Middle Rio Grande Depletions Are Pushing New Mexico Toward a Compact Violation
May 15, 2026
Written Public Comments to the ISC for its May 21 meeting.
Dear Chairman Sanchez, Vice-Chair Timmons, Secretary Anderson, Commission Members, and Director Riseley-White,
New Mexico’s Top Priority Water Resources Management Problem
Rio Grande Compact – Middle Rio Grande compliance ccmpliance metric history and trend
The facts are not in dispute. ISC Director Hannah Riseley-White and State Engineer General Counsel Nat Chakeres presented them plainly as invited speakers at the Water Advocates’ March 19, 2026, workshop. New Mexico carries an accrued compact debit of -132,000 acre-feet. The average annual debit is -19,800 acre-feet per year. The accrued debit limit is -200,000 acre-feet. New Mexico will violate that limit in three years if the trend continues or after one bad year.
New Mexico still has the ability to prevent a compact violation — but only through strong, proactive water resources management, and only if that management begins now. New Mexicans are far better off reordering their own affairs than drifting into a compact violation with the certainty that Texas will have its say at U.S. Supreme Court water bankruptcy proceedings.
The Middle Rio Grande is home to about half of the State’s economy and population and has the highest regional diversity. The State’s two water resources management agencies must protect the water supply that the compact provides for the economy and residents while also protecting the Middle Rio Grande and the State from the risks of Supreme Court litigation for using too much of the Lower Rio Grande’s water for too long.
The Rio Grande Compact is a perfect barrier protecting the Middle Rio Grande from the water demands of the Lower Rio Grande. A New Mexico compact violation opens the door.
The Interstate Stream Commission, A State Water-Policy-Making Body, Should Publicly Consider New Mexico’s Top Water Resources Management Problem
We are grateful that Director Riseley-White and OSE General Counsel Nat Chakeres spoke frankly about this problem at our March 19 workshop. We now urge you as a State Commission with purview over this emergency to take up the problem formally.
The Interstate Stream Commission is a State water resources planning and management policy-making body. It holds statutory authority and responsibility for compact compliance performance monitoring and is graded on Rio Grande Compact Compliance accrued debit status by a Legislative Finance Committee performance measure. That performance measure scale should now be deep in the red. The ISC also has a physical role and substantial funding to reduce Middle Rio Grande conveyance losses that annually worsen New Mexico’s compact deliveries.
This Commission Should Be Briefed, Deliberate, and Take Action.
We request that deliberations consider public comment before choosing or endorsing the State’s approach to prevent the dangerously close compact violation.
The State is quite late in addressing this problem. Because OSE and ISC are late, ISC Commissioners should consider whether resources should be marshalled for a more active compliance program — especially given that Director Riseley-White and State Engineer General Counsel Chakeres announced in March that staff would proceed slowly, through voluntary negotiations, with no metering order forthcoming until late in the year.
Several ISC Commissioners have openly expressed a preference for priority administration, yet the Commission has never been briefed on whether or how it could apply here, what the alternatives are, or what the consequences of each path might be.
We are convinced that water users will not consider the necessary sacrifices they must make Rto prevent a compact violation unless they are motivated by a potentially worse outcome in the absence of their participation, such as cutting off all non-essential uses for a period of time to make compact deliveries.
The Active Water Resources Management program provides a NM Supreme Court-approved legal framework. The Commission must take actions now to protect the Middle Rio Grande water supply in accordance with its statutory mission and broad powers “to protect and to do any and all other things necessary to protect, conserve and develop the waters and stream systems of this state.” Section 72-14-3 NMSA 1978.
Requested ISC Actions
New Mexico Water Advocates calls on the Interstate Stream Commission to take the following steps without further delay:
First, schedule a formal public briefing at the next Commission meeting on the state of compact compliance — the debt, the trend, the trajectory to violation, and the consequences of failure.
Second, deliberate and take a position on the management alternatives available to prevent a violation, including the regulatory authorities the State Engineer holds and has not yet exercised.
Third, direct staff to report publicly and on a regular schedule on progress — or the lack of it.
Fourth, become transparent about this problem in the name of advancing public education and public understanding of the issues, choices, and consequences and the quantity of depletions that must be stopped or prevented to maintain compliance.
The compact violation now in view would bring severe legal and economic consequences to New Mexico — consequences New Mexicans would live with for decades, administered by a federal court that does not forgive debt. This Commission has the authority, the responsibility, and the obligation to the public to address that threat openly. This problem must have a solution framework. ISC must lead its development.
The moment demands it.
Sincerely,
/s/
New Mexico Water Advocates
The New Mexico Water Advocates submitted this public comment to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission on May 15, 2026. The ISC requires written public comment 72 hours in advance of its meetings but does not read comments into the record, post them publicly, or take oral public comment. It is the only state agency in New Mexico known to operate this way. We are publishing this comment here so that our 1,700-plus members, subscribers, and the interested public have access to it.
The United Nations has a name for what is happening to Albuquerque’s water supply. In January 2026, the UN’s think tank on water published a report concluding that the world has entered an era of global water bankruptcy. New Mexico is not exempt. The term was formally defined this year to be more precise and descriptive than the generalized term “water crisis.” Water bankruptcy is a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it.
New Mexico Water Advocates submitted a White Paper to the Authority Board at its April 22 meeting requesting six actions to prevent Albuquerque’s pending water bankruptcy.
The first step in preventing water bankruptcy and adapting accordingly is to recognize the problem; that is, face the facts. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Albuquerque discovered and faced the relevant facts of the aquifer underneath it that was its sole water supply source. Now, reduced river flows of the Rio Grande and the three headwater streams since the turn of the century demonstrate the 1990s assumptions, which were also the Water 2120 assumptions, are invalid, overtaken by climate change. Albuquerque must again face the facts and adapt. As the 1997 Albuquerque Water Resources Management Strategy explicitly called for, Albuquerque should also help its neighbors.
Water 2120 Doesn’t Work with Climate Heating and Aridification
In 2016, the Authority adopted Water 2120, a 100-year water plan, concluding a major effort by Water Authority staff and several consultants. Water 2120 authors assumed that future water supplies would resemble the past — a condition water planners call stationarity. That assumption was visibly failing by the time Water 2120 was approved. It is now visible as dry riverbed sand and cracked mud in Valencia County. The river will dry at Albuquerque in May until drenching monsoon rains arrive, if they do.
Water 2120’s water supply strategy depends on the federal San Juan-Chama Project, which delivers water from the Colorado River basin through Heron Reservoir to augment municipal and irrigation water supplies in the Middle Rio Grande. The Authority has perpetual contract rights to half of the Project’s annual yield.
Direct drinking water use of the Authority’s share has two requirements. Both are failing simultaneously. Heron Reservoir ended 2025 at 7% of capacity, a record low. The absence of winter snowpack resulted in this year’s inflows to the reservoir also setting a record low. Runoff is over. Native Rio Grande flows are so low that the Water Authority’s river water treatment plant shut down on April 24 due to lack of sufficient streamflow to allow its diversions to continue. Since 2020, the drinking water plant has been unable to treat water for a sufficient number of days per year to meet its annual drinking water production targets.
The Rio Grande Compact Clock Is Running
New Mexico currently carries a cumulative Rio Grande Compact debt of 132,000 acre-feet, accruing at roughly 20,000 acre-feet per year. A plain-terms Compact violation occurs at 200,000 acre-feet. At the current rate, that is three years away.
A Middle Rio Grande Compact violation will cause another Texas lawsuit heard by the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court again will become New Mexico’s water bankruptcy judge and Texas will have its full say.
The Rio Grande Compact obligates New Mexico to deliver water to Elephant Butte Reservoir for the Lower Rio Grande’s water users. Every Middle Rio Grande diversion from the river, every pumping well, and increased evapotranspiration from the river and riparian corridor draws against a common Middle Rio Grande legally available water supply that is smaller than the total demand. In retrospect, this trend has been visible for many years.
The Water Authority contributes a relatively small fraction of the Middle Valley’s total depletions. However, a compact violation is extremely risky and will bring big problems for the Water Authority. Water 2120 doesn’t recognize the overarching compact limits on total depletions or the effects of Water Authority planning decisions and operations on compact compliance.
The Water Authority Board Must Act
The Water Authority’s executive director has made recent public representations that the Authority can serve new high-water-use industrial customers. The Authority plans to consume more of its treated wastewater for non-potable irrigation that will increase its net depletions of the river. These public representations and plans to consume more and more of the Authority’s return flows for irrigation are contradicted by the Authority’s 2026 Operating Plan that recognizes the severe constraints of this year’s hydrology and the requirement for unsustainable groundwater pumping. Staff reported to the Board that fewer wells are currently in operating condition and that two old high production wells had recently collapsed and were ruined.
The Authority also faces a growing gap between revenue and expenses, a substantial backlog of deferred facility rehabilitation, and over $140 million in unexpended rehabilitation appropriations while costly failures divert resources from planned work. The Authority’s financial advisors are recommending new fixed monthly customer fees and increased debt financing at a time when debt service is already the Authority’s largest annual expense. The Authority’s revenue model depends on water and sewer commodity sales — creating a structural conflict between the conservation the situation demands and the revenue the Authority needs to pay its bills.
Water 2120’s foundational assumptions have failed. The Board has the White Paper. The NM Water Advocates look forward to the Authority’s response.
What We Are Asking — And What You Can Do
The New Mexico Water Advocates’ White Paper requests six actions by the Water Authority board:
a formal, transparent reassessment of Water 2120;
an inclusive stakeholder process to revise planning assumptions;
a suspension of the Authority’s representations about serving new high-water-use industrial customers until future Authority water supply adequacy is publicly assessed;
a reassessment of the current Drought Stage designations and the responses each stage requires;
a conservation focus on high water users and non-functional turf; and
a policy of cooperation and mutual sacrifice to prevent a Compact violation.
The New Mexico Water Advocates are asking elected and appointed leaders at every level to engage honestly with what the data show.
We are asking you to make your voice heard — with the Authority Board, with your elected representatives, and in your community. The Middle Rio Grande’s water future will be decided in the next few years. The choice to adapt to prevent water bankruptcy is still available. The time to act is now.
In July 2025, drying in the Rio Grande had reached the Montaño Bridge in Albuquerque. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)
Last summer, the Middle Rio Grande through Albuquerque dried for about 50 days. This year, the river will dry again — as early as May.
Irrigation season will be short, fire danger will be high and Albuquerque’s largest drinking water utility will again switch from diverting river water to relying exclusively on groundwater.
Long-term data reveals clear warming and drying trends, said Jason Casuga, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s chief engineer and CEO. And New Mexicans experience those changes in their daily lives.
In mid-March, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District started “charging” the system. Irrigators should schedule water deliveries in the coming weeks. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)
“People see a river drying that they didn’t used to see dry, see mountains that are through their snowpack earlier than they’ve ever seen,” Casuga said. “Maybe some folks can debate why that’s happening, but the reality is there is less water here now.”
With an early heat wave gripping the watershed, the Middle Rio Grande might swell in the short-term, but by the end of April or early May, Casuga said, things will “look very bleak.”
Systems are breaking down right now because the hydrology of the river is “just that bad.” That calls for hard conversations, he said, about farming practices, managing invasive plant species in the bosque, complying with the Rio Grande Compact, and much more.
“Nobody has to agree, but we have to be willing to have the conversations and then push our leaders to make good decisions,” he said. “We can’t just go to sleep and hope it gets better tomorrow. We have to change, and that change needs to be flexible.”
Water security at ‘grave risk’
The terminus of the state’s largest river in Albuquerque, captured in August 2025. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)
For more than two decades, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office leased and released water from upstream reservoirs for endangered species and to keep water flowing through Albuquerque. Supplementing the river that way “kind of masked the effects of drought, of a warmer climate,” the agency’s Water Operations Supervisor Carolyn Donnelly told Source NM.
“For many years, we’d have a bad snow year but (people) still saw in Albuquerque, the river flow. So, they could think, ‘It’s not that bad,'” said Donnelly. “But really, it was that bad.”
Now, there’s no water to spare in the watershed’s reservoirs. On the Chama River, a tributary of the Rio Grande, Abiquiu Reservoir is 61% full; El Vado, 13% full; and Heron, 7% full. That’s the lowest Heron Reservoir has been since it was filled in 1971.
The Rio Grande Basin is coming off its warmest winter on record, with the mountains suffering a major snow drought. But overconsumption was already putting water security on the Rio Grande at “grave risk,” according to a study released late last year. That study of the watershed in the U.S. and Mexico revealed that 85% of the water used in New Mexico from the Rio Grande is “fundamentally unsustainable.”
Former New Mexico Interstate Stream Commissioner Norm Gaume believes New Mexico’s overuse of water in the Middle Rio Grande “compromises the water security of the entire state.” And he thinks New Mexico is headed into another “compact battle,” like the 12-year-long U.S. Supreme Court battle on the Lower Rio Grande.
Under this year’s “dire” conditions, the state will have an even harder time complying with the Rio Grande Compact, said Gaume, president of New Mexico Water Advocates.
Already, the state is under-delivering to water users in southern New Mexico and Texas, creating additional legal restrictions for water managers. New Mexico’s current debit to Texas exceeds 132,000-acre feet of water, and it’s expected to keep growing.
And while the state might experience a healthy monsoon or robust snowpack from year to year, the long-term trend toward less water in the region’s streams, rivers and reservoirs is clear. “This is not a drought, this is aridification,” said Gaume. “Droughts are climatic, but they’re expected to end. This is not expected to end, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine it will.”
The public needs political leaders to tackle the Middle Rio Grande’s problems as an “existential threat,” he said. “As a water resources engineer, I have that training, but I also have this deep respect and love for rivers,” he said. “Water is a life force. It doesn’t just come out of a tap. It exists naturally, and we are totally failing in our stewardship responsibilities — not only to our detriment and the detriment of the natural world, but to the detriment of our progeny.”
A coyote searches for water in the channel of the dry Rio Grande in Albuquerque in August 2025. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)
Climate change dealing a ‘bum hand’
The Middle Rio Grande includes two “types” of water in the system: water native to the Rio Grande watershed and its tributaries; and San Juan-Chama water, contributions from the Colorado River system diverted into the Rio Grande via Heron Reservoir and the Chama River.
After the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Plant came online in 2009, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo Water Utility Authority could draw that water directly from the river, the aquifer in Albuquerque “rebounded really well,” according to Mark Kelly, the utility’s water resources division manager. In certain parts of the city, groundwater levels rose by about 40 feet.
Since the utility has regularly shifted back to groundwater pumping in the summer, that upward trajectory has “flattened off.”
Climate change is “dealing us a bum hand” in terms of snowpack that makes it through the series of tunnels, diversions and siphons that moves water from the Colorado River system into the Rio Grande’s San Juan-Chama Project, said Kelly.
Already, the utility’s 100-year water resources management strategy accounts for a hotter, drier future. But the plan is being updated, Kelly said, “to make sure that some of the assumptions we’ve made in terms of climate change and demands are still aligned with our total water portfolio.”
In the meantime, the Middle Rio Grande will keep drying, often for longer expanses and durations. Fish, wildlife, and habitats will suffer. The bosque’s trees will die, dry and burn. And year after year, people will become more accustomed to seeing the dry riverbed.
“It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where we are all guilty because nobody has taken leadership,” said Gaume. “As a society, we should know better — and we do know better — but we haven’t acted yet.”
When the Rio Grande dries, as it did in Albuquerque in the summer of 2025, plants and wildlife suffer, farmers can’t receive water, and deliveries to downstream users are affected. (Laura Paskus for Source NM)
The Rio Grande at Its Driest: What 85 Years of Compact Data Show
Every year since 1940, federal and state water managers have accounted for the Rio Grande waters flowing past the Otowi highway bridge to Los Alamos. That annual volume determines how the river’s flow is allocated under the Rio Grande Compact — which is federal and state law that governs water sharing among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. The amount of water New Mexico must deliver for all uses downstream of Elephant Butte Reservoir — in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico — depends directly on how much water arrives at Otowi. The gauge is, in the most literal sense, where the Middle Rio Grande’s annual water entitlement and delivery obligations are set.
Each of the three graphics below reveals important facts that are not well known.
The current drought is not without precedent — the infamous drought of the 1950s was comparably severe
The first graphic spans the complete Compact era from 1940 to the present. It shows that the current drought is not without precedent — the infamous drought of the 1950s was comparably severe.
New Mexico has lost roughly one third of its Rio Grande water supply over the past fifty years
The second graphic examines the most recent five decades and reveals an alarming fact: New Mexico has lost roughly one third of its Rio Grande water supply over the past fifty years. The 1980s and 1990s were anomalously wet — a period that filled reservoirs and fostered a false sense of the river’s water supply blessings. Since then the basin has trended sharply dryer. El Vado and Elephant Butte Reservoirs have been essentially emptied, and Abiquiu Reservoir has been drawn down by roughly half — all in an effort to sustain water supplies and meet new federal endangered species requirements.
It has not been enough. New Mexico entered the current dry era holding substantial accrued delivery credits under the Compact. All credits have been consumed. Since 2018, New Mexico’s cumulative delivery deficit has risen to -132,000 acre-feet. This is a legally binding State of New Mexico water debt to Lower Rio Grande that has accrued over the last seven years.
The third graphic completes the analysis by placing the most recent 17 years in direct comparison with the driest 17-year period previously recorded under the Compact, with full accounting of San Juan-Chama Project imports, contractor entitlements, and the graphically alarming storage history of Heron Reservoir.
The data support two conclusions that the third graphic documents in detail.
Principal Finding:
The 17-year period 2009–2025 is, in terms of native Rio Grande basin water yield, as dry as the driest 17-year period ever recorded since annual Rio Grande Compact water delivery accounting began. Native basin flows at Otowi averaged 716,000 acre-feet per year over the recent period versus 703,000 acre-feet per year from 1948–1964 — a difference of only 1.8%. Both periods produced native flows above one million acre-feet in exactly three of seventeen years. Strip out San Juan-Chama Project imports, and the two eras are hydrologically indistinguishable.
Principal Conclusion
The effective water-supply stress today is far greater than the raw Otowi flow numbers suggest, or than it has ever been
Groundwater pumping from aquifers hydraulically connected to the Rio Grande exerts a persistent depletive effect on surface flows that was much lower during 1948–1964 historic dry period, making the effective water-supply stress today far greater than the raw Otowi flow numbers suggest or than it has ever been.
During the 1948–1964 historical driest period, the Middle Rio Grande corridor had far fewer people and cities were much smaller: Albuquerque’s population in 1950 was roughly 97,000; today the metropolitan area exceeds 900,000. Municipal, industrial, agricultural, and riparian water demands are dramatically greater today, and rising temperatures have increased evapotranspiration throughout the basin. Decades of heavy pumping from the hydraulically connected shallow alluvial aquifer and the underlying Santa Fe Group aquifer have drawn down water tables along certain reaches of the Middle Rio Grande, causing greater losses from the river.
The third graphic is the most important. It presents this evaluation’s bottom line findings and conclusions, including the stark storage history of the San Juan Chama Project and the recent diminishment of its annual contributions to a reliable Middle Rio Grande water supply.
Please click each graphic in sequence to see the situation and pay particular attention to the third.
Please be sure to click this thumbnail for the principal finding and conclusion including an alarming graphic pertaining to the reliability of San Juan Chama Project imported water supplies.
If analyses similar to this one are publicly available, I am unaware, so I invested the time to laboriously assemble the data. One element of the third graphic, for example, required specific data from the second page of 17 Rio Grande Compact annual accounting sheets posted as PDF images on the OSE/ISC website. The same documents are available as images from Colorado and Texas institutions.
No compact state, or the Bureau of Reclamation, or the Rio Grande Compact Commission has produced a digital dataset suitable for analysis of this rich data set. Note that the Interstate Stream Commission’s 2019 Water Data Act responsibilities would have the agency assemble all the pertinent annual terms for historical Rio Grande Compact accounting into a digital data set.
Comments and questions are welcomed.
Certification
I produced this short essay and the three HTML graphic web pages for public information using AI tools. I believe this essay and the HTML graphics presented herein are entirely accurate.
This is shaping up to be one of the driest years on record. Snowpack across the Rio Grande basin is near record lows. Elephant Butte Reservoir is very low; Elephant Butte Irrigation District farmers are expecting a four-inch 2026 irrigation allotment. Increased river flows from a big October headwaters storm, combined with the end of the Middle Rio Grande irrigation season and a large December block release from Rio Chama Reservoirs, significantly improved the Middle Rio Grande’s end-of-year compact deliveries — yet more than a fourth of that water was lost in conveyance before reaching the reservoir pool. Middle Rio Grande cumulative water delivery debt is now approaching the Rio Grande Compact’s legal cap. Texas will certainly sue when that debt limit is exceeded, if not before, bringing new U.S. Supreme Court litigation to the Middle Rio Grande.
The Middle Rio Grande Compact Crisis
The State Engineer and Interstate Stream Commission Director have named the Middle Rio Grande compact compliance situation as a crisis. The Middle Rio Grande is on a trajectory to violate the Compact within two or three years. State Engineer Elizabeth Anderson will violate state water law at Section 72-2-9.1 NMSA 1978 if her continued inaction allows that to occur. The ISC will fail to meet its mission to do everything within its broad powers to conserve and protect New Mexico water.
Join Us March 19 — Hear the State’s Plan
That is why our March 19 workshop Middle Rio Grande Compact Crisis is a must-attend event for every Middle Rio Grande resident. State Engineer General Counsel Nat Chakeres and ISC Director Hannah Riseley-White will present the State’s current hydrologic picture, including New Mexico’s Rio Grande Compact status and what it means for Tribal, agricultural, and municipal water users. The State is pursuing conservation, conveyance improvements, and expanded administration — and as Hannah writes, “working closely with major water users to develop creative solutions to meet needs while maintaining compliance with our legal obligations.” Join us. Register here.
What the Lower Rio Grande Tells Us
The featured article from our March 2026 News was written by Beth Bardwell from Las Cruces and this author to examine the Lower Rio Grande situation at the beginning of its post-litigation water management stage. Water use in the LRG has barely been affected to date by the litigation but water users there will soon dramatically feel the depth of the litigation consequences if the dry climate continues. The lessons for the Middle Rio Grande are neither abstract nor comfortable. Read the long-form article Drinking Water, Taxpayers, Pecans, and the Lower Rio Grande Settlement.
Groundwater Momentum Continues in March
Last month’s February 19 groundwater workshop with Dr. Gretel Follingstad and Dr. Maurice Hall was outstanding — the turnout, the depth of the conversation, and the community engagement it generated were exactly what New Mexico needs more of. Continue that momentum this month with two free webinars hosted by the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance. Details and registration links are in our article, Groundwater Is in Crisis — And the Experts Are Back to Talk Solutions.
The water and the consequences we will pay for ignoring its growing scarcity and our water sharing obligations are not waiting. We must stop waiting, too.
A landmark court settlement will force dramatic reductions in New Mexico groundwater pumping — and reshape who pays for water in the desert Southwest.
By Beth Bardwell and Norm Gaume
A Settlement That Changes Everything
For generations, Southern New Mexico residents and farmers have enjoyed cheap, seemingly unlimited water. That era is ending. A complex legal settlement between New Mexico, Texas, the United States, and the two major irrigation districts is expected to receive U.S. Supreme Court approval before this summer. If approved, it will become immediately effective. The consequences will be felt in every water bill, every farming operation, and every municipal water plan across the region.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit Texas filed in 2013, claiming that New Mexico groundwater users were pumping so aggressively that they depleted surface water flows legally owed to Texas. The United States joined Texas. The case wound through the courts for over a decade. New Mexico has agreed to substantially reduce groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande basin — a region that has, for years, been drawing far more water than is sustainable.
The years of cheap water are over.
The Hidden Aquifer Problem: Why Most Residents Don’t See It Coming
Freshwater has always been something of an illusion in the Chihuahuan Desert. The sole source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and daily life is underground. Unlike a reservoir, you can’t look at an aquifer and see how much is left, or how quickly it is dropping. Water flows from the tap. It is relatively cheap. The population is growing. Outwardly, everything appears fine.
N Gaume photo Nov 2025
Meanwhile, the Rio Grande — New Mexico’s major river — runs dry through most of southern New Mexico’s cities and towns. Over the last 25 years (2000–2025), the Bureau of Reclamation and farmers have released streamflow into the river below Caballo Reservoir for less than six months on average each year. The 2026 irrigation season will be worse, with EBID farmers expecting just a four-inch allotment of surface water due to very low storage in Elephant Butte Reservoir and extremely low snowpack in the Rio Grande headwaters.
Many Southern New Mexicans do not realize that Lower Rio Grande streamflow and the Rincon and Mesilla valleys’ underground aquifers are directly connected. When too much groundwater is pumped, it intercepts water that would otherwise flow downstream. That is precisely what Texas argued and what the scientific and litigation record demonstrates.
How We Got Here: The Pecan Boom and a Policy Decision That Shaped the Crisis
To understand the depth of the problem, you have to understand what grows in the valley — and why.
Historically, Lower Rio Grande farmers grew hay, vegetables, and row crops. These are seasonal crops with moderate water demands that could be fully satisfied by a full Rio Grande Project surface water supply of about three acre-feet of water per acre. Over the past several decades, that changed dramatically. Today, more than half of the acreage within Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID) — approximately 40,000 acres — is planted in pecans. Pecans are a permanent, high-water-use crop. Unlike seasonal crops, they cannot be fallowed during drought years. They require full irrigation every single year.
Pecan orchard irrigation requirements are staggering. Growing a single pecan requires more than eight gallons of water. A mature pecan orchard produces roughly 187,900 pecans per acre and consumes almost five feet of water annually — nearly twice the allotment of surface water EBID farmers can expect in a full supply year.
It takes more than eight gallons of water to grow a single pecan.
Pecan acreage had been climbing for years, but it took a dramatic leap in the early 2000s following a specific policy decision. The late Governor Bill Richardson[1] directed then-State Engineer John D’Antonio to recognize a special water right for pecan orchards — nearly five feet per acre per year. That administrative determination was subsequently affirmed in the State District Court’s ongoing Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication, locking it in. This crop-specific water right is unique due to its political origin and because it departs from New Mexico’s previously uniform practice of adjudicating a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region, based on the total crop mix.
The question that now hangs over the settlement is an uncomfortable one: farmers on the Lower Rio Grande dramatically expanded production of a permanent, high-water-use crop during a period of documented drought, declining reservoirs, and growing interstate water obligations. Was that a poor investment decision — or a calculated bet that, at the end of the day, public taxpayers would absorb the cost? See Jeremy Miller’s “The Rio Grande’s Pecan Problem: How Big Ag Is Threatening New Mexico’s Water Supply,” High Country News, September 2025.
By the Numbers: How Much Has Been Pumped
The scale of groundwater extraction in the Lower Rio Grande basin is significant. During the three years ending in 2024, groundwater users pumped an average of 281,000 acre-feet per year from the basin’s shallow alluvial aquifer and the deeper Santa Fe Group basin-fill sediments. EBID farmers account for 83% of that total — approximately 235,000 acre-feet per year. Municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) users represent the second-largest share at 14%, or roughly 40,000 acre-feet per year. Dairy farms account for 2.3%. These figures come from this table in the State Engineer’s Lower Rio Grande Water Master Report for 2024.
The cumulative impact of this extraction is substantial. State Engineer experts estimate that approximately 250,000 acre-feet have been drained from the shallow alluvial aquifer that underlies the valley floor. Another 1,000,000 acre-feet have been removed from the deeper Santa Fe Group aquifer system. The voids left by this pumping are being partially refilled by gravity flow from the Rio Grande itself — meaning the river is being pulled underground rather than flowing to Texas.
To offset the drawdown’s effect on Rio Grande streamflow, estimates suggest New Mexico would need to replenish approximately 750,000 acre-feet into its combined aquifers. That is roughly equivalent to three full years of current total groundwater diversions across the entire Lower Rio Grande basin.
On the municipal side, proactive conservation programs have kept MDCI pumping relatively stable despite population growth — a meaningful achievement that stands in notable contrast to the dramatic expansion of agricultural pumping. The State Engineer chart below illustrates the divergence between agricultural and municipal pumping trends over time.
Office of the State Engineer slide showing total agricultural and lumped non-agricultural groundwater pumping trends
Aquifer conditions and groundwater pumping levels, 1951–2021. Green lines reflects irrigation pumping; black lines reflects municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) pumping. The lowest irrigation pumping was in 1985, less than 25,000 acre-feet. 2021 irrigation pumping was 280,000 acre-feet. Source: NM State Engineer.
What the Settlement Requires: Four Consequences for Southern New Mexico
The settlement is nearly finalized. When the Supreme Court approves it, four major changes will follow.
New Mexico Must Retire Groundwater Rights
The Settlement requires New Mexico to purchase and retire 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater rights from willing sellers. The State must acquire half of those rights by 2030; the remainder by 2035. This represents approximately 5–7% of current total groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande — the equivalent of retiring roughly 9,240 groundwater-irrigated acres within EBID, or 83% of the City of Las Cruces’s annual groundwater pumping.
These retirements are a starting point, not a finish line. Achieving full compact compliance will ultimately require groundwater pumping reductions well beyond this to meet other specific settlement requirements.
New Mexico Taxpayers Will Foot a $150 Million Bill
The State Engineer estimates that implementing the settlement will cost New Mexico taxpayers more than $150 million. Approximately $27 million in additional public funds is being spent this year and the following two years paying EBID farmers to fallow their fields — leaving irrigated land unplanted to reduce pumping.
There are legitimate arguments on both sides of using public funds to compensate private agricultural operations for adjusting their water use. What is harder to defend is that the conditions requiring this expenditure — a pecan-dominated landscape in a water-constrained desert, during a documented period of drought and compact obligation — were foreseeable, and in some respects policy-enabled.
Water Will Cost More — for Everyone
Southern New Mexico residents are facing higher water bills regardless of whether they live in a city or run a business. Farmers will suffer shortages. The reason is rooted in water rights priority.
The settlement formally recognizes a 1903 priority date for EBID’s surface and groundwater rights of 3.024 acre-feet per acre. That portion of EBID farmers’ total diversion rights is senior to almost all others. Under New Mexico’s constitution and water law, junior groundwater rights — including those held by the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — cannot legally impair senior rights.
The settlement requires New Mexico, EBID, and the United States to negotiate with the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — the affected water users participating as amici — to develop an alternative administration plan that would replace strict priority administration. That deadline is October 2026.[2] If those negotiations fail, strict priority water law prevails: junior municipal users get cut before a single senior agricultural right is touched. The negotiations are not open to the public.
In dry years such as 2021, 2022, and 2025, fully satisfying EBID’s senior rights would require more water than New Mexico’s total share of Caballo Dam releases, meaning agricultural groundwater pumping may need to be partially curtailed. In better years, EBID rights will claim all the water. As a consequence, cities may need to pay EBID farmers to reduce their pumping or develop alternative water supplies — none of which are inexpensive.
Possible alternatives include more aggressive municipal conservation, importing groundwater from outside the basin, reuse of treated wastewater effluent, and desalination of brackish water. All of these approaches are in active use in El Paso. All of them cost significantly more than the groundwater Southern New Mexico currently relies on.
More Rio Grande Streamflow — But Perhaps Not for Wildlife
One potential benefit of the settlement is that Southern New Mexico residents and wildlife may see more water flowing in the Rio Grande as New Mexico works to meet its delivery obligations to Texas. The 105-mile stretch of river that has run bone-dry for six months of most recent years could see more sustained flows.
However, even this outcome may be more limited than it appears. The Bureau of Reclamation and the NM Interstate Stream Commission are investing millions of dollars helping EBID improve operational efficiency and capture “surplus” stormwater — the wild water once allowed to flow freely in the Lower Rio Grande. This water, which once supported riparian habitat and downstream ecosystems, will be systematically captured for groundwater recharge. The environmental benefits of increased streamflow may be largely offset before the water ever reaches wildlife.
What This Means for You
The Lower Rio Grande Settlement is not an abstract legal proceeding. It is a turning point in how water is managed, priced, and prioritized across Southern New Mexico. The aquifer that supplies drinking water to Las Cruces, Doña Ana County, and dozens of smaller communities is connected to the same system that has been heavily drawn down for decades. The bill for that drawdown is now coming due — in court-mandated pumping reductions, in taxpayer-funded buyouts, and in the rising cost of water for every household in the region.
Southern New Mexico has long operated under the assumption that water from the ground is reliable, cheap, and essentially unlimited. The Settlement forces a reckoning with a different reality: that the desert’s water supply was never inexhaustible, that decisions made over the past two decades have accelerated its depletion, and that state taxpayers and Lower Rio Grande water users will broadly share the costs of those decisions.
Beth Bardwell is a water policy researcher and writer focusing on the Rio Grande basin. Her work appears in publications covering water law, environmental policy, and Southwestern water management.
Norm Gaume is a retired water engineer and former director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
[1] The State Engineer’s offers in the Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication recognized a unique, crop-specific diversion right of nearly five acre-feet per acre for pecan orchards — a significant departure from New Mexico’s historic practice of recognizing a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region based on the total crop mix. Among all adjudications statewide, the pecan offer stands as the outlier. This crop-specific right emerged during the Richardson administration. The political origins of the pecan crop water right in the Lower Rio Grande remain incompletely documented in the public record. The Salopek family, operators of one of the largest pecan farming operations in the region, were prominent stakeholders during this period. Co-author Norm Gaume has firsthand knowledge of these events from his work with the Office of the State Engineer during this time, including a contemporaneous conversation with the late Mark Salopek in which Salopek described the political origins of the water right.
HAFC Final Decisions Undercut New Mexico’s Ability to Manage Its Water Crisis
House Budget Reported Out of Finance Committee Cuts Planning, Modernization, Staffing, and River Maintenance
The House Appropriations and Finance Committee (HAFC) took a step forward by improving funding for the Office of the State Engineer and Interstate Stream Commission. But the committee’s final decisions amount to fiscal malpractice—leaving dangerous gaps in water management and failing to fund actions now that will cost New Mexico multiples more later. Those costs escalate sharply if continued underdeliveries to Elephant Butte trigger a new Rio Grande Compact violation. This table summarizes all the special appropriations to the State Engineer/Interstate Stream Commission that are in the Committee Substitute for HB2, available at nmlegis.gov
Major Rio Grande Crises
The State Engineer requested $50 million to reduce Lower Rio Grande depletions and implement the interstate settlement. That amount remains essential. After hearing the State Engineer’s budget presentation on November 20, 2025, HAFC Chair Nathan Small said the request “sounds right to me.” Deferring or cutting this funding does not avoid costs—it postpones action until the consequences are far more expensive to fix, particularly if continued underdeliveries to Elephant Butte trigger enforcement, emergency measures, or renewed interstate litigation. Anything less increases New Mexico’s legal exposure and financial risk down the road.
Water Planning and Modernization
HAFC also cut in half the OSE/ISC $5 million request for water planning, agency modernization, and work on the Governor’s 50-Year Water Action Plan. That reduction will delay implementation of the unanimously passed 2023 regional Water Security Planning Act. Not only will that postpone deployment of planning needed to seek well-informed regional solutions, but it continues the Legislature’s pattern of failing to fund the good water laws it has passed this century.
Middle Rio Grande River Channel Maintenance
More troubling, HAFC’s decision to eliminate all funding for essential Middle Rio Grande river channel maintenance is foolhardy. In November and December, the river channel absorbed roughly half of unusually large non-irrigation-season flows, including a major pulse of unused Pueblo water. Failing to maintain conveyance guarantees preventable losses that otherwise would improve deliveries to Elephant Butte.
Supporting Institutional Capacity
Finally, HAFC refused to fund the six additional State Engineer staff needed to administer wet water in the Middle and Lower Rio Grande and to implement three Indian water rights settlements. These are core state responsibilities: Section 72-2-9.1 NMSA 1978 directs the State Engineer to act in recognition that interstate stream compact compliance is imperative, and settlement implementation is work only the State has authority to perform. Failing to fund these functions risks serious legal, financial, and water-supply consequences for New Mexicans statewide.
What a Winter Rio Chama Release Reveals About the Middle Rio Grande
Background: Why the Water Was Stored
Last spring, state and federal water agencies stored approximately 34,000 acre-feet of Rio Chama water to assure a full supply for the six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos’ prior and paramount water rights. Less than 5,000 acre-feet was ultimately used by the Pueblos, about 2,000 acre-feet was lost to evaporation over the storage period, and roughly 26,000 acre-feet remained in storage at the start of winter.
That remaining water was released this month in a planned winter block release.
The Release and River Operations
The release originated at Abiquiu Dam and appears clearly in the Cochiti Dam release as rapid step increases in flow, a sustained six-day release of approximately 1,400 cubic feet per second (cfs), and a more gradual step-down when the release ended. The Rio Chama release flowed into the Rio Grande upstream of Cochiti Reservoir, where Cochiti Dam operations reflected the combined inflows. Cochiti Dam released 2,000 cfs for six days, also. This was by far the highest flow since 2023.
USGS gage data provide a clear picture of the timing and shape of this release as it entered and traversed the Middle Rio Grande system.¹
What these Hydrographs Show
As the pulse moved downstream, it weakened, spread out, and arrived later at each successive river gage below Cochiti Dam. By the time it reached Elephant Butte Narrows, only a small fraction of the released water remained in the river channel.
This behavior is consistent with a river that is hydraulically well-connected to heavily pumped tributary aquifers and dried over extensive distances and durations during the record dryness of early- and mid-2025. Large volumes of groundwater were pumped this past summer by municipal supply wells, domestic wells in and near the floodplain, agricultural wells, and phreatophytic riparian vegetation. Together, those large uses lowered groundwater levels in both the shallow river alluvium and the deeper aquifers beneath metropolitan Albuquerque.
As the surface water of the Cochiti Dam block release moved downstream, increasing portions of the swollen river flow left the river channel. Driven by gravity, it seeped through the river’s bed and banks to recharge the connected but depleted shallow aquifer storage space. The gaps between adjacent upstream and downstream gages illustrate these losses, accumulating reach by reach.²
Why This Winter Releases Is Revealing
Winter conditions make this behavior easier to observe. Irrigation diversions are absent, riparian vegetation is largely dormant, and evaporation from the river surface is small. Under these conditions, losses observed between gages have no plausible destinations other than groundwater recharge and temporary bank storage.
The hydrographs also show delay. Peaks arrive days later downstream, and in some cases downstream flows briefly exceed the contemporaneous Cochiti Dam release. This reflects travel time and temporary storage in the river channel and adjacent aquifers, not the appearance of new inflow.³
What Counts for Compact Accounting
Only water that actually reaches Elephant Butte Reservoir and increases the net volume stored or released from there counts toward New Mexico’s water delivery obligations under the Rio Grande Compact. Compact deliveries are accounted as the sum of the net annual change in Elephant Butte storage and total annual releases from Elephant Butte Dam . Daily reservoir storage volume data needed to complete that calculation are not currently available online so this analysis relies on the reservoir inflow measurement instead. Official accounting results will be available only after the federal agencies approve their provisional data and the Rio Grande Compact Commission approves the accounting. Official results are expected in early spring 2026.⁴
In the meantime, Middle Rio Grande delivery debt continues to accumulate. At the real-time flows shown in the graphic above, today’s under-delivery is approximately 90 acre-feet.
End Notes and Disclaimers
¹ Data limitations. USGS streamflow data are provisional. Several gage locations on the Middle Rio Grande present difficult hydraulic and sediment conditions that limit measurement accuracy and precision. All observations and interpretations presented here should remain roughly accurate as the provisional data are reviewed and finalized. The author’s judgment is that the data set is internally consistent, which supports confidence in this early interpretation.
² Attribution of losses. Attribution of observed surface-water losses to groundwater recharge is based on hydrologic inference, system behavior, and the absence of significant winter surface-water diversions. This analysis does not represent a quantified groundwater balance or a formal causal determination.
³ Delay and return flows. Some delayed return of water from bank storage or groundwater back to the river may occur over time. The timing and magnitude of any such return cannot be determined from the available data. In any case, unless it adds measurably to the volume of water in Elephant Butte Reservoir this year, it won’t be counted in 2025.
⁴ Compact accounting. Daily or interim delivery estimates reflect the author’s qualifications. Those estimates are published here for timely science- and data-driver reporting to the NM Water Advocates readers. Official results are determined annually and are subject to Commission approval, usually in late March each year.
At winter’s end early this year, the snowpack was low; the spring runoff forecast was dismal. Two federal agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Reclamation, stored all the native Rio Chama runoff in El Vado and Abiquiu to ensure a full supply for the six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos prior and paramount water rights. Of the approximately 34,000 acre-feet of water stored, 13% was used and 5% evaporated. Winter arrived again with 26,000 acre-feet remaining in storage.
Federal and state water agencies planned the release of this water. This article summarizes the fate of the release as the water flowed downstream.
A block release of the remaining 26,000 acre-feet of stored water began November 30. Water agencies intended that it flow unused into Elephant Butte Reservoir to reduce this year’s large underdelivery of the water that belongs to water users below Elephant Butte Dam. As of November 24, 2025, the Rio Grande Compact accounting model showed New Mexico’s deliveries were about 39,000 acre-feet short of the delivery obligation.
The hydrographs below show vividly what happens when water is poured down losing reaches of a river. We hope the OSE and ISC will collect a complete data set of this event, analyze it, and report their technical analysis and full data set.
Superimposed USGS hydrographs_Rio Chama winter block release. NM Water Advocates graphic
Let This Set of Hydrographs Tell Their Story
Let’s start with a summary of the MRG geography.. The Cochiti Dam releases drive the downstream responses, as the hydrographs above illustrate. The step increases in Cochiti Dam releases are in response to Abiquiu Dam releases to the Rio Chama upstream. The Abiquiu Dam releases flowed down the Rio Chama to its confluence with the Rio Grande, and down the Rio Grande into Cochiti Reservoir. Cochiti Dam releases were stepped up or down once daily to match the total inflows to the reservoir.
During the block release period, the Rio Grande below Cochiti Dam gage steps up rapidly to 2,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) for six days and then steps down. The Cochiti Dam release mimics the Abiquiu Dam release on the Rio Chama, which was sustained at 1,400 cfs for six days. The difference is water from the northern Rio Grande, measured at the Rio Grande at Embudo gage.
2025: An Extremely Dry Setup.
How much of the release made it to Elephant Butte? The answer begins with the conditions leading into the release. Rio Grande flows in 2025 set record lows. The runoff was small and brief. After the runoff ended prematurely in May, the riverbed was dry through Albuquerque and more extensively downstream for several months.
River water users did their best to meet their needs with increased groundwater pumping.
Floodplain and riparian vegetation— cottonwoods, willows, salt cedar, Russian Olive — drank from the wetted soil zones above the shallow groundwater table.
How Much Made It to Elephant Butte? Peak Flows at Downstream River Gages Reveal Large Losses
Individual hydrographs show consistently lower peak flows as the block release moved down the river. The pattern is clear.
Cochiti Dam release: Peak flows of 2,000 cfs were sustained.
Bosque Farms: The peak flow is much lower, delayed, and smoothed. Comparing the flow downstream of Albuquerque with the Cochiti Dam releases shows large losses through the Albuquerque reach.
San Acacia: The peak is lower still at this river gage at the head of the Socorro Valley, but not by a huge amount. The losses between Bosque Farms and San Acacia are relatively small.
San Marcial (floodway): The peak is further reduced and delayed. The river above San Marcial suffers especially high river losses. The river channel is perched several feet above the adjacent floodplain, trapped between levees on an elevated bed of accumulating sediment.
Elephant Butte Narrows: As of December 18, only a muted remnant of the original pulse has made it Elephant Butte Reservoir as of December 18.
Reclamation’s 1950s low-flow conveyance channel at San Marcial is added to the San Marcial river flow as the total surface flow moving downstream at that river location. Both flows come together before the Narrows gage.
Comparison of the San Marcial and Elephant Butte Narrows hydrographs shows significant intervening losses as the water flows down a temporary channel dredged by amphibious excavators to the Narrows. The channel is dredged through the top layer of the thick sediment beds that accumulated when the Elephant Butte Reservoir was routinely full and the pool reached almost all the way north to San Marcial.
Summary – What the Hydrographs Show
Each downstream gage captures a smaller and flatter version of the same release, indicating significant losses in every reach. Our calculations show the river lost more than 40% of the block release.
The Embudo gage provides a steady upstream reference.
The Abiquiu release provides a controlled input.
The Cochiti release shows their combined signal.
Everything downstream shows systematic attenuation clearly visible in the curves.
The Bottom Line
The block release was intended to move Prior and Paramount stored water downstream to Elephant Butte Reservoir.
The hydrographs show that much of the water never made it.
The Middle Rio Grande took it — into the channel, the banks, the shallow aquifer, and the steady flow to deep groundwater pumping zones.
Downstream river gages reproduce the Cochiti Dam stepped pattern, particularly the steps down. You can trace the first big drop. These data show a pattern that is consistent with what would be expected after a long season with a dry river, accelerated groundwater pumping, major riparian and domestic withdrawals from the shallow aquifer, and poor channel conditions.
This is more evidence that our current water uses can’t be sustained. Sobering thoughts to consider as a new, even drier year begins.
After explicitly threatening litigation since 1997, Texas v. New Mexico was filed in 2013. The United States added its claims against New Mexico.
US Supreme Court Building Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia
On August 29, 2025, parties and amici filed a proposed settlement with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Special Master. The settlement consists of a proposed Consent Decree and four implementing agreements that establish an explicit New Mexico downstream delivery obligation for the waters released annually from Caballo Dam. Together, these legal documents total more than 130 pages. They
Establish institutional and financial responsibilities,
Create the Effective El Paso Index that New Mexico’s water deliveries must meet,
Restore New Mexico’s original 57% apportionment of Rio Grande Project water,
Limit New Mexico groundwater pumping, including state purchase of 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater rights from willing sellers,
Require detailed water measurement and accounting procedures,
Set limits on annual and cumulative water delivery debts and credits,
Trigger water allocation transfers, cumulative water underdelivery penalties, or consultation under specific circumstances, and
Leave NM’s discretion intact to continued to buy water or to regulate water uses to achieve compliance.
If approved, New Mexico must comply with numerous, difficult, and permanent requirements. New Mexico’s compliance will cause significant water user and taxpayer impacts.
Why This Analysis is Needed
The Office of the State Engineer posted the proposed settlement documents but with very limited public explanations, all of which have been before the Legislature’s interim committees. Individual requirements are addressed in multiple documents. They must be understood as an integrated whole. The agreements were negotiated as an integrated package but have not been interpreted for the interested public.
Without an official interpretation for New Mexico’s interested and affected public, understanding how the five documents work together is difficult and time-consuming. That’s the purpose of this second Water Advocates’ analysis that focuses on the proposed settlement’s compliance measures.
Understanding the Settlement
There are two parts to the Water Advocates explanation of the proposed Settlement. This article introduces our new analysis. It argues below for the State Engineer to achieve permanent compliance through State Engineer administration of diversions rather than continuing to pay NM water users to not use Texas’s water. Continuing to pay means after the ISC purchases 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater rights from willing sellers.
This article also describes the situation municipal and industrial water users face. The settlement requires negotiation to find a solution to not having enough physical water for all New Mexico users. Almost all municipal and industrial water rights were adjudicated priority dates that are junior to Elephant Butte Irrigation District’s 1903 priority date for Project water and supplemental groundwater. In recent years, New Mexico’s entire annual share of the Caballo Dam release has not been sufficient to meet the 1903 rights.
Our settlement analysis is based on the premise that a good general settlement understanding can be gained answering these questions.
How does the settlement work?
Who pays?
The analysis summarizes each of ten compliance mechanisms we identified in studying the documents. Understanding these compliance mechanisms gives a good answer to the first question above. Seven of the ten compliance measures are mechanisms to reduce water use. Six of the seven require state funding. One of the six mandates state spending to purchase and permanently retire 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater pumping rights from willing sellers. State administration by priority or the water users’ agreed alternative is the seventh.
Five settlement compliance mechanisms would require considerable continuing state funding over and above the mandatory groundwater rights purchases. The seventh measure allows the state to limit diversions in the Lower Rio Grande through regulatory action. Using water that belongs to downstream users is illegal and can be cut off through the State Engineer’s existing but unused regulatory authority.
Please consider that the costs of regulatory action to enforce against illegal water uses should be routine across New Mexico. In reality, State Engineer enforcement against illegal water use is rare.
The New Mexico Water Advocates urge New Mexico’s top water decision-makers to make the State’s water administration in accordance with law routine. We urge the Governor and Legislature to invest now in creating OSE/ISC capacity to administer and make clear the state must stop spending tens of millions routinely for short-term fallowing of irrigated lands. It’s pertinent that the ISC on December 11, 2025, approved contracts to pay $17.5 million to 163 EBID farmers to fallow about 8,300 acres for one, two, or three years.
That amount of money would go a long way if the 2026 Legislature appropriated an equivalent amount to increase the water agencies’ enforcement capacity.
Why This Matters Now
The Effective El Paso Index becomes effective on the day the U.S. Supreme Court issues the decree. New Mexico has five years to purchase and retire 9,100 acre-feet of active groundwater rights, and ten years to retire the full 18.200 acre-feet. Interim compliance with that Index and full implementation of everything the Settlement imposes on New Mexico will cost hundreds of millions. The OSE/ISC are requesting $50 million from the 2026 Legislature to get started. Additionally, the State Engineer must implement Active Water Resources Management (AWRM) regulation of diversions so that New Mexico can stop forever paying farmers to not use water that is not theirs to use.
Regardless, the settlement will have a major impact on New Mexico’s Lower Rio Grande water use and water users. Legislators, local officials, water managers, and the public all have an interest in understanding New Mexico’s many compliance obligations including the settlement’s processes, required milestones, deadline, and penalties, in addition to the state funding requirements and options.
This settlement must serve as a warning to New Mexico’s water-resource agencies, the Governor, and the Legislature’s finance committees and leadership. New Mexico’s water resources agencies don’t think or act like regulators. The settlement will teach New Mexico a painful lesson of water resources governance neglect.
Continued failure by the Office of the State Engineer to implement Active Water Resources Management as authorized by the 2003 Legislature will cause a massive taxpayer burden. Instead, the State Engineer must apply the General Rules for AWRM unanimously upheld by the NM Supreme Court in 2012. AWRM is essential to avoid draining the public purse into both the Lower and Middle Rio Grande.
Continued failure to stop ongoing depletion of the Lower Rio Grande’s Rio Grande Compact entitlement by unregulated Middle Rio Grande water uses will bring the next new SCOTUS litigation in two or three years. It’s time to stop the never-ending-saga of successive chapters of Texas v. New Mexico. State leaders collectively can stop that saga, but that requires the State to get its water management house in order and take actions, muy rápido.
New Mexico State Capitol Photo: Mike Sanchez
What About Municipal and Industrial Water Users?
One major impact of the settlement is its ultimate effect on junior water uses. The state adjudication court awarded 1903 priority dates to EBID’s share of Caballo Dam releases and for EBID farmers’ supplemental groundwater pumping required for a full annual water supply of 3.024 acre-feet. According to the State Engineer’s chief lawyer, almost all municipal and industrial water rights are junior to EBID water rights. The hydrologic record shows the total available annual surface water has been insufficient in many years this century to meet the 1903 water rights. We believe that administration involving cutting off junior uses and cutting into senior uses will be required to meet the new Effective El Paso Index.
That leaves the junior uses in the coming collision between equitable requirements for water and the hydrologic reality of insufficient water. Statutory law does not recognize these equitable requirements for water, but we believe courts will not cut off junior hospitals and schools or people from their drinking water.
The OSE and ISC are not talking about this publicly, although the topic is addressed in the Operations Settlement Agreement, Section II.B.
“Other Adjudication and Administration Issues. The United States, New Mexico, and EBID agree to negotiate in good faith among themselves and the Other Amici in New Mexico (“Other New Mexico Amici”) to seek to resolve, by no later than October 1, 2026: (1) the potential objections of the Other New Mexico Amici to the [EBID water right priorities in the] proposed amended subfile order in SSI 101; (2) other appealable issues raised by the United States’ and New Mexico’s notices of appeals in SSI 104; (3) a separate appeal filed by the City of Las Cruces in SSI 104; and (4) final decrees of subfile orders on the water rights of EBID, the City of Las Cruces, and New Mexico State University. In addition, by no later than October 1, 2026, the United States, New Mexico, and EBID agree to negotiate in good faith among themselves and with the Other New Mexico Amici on issues associated with the manner in which the New Mexico State Engineer will administer water rights determined in the LRG Adjudication, including a potential alternative administration plan that might replace strict priority administration. Nothing herein precludes the participation in the negotiations of an affected party or amicus in the adjudication.“
What About Upstream in the Middle Rio Grande?
OSE and ISC are avoiding naming this problem, also. The plain truth is that New Mexico will by its neglect cause a new violation of the Rio Grande Compact within 2 or 3 years, due to routine Middle Rio Grande use of water the Compact apportions for use below Elephant Butte Dam. This overuse is due in part to the unregulated diversions of water by the siloed water institutions named above, excessive groundwater pumping that takes water from the river, and the poor condition of the Rio Grande channel to move water downstream. If New Mexico does not stop this pending new compact violation, it will create a huge new taxpayer burden. In the end, New Mexico will be left with the same choice it faces today: to comply or to be held accountable by Texas and the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming the proposed Lower Rio Grande Consent Decree is an example, noncompliance will be met with large penalties, paid back in real, wet water.
The Public Welfare of the State
Taxpayers and downstream users will suffer from the structural mistake of legally enabling water-management silos in New Mexico, such as the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority without constraining them to act in a manner that is consistent with “the public welfare of the state.” These entities pursue their own interests while disregarding the impacts of their actions on Rio Grande Compact compliance. The plain truth is New Mexico allows actions by these siloed agencies that are “detrimental to the public welfare of the state.”
We have not acted to prevent this mess. Now we have to deal with it. It will be difficult.
Editor’s Note
We strive to provide accurate and thorough information in this analysis. We encourage you to let us know if you identify any errors or omissions. Your feedback is valuable and will help us maintain the accuracy and usefulness of this resource. Thank you for your assistance in ensuring the quality of this public reference.
