but the interannual ups and downs make it harder for me to see what’s going on.
2024 v. 2023
After last year’s unusually wet year:
Northern reservoirs are up ~27,000 acre feet on April 1
Southern reservoirs are up ~95,000 acre feet.
The Loss of El Vado
Summer maximum versus end of year storage in El Vado Reservoir. Credit: John Fleck
The loss of El Vado Reservoir, currently under repair, is striking. But what’s also striking is how significantly we were draining it in recent years, before the current repairs started in 2022.
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District built El Vado in the 1930s (with an under-appreciated amount of federal subsidy) to extend the irrigation season, capturing spring runoff for use in the dry months of late summer and fall. (“Canals move water in space, dams move water in time.”)
I’m still playing with how best to illustrate this. The graph above shows how full El Vado gets each year as it swells with spring runoff (blue dot) and how far we’ve drained it by the end of the year (red dot).
The budget, which is not yet finalized, includes funding for non-lethal wolf deterrence, water litigation and wildlife management. The six-member Joint Budget Committee, which writes the state budget, settled on a $40.6 billion budget that would take effect July 1…
Water
The proposed budget also includes about $300,000 for two additional full-time employees in the Department of Law to help secure the state’s water interests…Colorado is part of nine interstate water compacts, one international treaty, two U.S. Supreme Court decrees and one interstate agreement.
“As climate change and population growth continue to impact Colorado’s water obligations, the DOL’s defense of Colorado’s water rights is more critical than ever,” according to the document.
One of the new employees, a policy analyst, will monitor government regulations and neighboring states’ activities on water policy. The other position will “bolster the representation and litigation support of the DOL across the various river basins,” support the state’s efforts to negotiate Colorado’s water and compact positions and communicate with the state’s significant water interests.
The Town of San Luis. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson Center
Walking tour of San Luis. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson CenterMarker alongside the San Luis People’s Ditch. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson CenterInside the Congreso de Acequias. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson CenterMembers of the Acequia Assistance Project. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson Center
Members of the Acequia Assistance Project, in conjunction with the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Colorado Law School, made their way down to San Luis, CO earlier this month to attend the 12th annual Congreso de Acequias. There, Project members took a walking tour of San Luis, visited the People’s Ditch which holds the oldest water right in Colorado, met with clients, participated in community workshops, and dined at local favorite Mrs. Rios. This visit gave students the opportunity to better understand the San Luis community, the land that their work is influencing, and gain a deeper understanding of the importance of the acequia system within Colorado’s water laws.
Congreso is a full-day conference that centers local voices, issues, and plans for the future. The event began with bendición de las aguas– the blessing of the water– where water from each acequia in attendance was combined and blessed. At the first workshop of the day, titled “Rebuilding a Robust Local Food System,” Colorado Open Lands and the Acequia Association brought together voices from around the Valley to discuss food sovereignty and how the community can work together to keep locally grown produce in the Valley, rather than export it, to address the lack of local access to healthy food. Representatives joined from the San Luis People’s Market, the San Luis Valley Food Coalition, local farms, and other organizations from around the Valley. In the second workshop of the day, “Rangeland and Grassland Drought Resilience,” Annie Overlin from CSU Extension discussed how farmers and ranchers can maintain their crops and cattle during drought years by creating action plans in advance. To wrap up the morning programming, the Acequia Association presented awards to elementary-aged art contest winners, who created pieces exhibiting their relationship to water growing up in the Valley, and one 13-year-old community member shared the story of how he learned the importance of water during his childhood in San Luis.
Selection of the 2015 native heirloom maize harvest of the seed library of The Acequia Institute in Viejo San Acacio, CO
Photo by Devon G. Peña
San Luis garden, 2021. Photo credit: The Alamosa Citizen
Lunch consisted entirely of locally-sourced food and featured a performance from local singer, Lara Manzanares, who performed a series of songs which spoke to the experiences growing up in rural areas and her perspective on the land surrounding her. In the afternoon, Colorado Law’s student attorneys, Masters of the Environment (MENV) students, and Project Director MacGregor presented updates about current student projects to inform the community of legislative updates impacting the San Luis Valley, outcomes from ongoing research projects, and new opportunities to seek support from the project. To wrap up the day’s workshops, there was an in-depth presentation on current funding opportunities for acequias and farmers.
The final event was a discussion and film screening about the Cielo Vista Ranch dispute, which has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Many community members in San Luis have historic land rights to graze livestock, collect timber for firewood, and hunt on the land currently owned by the Cielo Vista Ranch. Texas billionaire William Harrison bought the mountain in 2017 and has continued to build an 8 to 10-foot tall animal fence that interferes with easement owners’ rights to the land, exacerbating the decades-long issue. Documentary producer, Juan Salazar, attended Congreso and introduced his film, titled La Tierra, which details the history of advocacy in the San Luis community and discusses the significance of community organizing and resistance. Community members, including activist Shirley Romero-Otero, led a discussion about the dispute following the documentary, which allowed students to gain a more well-rounded understanding of how the issue has been impacting the valley for generations.
Colorado Law student attorneys and MENV students attended Congreso along with Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Acequia Assistance Project Director Gregor MacGregor and supervising attorneys Bill Caile, Megan Christensen, Enrique Romero, Andrew Teegarden, and Aaron Villapondo. The Acequia Assistance Project has provided pro bono legal services to clients in the San Luis Valley since the Project’s founding in 2012, and this year is no different. The project currently has 18 open cases, providing a variety of services to clients in the San Luis Valley including legal and policy research related to the region’s water rights, drafting acequia bylaws and amendments, conducting community title searches, facilitating water right applications, completing Acequia Handbook updates, and providing application assistance to farmers seeking federal Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) funding. Throughout the day, Acequia Assistance Project members conducted client intake meetings, worked with farmers one-on-one to discuss upcoming funding opportunities, and collected comments to improve the community’s Acequia Handbook.
The Acequia Assistance Project is grateful for the opportunity to work with the San Luis community, learn alongside its members, and provide pro bono legal support to benefit community members. We cannot wait to return to Congreso in future years.
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
The Rio Grande at Isleta Blvd. and Interstate 25 on Sept. 7, 2023. (Photo by Anna Padilla for Source New Mexico)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
March 13, 2024
New Mexico and Albuquerque-based irrigation officials have signed off on a first-of-its-kind cooperative agreement for “emergency, short-term and long-term” management of the Rio Grande.
Last week, the Interstate Stream Commission voted unanimously to allow its staff to enter an agreement with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which was signed Monday evening after receiving approval from the irrigation’s board.
The deal will allow these governing bodies to better manage flood prevention, improve “water conveyance,” meet interstate legal agreements and build species habitat for endangered animals in the Middle Rio Grande, said Hannah Riseley-White, the executive director for the Interstate Stream Commission.
“It exemplifies our commitment to each other to work together in solving and tackling these problems,” she told commissioners in the March 5 meeting.
The five-year agreement will allow for communication and coordination between the state and irrigation district officials and outline responsibilities in the partnership, according to a packet given to commission members.
The Interstate Stream Commission is a division of the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, charged with the “broad powers” to protect, conserve, develop and investigate New Mexico surface waters – such as rivers, streams and lakes.
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, based in Albuquerque, is the governmental body which oversees irrigation for land between Cochiti Dam to the Bosque Del Apache Wildlife Refuge. Irrigated lands in the district are ballparked between 55,000 to 58,000 acres with about 11,000 active irrigators, said Conservation Program Supervisor Casey Ish.
Top officials for the irrigation district and the state agency said the agreement puts an unofficial two-decade partnership to paper.
The state and district face colliding concerns of climate change causing more fires and floods in the region; difficulty in sending water downstream for legal agreements and a need to build habitats for endangered species, Riseley-White said.
As federal funds pour in from infrastructure and climate-adaptation projects, the agreement will help address difficult reaches in the irrigation district’s area, Jason Casuga, chief engineer and CEO for the irrigation district, told commissioners last week.
In a summary given to commissioners, the partnership is necessary to meet legal obligations to Texas and Mexico users downstream, made in treaties and a nearly 80-year old agreement.
“The looming water crisis is prompting an ‘all hands-on deck’ approach by water managers in the Rio Grande basin to ensure New Mexico can maintain water deliveries within the Middle Rio Grande under the Rio Grande Compact,” the summary said.
Concerns raised by Interstate Stream commissioners
Board members had questions for how the agreement might impact relationships with other irrigation districts and tribal governments of Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Sandia and Isleta Pueblos.
At the March 5 meeting, board member Phoebe Suina (Cochiti), a hydrologist, asked if any of the six middle Rio Grande Pueblos were consulted, or going to be included formally in future project planning or agreements.
Riseley-White said the state’s intent would be engaging relevant parties, including tribes, on specific projects.
“I think those six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos are important partners for us in figuring out what this needs to look like, and it will be critical to engage with them effectively,” she said.
Casuga further responded that the projects would target “benefiting all middle Rio Grande users.”
“When we get into project specifics and the funding associated with those, that’s when I think we would engage individually with the constituents who would be affected by this,” he said.
Board member Greg Carrasco, a Las Cruces farmer and rancher, asked if this agreement impacts the state’s relationship with other irrigation districts.
Riesely-White replied that the agreement has no impact on other relationships.
State Engineer Mike Hamman addressed the commission, calling the agreement a “starting point” for the state to work with other irrigation districts, Pueblos and other water users to address “mutual interests” and leverage federal dollars.
Hamman noted upcoming settlements in adjudication for the six middle Rio Grande Pueblos’ water rights and the pending settlement agreement in the Rio Grande U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit between Texas and New Mexico, could operationally impact the Rio Grande and Rio Chama.
He said that meeting those legal agreements to ensure water in rivers flows to recipients poses a challenge to both entities, requiring a “symbiotic relationship” to turn it around.
“We’re in a compact-deficit situation drifting towards potential violation in theory,” Hamman said, referencing the Middle Rio Grande’s debit of about 25,000 acre feet owed to Elephant Butte Dam for users downstream in Texas and Mexico.
Hamman said both the irrigation district and the state were concerned about delays in construction on the El Vado Dam, and how that is impacting sending water downstream.
Before the vote, Suina urged soliciting Pueblos’ inclusion on upcoming projects, saying the land and water stewardship of the Pueblos has often been overlooked in the past century of water planning.
She noted that Pueblo governments have pushed back against assertions that the middle Rio Grande is “at the end of its life cycle,” saying that the river itself is a necessity.
“I want to encourage that engagement, encourage the collaboration, I see this [agreement] as a step towards that,” Suina said. “But even in that state, just not to forget our Pueblo communities.”
Suina voted yes, but appended her vote with a comment.
“I have confidence in director Riseley-White to have that Pueblo engagement that enables me to say yes to this,” she said.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
I often go into great detail about these adventures around the state but I just want to say that charging is not a worry any longer for non-Tesla EV travelers in Colorado. The Colorado Welcome Center in Alamosa is a great location to bump your charge. They have DC fast chargers, restrooms, Wi-Fi, and space where you can set up and doomscoll through the Internet. If you get a chance stop for food at Mojo’s Eatery in Salida and charge while you dine.
Over on Twitter Karl Kistner asked if the precipitation in the San Luis Valley was doing well this season after viewing the video above. Snowpack is below average in the Upper Rio Grande Basin and the snow in the video above was from a beautiful snow storm the night before that dropped 0.41″ of precipitation on the valley floor.
The Blanca massif, located just south of Great Sand Dunes, has been been a landmark for people for thousands of years. The #SnowMoon rising behind it is the full moon that occurs each February.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
February 10, 2024
Folks in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are engaged in a bold experiment in western water management – charging farmers for the water they use. Jerd Smith [Fresh Water News] explains:
The challenge in the valley is that, with climate change inexorably chomping at the Rio Grande, and the groundwater used to replace the river’s dwindling irrigation supplies, there simply isn’t enough water to keep farming all the acreage they’ve got up there.
The valley is operating under the same two constraints that we see up and down the river – less water flowing in, and requirements established in the Rio Grande Compact to pass some of what does come in to folks downstream – Colorado can’t use it all, but must pass some water along to water users in central New Mexico. Those of us in central New Mexico’s “Middle Rio Grande” (the stretch from Cochiti through Albuquerque to Socorro) get to use some, but must pass some of on to farmers in Southern New Mexico. Under the deal now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the southern New Mexican’s (the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and Las Cruces area) must then pass some water across the border to people in Texas and Mexico.
PAYING TO REDUCE USE: PRIVATE V. PUBLIC GOODS
In each of those stretches – Colorado, central New Mexico, and southern New Mexico – we face the challenge of reducing use in order to meet downstream obligations.
In New Mexico, our approach to problems like this has been to treat the water as a private good, and pay its users to not use the water. This year, for example, a pipeline of money from the federal government, through the state, to our local water agency, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, is paying irrigators $700 an acre to not irrigate.
The approach in the San Luis Valley is different. There, farmers who want to pump groundwater (recognizing that groundwater and surface water are an interconnected part of a single system, and that as river flow declines farmers have been pumping groundwater to replace it) have to pay for it. If you want to pump more, you have to pay more. And as it gets scarcer, the price needs to go up.
The legal terminology involving the notion of property rights here is tricky, but as a practical matter this suggests two very different approaches. In New Mexico, we are treating the water as the irrigators property, and paying them to forego its use. In Colorado, they’re treating it as public property, and requiring them to pay if they want to use it.
THE COASIAN SOLUTION
Students of the Berrens-Fleck Lab will recognize this as a version of the classic problem of assigning the property right, as laid out by Ronald Coase in his classic 1960 paper The Problem of Social Cost. Overuse of water in a climate change-constrained system is a classic “externality” – a burden pushed off onto others, rather than the people who get to benefit from the use of water. [ed. emphasis mine]
Coase’s answer – “assign the property right!” – has made his paper one of the most-cited papers in the history of papers, and won him a Nobel prize. Coase’s argument is that by assigning the property right, and starting from that point to figure out who pays and how much to solve the problem, we can converge on solutions. You can either make the people being harmed pay to stop the harm, or the people causing the harm pay to stop the harm.
We can, for example, require the factory polluting our river pay the cost of installing pollution control equipment. Or we can make the folks downstream, or the community as a whole, pay. Either way will work. The question of which approach we take is an ethical and political question.
Colorado has chosen (or at least is trying to chose – this’ll end up in court) one approach. New Mexico has chosen another.
CARTOON COASE
This is a cartoon of Coase’s argument. In the paper (which is a terrific read) he’s making a more nuanced argument involving transaction costs. In both the New Mexico and Colorado cases, the cost of setting up the payment system makes actually carrying out the policies we need super hard. But the cartoon helps frame our approach to western water management challenges more broadly.
This image is fake. There also is no Large Container Ships Full of Money Act. I made that up too. It’s really the “Build Inflation Better Act” or something, I can never get that right. Graphic credit: John Fleck/InkStain
The Colorado example – charge more to use water! – is rare. In the Lower Colorado River right now, we’re paying farmers, through their agricultural districts, giant container ships full of money to reduce their use – the New Mexico approach. We’re treating the water as their property, and paying them not to use it. This is an ethical and political (and possible legal?) choice.
But the key difference between the New Mexico/Lower Colorado approach and the classic Coasian cartoon is who’s doing the paying. In both cases, at least for now, we’re using Other People’s Money (OPM), via the recently passed Large Container Ships Full of Money Act (LCSFMA). Those of us in the West have somehow worked a racket where folks in Maine and Georgia and elsewhere are paying to bail us out of our mess. (To be fair, I’m sure we’re bailing them out in some way too.)
The processes by which we have to figure out how to move all this money and water around – to pay people to not use water, or to charge them for the water they use – are a great example of the power of the deeper insights in Coase’s 1960 paper. Working out the ways things don’t match up to Cartoon Coase is where the real value of the intellectual framework is found.
SOURCES AND METHODS
Two huge thanks. First, to Daniel Rothberg, whose Western Water Notes alerted me to the issue. And to Jerd Smith, for supporting and publishing the great water journalism we all need to understand these issues. If you can, I’d encourage you to contribute to one or the other or both, to support the fundamental underlying knowledge base we all need to move forward on climate change and western water issues.
The Rio Grande flows near Albuquerque as the sun rises over the Sandia Mountains. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
State climatologist Russ Schumacher appeared on the latest episode of the Outdoor Citizen podcast to talk to us about Colorado’s snow and climate. Schumacher, who took over as Colorado’s state climatologist in 2017, is also professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. In a time of climate change and increasingly unpredictable events, Schumacher and people like him are here to help us all make sense of it.
“There’s always something new happening,” and that’s what fascinates him most about his work and the weather. In Colorado, especially, he said. “We have such fascinating weather. The weather and the climate can vary hugely over short distances.”
It’s both fascinating and challenging, he said.
The San Luis Valley is a great example of the variability of weather, he noted. “For one thing, I think it’s not as well understood as other parts of the state.”
Everybody loves to study the weather in the northern part of the state, he said, but “I think some of what happens there in the Valley is so fascinating, and a lot of times it flies under the radar either literally or figuratively.”
New radar installed near the Alamosa airport helps track local weather, he said.
Schumacher and his colleagues at the climate center just released the third edition of the Climate Change in Colorado report. The last time that report was updated was in 2014. A lot has happened since then, he said, and they realized a new update was needed.
You can read the report here. Schumacher broke down some of the key takeaways from that report.
LIke most of the planet, Colorado has been warming. Colorado has warmed by 3 degrees fahrenheit on average since the late 1880s. Precipitation is much harder to pin down, but the past two decades have been very dry.
As the planet continues to warm, Colorado will see the effects.
Climate models are all over the place, he said, when it comes to precipitation. There is a lot of variation. When it comes to snow and water, he said, even if the precipitation doesn’t change and the amount of liquid coming out of the sky doesn’t change “the fact that it’s warmer is going to put more stress on those water resources.”
In the summer, when the air is hotter it means quicker evaporation. In the winter, there is a shift in timing when runoff occurs in the spring and that changes when there are peak flows in the river.
“Warming is going to have impacts on our snow in the winter and our water supply in the summer,” he said.
We’re haven’t yet seen much of the effects for this El Niño year. Schumacher says there is still more time for that. Yet, we’re still below average in many of the nations’ southern river basins.
The current atmospheric river conditions on the west coast and in California are likely to head our way in the coming days and weeks. “It’ll be on the warm side when it hits Southern Colorado, as well.”
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 9, 2024 via the NRCS.
“Nowhere in the state is looking great at this point,” but we are much better than we were at the end of 2023. This last bout of snowstorms this month is helping. But it’s not a “boom year” that is typical with El Niño years.
There’s still hope to be had, he said.
The storms coming from the southwest are typically warmer than winter weather. He said that Saturday, Feb. 4, was the wettest day Fort Collins has seen. The city received 1.66 inches of precipitation in just that one day, which he said is not typical for early February.
The current snow drought will have long-term effects. It’s been “most acute” in Southern Colorado. There have been more years with low snowpack rather than a higher snowpack.
Since Colorado is a headwaters state, that doesn’t just impact us but the states surrounding us. Their water levels are reliant on Colorado’s snowpack.
The larger reservoirs in the Colorado River system require more consistently good years. One good year won’t necessarily create good levels. That system is in better shape than it was a year ago, but overall is in a bad state.
In the Rio Grande basin, he said, as the river flows down to New Mexico, there are increasing water supply issues further south. “Even if you have a good snowpack year, if the summer monsoon doesn’t come through and it’s really hot, that air is really thirsty for that water. It’s gonna try and pull that water out of the soils and out of the crops back into the air which means if you’re growing crops you’ve got to irrigate more, which means you’re using more water. That all is really a vicious cycle that puts stress on the system all around.”
Listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts to hear more about what Schumacher is seeing.
Hundreds of growers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley could see their water costs nearly quadruple under a new plan designed to slash agricultural water use in the drought-strapped region and deflect a potential legal crisis on the Rio Grande.
A new rule approved by the area’s largest irrigation district, known as Subdistrict 1, and the Alamosa-based Rio Grande Water Conservation District, sets fees charged to pump water from a severely depleted underground aquifer at $500 an acre-foot, up from $150 an acre-foot. The new program could begin as early as 2026 if the fees survive a court challenge.
“It’s draconian and it hurts,” said Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican from Alamosa who is also general manager of the Rio Grande water district.
The region, home to one of the nation’s largest potato economies, has relied for more than 70 years on water from an aquifer that is intimately tied to the Rio Grande. The river begins high in the San Juan mountains above the valley floor.
Both the river and the aquifer are supplied by melting mountain snows, but a relentless multi-year drought has shrunk annual snowpacks so much that neither the river nor the aquifer have been able to recover their once bountiful supplies.
And that’s a problem. Under the Rio Grande Compact of 1938, Colorado is required to deliver enough water downstream to satisfy New Mexico and Texas. If the aquifer falls too low, it will endanger the river’s supplies and push Colorado out of compliance. Such a situation could trigger lawsuits and cost the state tens of millions of dollars in legal fees.
Subdistrict 1 has set state-approved goals to comply with the compact. Within seven years, it must find a way to restore hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water to the aquifer, a difficult task.
Rio Grande River, CO | Photo By Sinjin Eberle
An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water, or enough to cover an acre of land with water a foot deep.
The specter of an interstate water fight is creating enormous pressure to reorganize the valley’s farming communities in a way that will allow them to use less water, grow fewer potatoes, and still have a healthy economy.
For more than a decade, valley water users have been working to reduce water use and stabilize the aquifer. Many have already started experimenting with ways to grow potatoes with less water by improving soil health, and to find new crops, such as quinoa, that may also prove to be profitable.
But the pumping plans, considered innovative by water experts, haven’t been enough to stop the decline in aquifer levels. The Rio Grande Basin is consistently one of the driest in the state, generating too little water to make up for drought conditions and restore the aquifer after decades of over pumping.
With the new fees, the region will likely have some of the highest agricultural water costs in the state, said Craig Cotten, who oversees the Rio Grande River Basin for Colorado’s Division of Water Resources.
Perhaps not as high as water in the Colorado-Big Thompson Project on the northern Front Range, where cities and developers and some growers pay thousands of dollars to buy an acre-foot of water.
Still it is much higher than San Luis Valley growers and others have paid historically. Fees at one time were just $75 an acre-foot, eventually reaching $150 an acre-foot. The prospect of the fee skyrocketing to $500 is shocking.
“That is high,” said Brett Bovee, president of WestWater Research, a consulting firm specializing in water economics and valuations. Typically such fees across the state have been in the $50 to $100 range, he said.
But Bovee said the water district is taking constructive action while giving growers opportunities to find their own solutions to the water shortage. “It’s putting the decision-making power into the hands of growers and landowners, rather than saying ‘everybody take one-third of your land out of production.’”
Third hay cutting 2021 in Subdistrict 1 area of San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Chris Lopez
Subdistrict 1 is the oldest and largest of a group of irrigation districts in the valley, according to Cotten. Its $500 fee has triggered a lawsuit by some growers, who believe the district is applying the new fees unfairly.
“The responsibility for achieving a sustainable water supply is to be borne proportionately based on (growers’) past, present and future usage,” Brad Grasmick, a water attorney representing San Luis Valley growers in the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group and the Northeast Water Users Association, said, referring to state water laws. “But we believe the responsibility is being disproportionately applied to our wells.”
Those growers are now trying to create their own irrigation district and they are suing to stop the new fee.
“I think that more land retirement and more reduction in well pumping is needed and that is what my group is trying to do,” Grasmick said. “No one wants to see the aquifer diminish and continue to shrink. If everybody can do their part to cut back and make that happen, that is the way forward. My guys just want to see the proportionality adhered to.”
To date, tens of millions of dollars have been raised and spent to retire wells in the San Luis Valley, with Subdistrict 1 raising $70 million in the last decade, according to Simpson. And in 2022 state lawmakers approved another $30 million to retire more wells.
Lawmakers are closely monitoring these efforts to reduce water use while protecting growers.
Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, said the combined money that is going to the Rio Grande and Republican basins is critical. But the potential for legal battles, he said, is concerning.
“Agriculture is key in our communities,” Pelton said. “But the biggest thing is that we have to stay within our compacts. Sometimes you’re backed into a corner and that is just the way it has to be. I hate it, but we have to stay in compliance.”
How much irrigated land will be lost as wells are retired isn’t clear yet. Simpson said growers who have access to surface supplies in the Rio Grande will still be able to irrigate even without as many wells or as much water, but the land will likely produce less and farms may become less profitable.
And it will take more than sky-high pumping fees to solve the problem, officials said. The Division of Water Resources has also created another water-saving rule in Subdistrict 1 that will force growers to replace one-for-one the water they take out of the aquifer, instead of allowing them to simply pay more to pump more.
Cotten said the hope is that the higher fees combined with the new one-for-one rule will reduce pumping enough to save the aquifer and the ag economy.
Valley growers are already shifting production and changing crops, said James Ehrlich, executive director of the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee in Monte Vista, an agency involved in overseeing and marketing the region’s potato crops.
“There are a lot of creative things going on down here,” Ehrlich said. “But we have to farm less and learn to survive as a community together. And Mother Nature has not helped us out. We’ve stabilized but we can’t gain back what (state and local water officials) want us to gain back. It is just not going to happen.”
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Changing Rio Grande flow at Otowi over time. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
February 2, 2024
I’ve been updating the crufty old code I use to generate graphs to help me (and colleagues) think about river flows.
This one’s a little busy, so maybe for specific nerd colleagues’ use, and not general consumption?
It’s based on a request from a friend who uses these, and asked for a visualization of the wet 1981-2000 period compared to the drier 21st century. This is an important comparison given that a whole bunch of New Mexicans (including me!) moved here in the wet 1980s and ’90s, which created a sense of what’s “normal.”
It’s important to note that this is not a measure of climate, at least not directly. This is a measure of how much actual water flows past the Otowi gage, which is a product of:
climate-driven hydrology adding water
trans-basin diversions adding water (“trans basin diversion” singular, I guess, the San-Juan Chama Project)
upstream water use subtracting water
reservoir management decisions moving water around in time (sometimes reducing the flow by storing, sometimes increasing it by releasing)
I get so much out of staring at these graphs. A few bits from this one, which I did a few evenings ago curled up with my laptop in my comfy chair:
Look at the curves around Nov. 1 – a drop as irrigation season ends, following by a rise as managers move compact compliance water down the river to Elephant Butte. Makes me curious about what they were doing back in the ’80s and ’90s in November.
This year’s winter base flow is low.
At some point soon I’ll get the updated code onto Github, but it’s not quite ready for sharing. (I’m rewriting it in Python, because learning is fun!)
The Rio Grande flows near Albuquerque as the sun rises over the Sandia Mountains. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
The nation’s highest court will hear federal objections to a deal between Texas and New Mexico in their dispute over Rio Grande water in oral arguments scheduled for a midweek date on March 20.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case last week, as the lawsuit crawls into a decade since its filing.
Justices will evaluate arguments from the federal government taking exception to a compromise planagreed to by Texas, New Mexico and Colorado to settle the case. The three states are parties in the lawsuit and agreed to the compromise in January 2023. [ed. emphasis mine]
The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer said there would be no need to adjust its budget request before the New Mexico State Legislature because of the oral arguments in D.C. State Engineer Mike Hamman said in a written statement that the office is looking forward to the oral argument in March.
“We are confident that the Supreme Court will accept the states’ proposed settlement, which will allow us to move forward towards securing a stable water future for all users in the lower Rio Grande,” said Hamman.
Budget asks
Also on Monday morning, the New Mexico House of Representatives released its state budget proposal for the next fiscal year. In the proposed budget, the House Appropriations and Finance committee extended $2 million given last year to the New Mexico Department of Justice for Rio Grande litigation and notes another $6.4 million on interstate water litigation will carry forward from last year.
In the Office of the State Engineer, $8.9 million is set aside for litigation and adjudication of water rights within streams around the state and underground basins.
Separately, the agency will transfer $2.5 million to the litigation and adjudication programs of the state engineer. While not all adjudication and litigation is specific to the supreme court’s Rio Grande case, that in all, totals to nearly $20 million between both agencies.
How we got here
Formally called Original No. 141 Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, the case has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
The 2014 filing by the state of Texas centers on allegations that New Mexico groundwater pumping downstream of Elephant Butte Reservoir took Rio Grande water allocated to Texas.
Texas said New Mexico’s pumping violated the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, a legal agreement between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas to split the river’s water.
While 80% of the river’s water is used for agriculture, it’s a major source of drinking water for cities such as El Paso and Albuquerque, and for wildlife. Las Cruces sits below Elephant Butte Reservoir and receives all its drinking water from groundwater.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to intervene in the case. Attorneys for federal agencies said New Mexico groundwater pumping threatened federal abilities to deliver water to tribes, regional irrigation districts and Mexico under a federal treaty.
The case pressed on to trial in 2021 and was split into two parts. A six-week virtual portion of the trialwas held in the fall, and a second in-person technical portion was pushed back after months of negotiations by parties took up much of 2022.
Just before the trial was set to resume, the three states announced an agreement which would resolve issues between Texas and New Mexico. It includes measuring water deliveries at the state line, new conditions for over- and under-deliveries of Rio Grande water and incorporating drought baselines and groundwater pumping into the formulas for how much water is available.
Attorneys for the federal government objected, arguing that the agreement was made without their consent.
U.S. 8th Circuit Judge Michael Melloy recommended last year that the Supreme Court accept the deal over objections from the federal government, calling it “fair and reasonable” in his 123-page report. He said disputes over federal operations in Southern New Mexico could be resolved in other courts.
In December, the federal government submitted a filing objecting to Melloy’s recommendation. In the filing, attorneys said the settlement “imposes obligations on the United States without its consent.” Attorneys further argued that the deal should be thrown out because it is “contrary to the Compact”.
It’s expected that only attorneys for the states and the federal government will have time to speak during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March. If that happens, groups unable to present arguments would include farming associations, irrigation districts, the city of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University, which appear as amici curae or “friends of the court.”
Opinions from the Supreme Court are typically issued by late June, occasionally early July, during their session.
Map of the Rio Grande watershed. Graphic credit: WikiMedia
This Rio Grande crossing, just south of Belen, 30-plus miles downstream from Albuquerque, has changed dramatically since Jack Delano took the picture above in spring 1943.
Beyond drains, a forest. John Fleck, January 2024
THE BOSQUE
I’ve stared at Delano’s picture often, because of the story it tells – a broad open river valley. It’s nothing like that today.
I pieced together some dirt roads and ditchbanks to visit the site on this morning’s bike ride. I had hopes of duplicating Delano’s picture, but the train traffic made standing in the middle of the tracks seem ill-advised. The picture to the right, facing the river looking east, should give you a feel. The Rio Grande here is now flanked by a magnificent cottonwood gallery forest, with low stands of coyote willow and salt cedar and some other stuff. We call it “the bosque.”
Looking at the picture last night as I was doing the map work to figure a sane bike route to get to the bridge, the date clicked: Spring 1943. In thinking about the modern relationship between human communities and the Rio Grande, 1941-42 is a dividing line – the last big flood years, the floods that drove the major changes in river management that created an ecological niche that the cottonwoods exploited in the second half of the twentieth century with full-throated glee.
Delano’s picture can be misleading. It wasn’t all treeless like that. The 1917-18 Rio Grande drainage survey, which is our best “before” snapshot of the valley, shows clumps of cottonwoods up and down the river. Following the 1941-42 floods, the federal Middle Rio Grande Project reengineered the main river channel with a series of sediment traps on the banks that were intended to push the river into a narrower central channel. In the process, they created ideal seed bed habitat for the cottonwoods to fill in the empty spaces.
A cottonwood forest in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: Matthew Schmader/Open Space Division
The result is a linear cottonwood gallery forest more than 150 miles long. I’ve always called it “continuous,” but I just scanned the whole length using satellite imagery and found two short gaps. So “nearly continuous,” to add precision.
The bosque is often treated as one of the Middle Valley’s great natural treasures, and I don’t disagree. But “natural” may not be quite the right word.
Belen High Line Canal, feeding pecan orchards in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. John Fleck, January 2024
PECANS
Next stop: one of the most interesting climate change adaptation experiments underway in Middle Valley agriculture.
Past the railroad bridge, I found a ditch crossing and peeled away from the river toward the sand hills to the east, winding through the small farms of Jarales that make this stretch of the valley a lovely exemplar of the “ribbons of green” we talk about in the new book. Nearly all the farms were less than 10 acres – non-commercial, “custom and culture” agriculture, mostly alfalfa or other forage crops, lots of horses. Dodging the one busy highway the best I could, I veered into a neighborhood and under the interstate, where the road kicked up to a geomorphic bench in the sand hills maybe 30 feet in elevation above the nearby valley floor.
The pecans are in the distance in the picture to the right, though you can’t really see them. I was on relatively unfamiliar ground, and was cautious in my interpretation of the “No Trespassing” signs on the ditchbank road. It’s land that was once scrubland just like the land in the foreground. Now it’s irrigated with water from the ditch in the picture, to the tune of more than 1,000 acre feet per year. (We don’t know exactly. We don’t meter this use of water here.) There was a lot of controversy nearly 20 years ago when the land was brought into production. Critics (included regular Inkstain commenter Bill Turner, who was on the MRGCD board at the time) argued it wasn’t entitled to irrigation water from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s ditches. I’m not going to relitigate that argument here. Those objecting to serving the land with MRGCD irrigation water lost. Now the land is home to a fascinating experiment in climate change adaptation.
With a warming climate, the optimal range for pecans has moved north. (UNM Water Resources Program grad Tylee Griego took a deep dive into the pecans’ migration here.)
We have seen a century of failed efforts to foster a commercially successful crop in the valley – wheat, tomatoes, sugar beats, pinto beans, tobacco (!). Pecans are the latest, and rather than climate change making it harder to grow stuff, in this case it has made it easier. By increasing irrigated acreage in the valley. We usually think of agricultural climate change adaptation as “crop switching,” not “crop adding.” In addition to the big orchards by the river, the latest USDA CroplandCROS dataset, which uses satellite data and algorithms to identify crop types, is showing more pecans in small patches across the valley. I don’t full trust CroplandCROS – it gets a lot of pixels wrong ’round here, unfortunately. But this just means more bike rides needed to “ground truth” my blog posts. This is a part of the valley I don’t know as well, so fun ahead!
As I was riding through Jarales this morning and writing this post in my head, I was playing with the theme suggested by the two forests – each spread across a niche created by human alteration of the hydrologic system. Not sure it quite works, but I’ll leave it here.
“Santa Fe R.R. streamliner, the “Super Chief,” being serviced at the depot, Albuquerque, NM. Servicing these diesel streamliners takes five minutes”. Jack Delano’s original caption. Courtesy Library of Congress
A NOTE ON JACK DELANO
Jack Delano’s 1943 trip through New Mexico is worthy of note.
Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Ukraine, was one of the Farm Service Administration/Office of War Information photographers whose work dominates our visual understanding of the 1930s and early ’40s in the United States. His photographs of the AT&SF rail yard in Albuquerque, taken on the same spring 1943 trip that he took the Belen railroad bridge above, represent a remarkable documentation of a moment in time, as freight bustled through Albuquerque in service of the war effort.
We tend to think of the classic FSA photography as “documentary” work of the highest order – which it was. But it also was government propaganda – artists paid by the government to tell particular kinds of stories, and share particular kinds of messages.
Much of the classic visual vocabulary of the FSA pictures – think Dorothea Lange – is very much black and white. But with the development of Kodachrome in the 1930s, photographers of the period were beginning to shoot in color too. Most of Delano’s Albuuquerque pictures are in black and white, but his color picture of the Albuquerque rail yard, taken from the Lead Avenue orverpass circa 1943, is a classic.
Birds and water at Bosque de Apache New Mexico November 9, 2022. Photo credit: Abby Burk
The uranium-mining buzz is reaching a fevered pitch lately as uranium prices climb above $100 per pound, the highest since October 2007. I already reported on Energy Fuels’ intent to begin or resume production at its Pinyon Plain and La Sal complex mines. But nearly every day another press release lands in my inbox touting a big find or big plans somewhere on the Colorado Plateau.
Let’s start with the headline that irks me the most: “Churchrock could pump out 31 million lb of US uranium over three decades, Laramide PEA shows.” On its surface, this one looks like just another attempt to drive up share prices. And it probably is. But it’s the location and the name that gets to me: The project is just a couple of miles from the 1979 Church Rock disaster, when a uranium mill tailings dam failed, sending 94 million gallons of acidic liquid raffinate and 1,100 tons of uranium mill tailings rushing down the Puerco River and across the “checkerboard” area of the Navajo Nation. The slug of material, containing an estimated 1.36 tons of uranium and 46 trillion picocuries of gross-alpha activity, continued past Gallup and down the Puerco for another 50 miles or more, seeping into the sandy earth and the aquifer as it went, and leaving behind stagnant and poisonous pools from which livestock drank.
The Rio Puerco, an ephemeral tributary of the Rio Grande, west of Albuquerque, crossing the eastern edge of the Tohajiilee Indian Reservation; December 2016. By Dicklyon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54602926
It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.
Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:
It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.
Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:
Laramide is busy these days: They also recently announced the U.S. Forest Service has restarted the environmental review and permitting process for the company’s proposed La Jara Mesa project north of Grants, New Mexico. During the uranium industry’s last “renaissance” (lasting from 2007 to 2011), Laramide looked to open an underground mine on Cibola National Forest land. They made it as far as a draft environmental impact statement, released in 2012, before low uranium prices stalled the project.
Nexus Uranium says it will begin exploratory drilling on its Wray Mesa claims near La Sal, Utah, on the northern edge of the Lisbon Valley.
Anfield’s subsidiary, Highbury Resources, acquired another 12 Department of Energy uranium leases from Gold Eagle Mining in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado. The tracts are near Slickrock, on Monogram Mesa south of the Paradox Valley, and near Uravan. Anfield also says it plans to reopen the Shootaring uranium mill near Ticaboo, Utah, although it appears to have made little progress in that regard.
Thor Energy says it has found high-grade uranium at its Wedding Bell and Radium Mountain projects on a mesa just east of the Dolores River in western Colorado.
Kraken Energy got the Bureau of Land Management’s go-ahead to drill on Harts Point, right along the northeast border of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. This is the second time the company (or its partners Atomic Minerals and Recoupment Exploration) have purportedly received a drilling permit for the slickrock peninsula adjacent to the Indian Creek climbing area. The first time the company failed to come up with a reclamation bond and the permit was cancelled.
Australia-based Okapi Resources is set to begin exploratory drilling near Cañon City, Colorado, raising concerns among the locals.
And, perhaps the only big buzz in the lithium space right now (lithium prices are in the dumps): American Battery Metals is pushing its Lisbon Valley lithium project. Well, that is to say they are looking to get exploratory drilling permitted.
Fund will retire approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water
When Colorado Senate Bill 28 was adopted during the 2022 legislative session, it created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for irrigators in the Upper Rio Grande Basin.
The state money derived from Colorado’s share of federal COVID dollars that came through the American Rescue Plan Act would serve to incentivize local farmers to permanently retire more groundwater wells. Doing so would further reduce groundwater pumping and translate to fewer irrigated acres in the Valley as a whole.
Seven months after opening applications to the fund, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has enough contracts to spend nearly the entirety of the $30 million. The contracts represent the full retirement of approximately 34 crop circles and partial restrictions on 28 circles, according to an accounting from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
When it’s all said and done, the $30 million will have paid for the retirement of approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot represents around 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land.
Each application submitted to the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund was reviewed by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and Colorado Division of Water Resources. So far six applications representing $4,772,204 have been closed and the RGWCD now owns those water rights, according to deputy general manager Amber Pacheco.
The remaining applications have to be approved or rejected by March 31.
The senate bill also directed $30 million to sustainability efforts on the Republican River Basin in the eastern plains. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, the Republican River Water Conservation District has been successful in administering the program, Pacheco said.
“We’ve been pretty successful,” she said at the Jan. 16 board meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “It’s pretty shocking that in six months that amount of money was obligated.”
A small amount of funding will likely remain after current applications are all reviewed, Pacheco said.
The RGWCD received a total of 27 applications. Here’s a breakdown of applications by subdistrict. The applications represent 11,296 acre-feet of past annual withdrawals that would be retired.
Applications total approximately $29,000,000
14 applications in Subdistrict 1* – $11,700,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 3* – $1,200,000 1 application in Subdistrict 4 – $500,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 5 – $5,100,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 6 – $1,300,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 7 (Trinchera Subdistrict) – $9,300,000
*SD1 and SD3 both offered some type of incentive on top of the SB28 program.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Current levels are at 71 percent of normal for the Rio Grande Basin
The Rio Grande Basin has about another 70 days to get itself up to average peak levels for snowpack that would deliver a normal spring runoff year for San Luis Valley irrigators in 2024. Water from melting snow in the surrounding mountain ranges also irrigates farm fields in New Mexico and Texas through the Rio Grande Compact.
The snowpack levels and corresponding 2023 spring runoff was the focus of a presentation at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District’s quarterly meeting held on Tuesday, Jan. 16. Craig Cotten, Division 3 engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, walked water managers through a series of slides showing the conditions of rivers and creeks all critical to Valley’s agricultural economy as well as Colorado’s ability to deliver water to the New Mexico state line for Rio Grande Compact obligations.
Rio Grande and Conejos River
These charts represent the two river systems tied to the Rio Grande Compact and the effect on stream flows from snow runoff during the spring of 2023. The winter of 2022-23 translated into significantly above-average runoff for several months and then by the first of July a drop in streamflows to below average on the Rio Grande and right at average to below on the Conejos River.
It’s the Rio Grande and Conejos that form the Rio Grande Compact between the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. The annual spring runoff determines how much water Colorado delivers to the New Mexico state line to fulfill its compact obligation. From the 2023 runoff Colorado delivered 29 percent of the streamflow or 208,000 acre-feet of water from the Rio Grande, and 47 percent or around 200,000 acre-feet from the Conejos River.
Los Pinos River near Ortiz
Los Pinos is the main contributor to the San Antonio River, which is a main tributary to the Conejos. Los Pinos had significant above-average runoff that resulted in some flooding on the lower end of the San Antonio in the spring of 2023. With its tributaries, the Conejos River had 411,000 acre-feet or 137 percent of its long-term average in 2023. Again, 47 percent of that water had to be delivered to the New Mexico state line to meet Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact obligations.
Saguache Creek near Saguache
Saguache Creek forms from runoff coming off the San Juan Mountains. It had above-average spring streamflows like others, and ended up below-average when the normal summer rains did not materialize in 2023.
Trinchera Creek above Turner’s Ranch
Trinchera Creek presented the biggest challenges for irrigators in 2023 due to less snow on the Sangre de Cristos than on the San Juans. Trinchera Creek was significantly below average for most of the irrigation season.
Ute Creek near Fort Garland
Ute Creek too forms from the Sangres. Unlike the Trinchera Creek, it got to average and a bit above for the peak of the 2023 spring runoff and then dropped to below-average streamflows for the year.
Alamosa Creek above Terrace Reservoir
The highlight of the heavy snow from 2022-23 and the corresponding spring runoff was the spilling of Terrace Reservoir for the first time in 40 years. “That was really neat to see,” Cotten said.
Spring and summer 2024 forecasts
Looking to the 2024 spring runoff, current snowpack levels are at 71 percent of normal for the Rio Grande Basin and the lowest for any basin in Colorado by a significant amount. “We do still have some time to get up that average,” Cotten said. “If we can get some good snowstorms coming our way, hopefully we’ll be in decent shape for this year.”
Precipitation outlook through March shows potential for more snow that would help build up the snowpack for spring water. The spring months show an equal chance for precipitation and then below-average forecasts for the summer months. The temperature forecasts for the summer do not predict the same type of record-setting heat as the summer of 2023.
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