The Invisible Elephant in the Room

Everyone seems to agree that New Mexico has problems — poverty, unemployment, education, healthcare, childcare, crime rates, etc.

Political candidates and current office holders talk endlessly about these. Each claims to have a solution.

However, those politicians inadequately address the invisible Elephant in the room. That Elephant is the growing scarcity of water across the state, and He is huge.

Depending upon where you live, water scarcity shows itself in different ways and with different urgencies. Examples:

• In the Clovis area, you know that the Ogallala aquifer is running very low (in part from Texas’ minimal groundwater regulations). The Ute pipeline, several years away, may help but is certainly not a permanent solution.
• In the rapidly expanding Rio Rancho area, you are dependent upon recycled or reused water, but, more, upon groundwater pumped from an aquifer that is minimally recharged.
• In the Lower Rio Grande valley (south of Elephant Butte to the Texas state line) you are legally subject to a recent US Supreme Court decree. That Rio Grande Compact lawsuit took 13 years and cost the state well over $100 million to litigate – and lose. The decree requires the region to use significantly less groundwater annually, enough less to fill a football field to a depth of 3½ miles.
• In Las Vegas, you are already in Stage II drought restrictions and are subject to regularly increasing rates of river evaporation.
• In the Albuquerque East Mountains and Estancia Basin, you’re dependent on a groundwater aquifer that is regularly being drawn down with minimal recharge.
• In the northwest corner of New Mexico, you are subject to regulations and restrictions based on the annually diminishing flows in the Colorado River.
• In the Placitas Village, your available domestic and irrigation water is dependent each year on the previous winter’s Sandia snowpack. And snowpacks have been regularly diminishing.
• In the Middle Rio Grande (Los Alamos highway bridge to Elephant Butte), your area is racing toward another Compact violation, yielding another Texas lawsuit because of regular overuse and under-delivery of water.

A few politicians have suggested that we could solve our water problems by obtaining “new” water. They variously cite purified “produced” water from oil and gas wells, desalinated brackish groundwater, and imported water pumped into the state from elsewhere. Each of these suggestions carries some serious baggage:

• Purifying produced water is extremely expensive and can leave unknown substances in the water.
• Mining treatable brackish water is limited in quantity, and the energy intensive process of desalination creates substantial waste products needing safe disposal.
• Imported water requires finding a willing exporter/seller, as well as substantial piping and delivery costs.

However, all is not yet lost. The 2023 New Mexico Water Security Planning Act (72-14A NMSA) provides an opportunity for each region in the state to understand the specifics of its regional water situation, to identify the values important to the region, and to design a negotiated plan with policies and projects that, when implemented, would make for improved water longevity or sustainability.

Fulfilling that Act, of course, would require the politicians in Santa Fe to acknowledge the enormity of the Elephant, the severity of the problems, and provide funds needed for the regions to conduct their planning. While planning is hard and often contentious, failing to do so mortgages our future.

The future of New Mexico depends upon water. For New Mexico’s economic future, please coax your legislator to fund the state agencies to do the jobs and implement the laws the Legislature has assigned them.