Desperate Need for State Leadership and Political Will
New Mexico’s water problems are not chronic conditions to be managed incrementally. They are acute crises, unfolding simultaneously across the state, with immediate water supply, public welfare, legal, and financial consequences. State elected leadership’s lack of political will to confront and manage them is a fundamental failure that will alter our lives and history.
Governor Lujan Grisham has one remaining opportunity to exert meaningful water-governance leadership. She must insist the 2026 Legislature fund the state’s water-resources agencies’ budgets as she recommended. The initiatives the Governor has recommended are essential to prepare New Mexico for what must be done. The Legislative Finance Committee’s parallel recommendation would leave these critical needs largely unfunded.
State elected leadership’s lack of political will to confront and manage New Mexico’s water crises is a chronic and potentially existential failure.
Rio Grande Compact compliance, groundwater administration, water rights enforcement, accounting, and institutional capacity must be funded and staffed. The consequences and the costs of continued delay are rising rapidly.
I. The OSE/ISC Budget Request to the Governor Is a Cry for Help
The September 2, 2025, budget request submitted to the Governor’s Office by the Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission[1] reads as an institutional warning and a cry for help. Taken as a whole, the funding request is an acknowledgment by the state agencies responsible for water governance that the State does not have capacity to manage the State’s physical “wet” water and avoid escalating legal and financial risk and consequences.
The combined tone of the agencies’ budget narratives was unmistakably defensive, reflecting an operating environment defined by an overwhelming workload, deadlines, penalties, and diminishing discretion. The non-recurring funding is intended to begin addressing—but not solve—New Mexico’s present and future water-supply problems.
The water-resource agencies’ budget request is shaped by relentless litigation, looming deadlines, and diminishing discretion—not optimism. The agencies face these difficult tasks:
- Complying with the costly requirements and near-term deadlines of the pending Lower Rio Grande SCOTUS settlement;
- Preventing a new Rio Grande Compact violation driven by the Middle Rio Grande’s chronic use of water owed to the Lower Rio Grande;
- Preventing groundwater mining that destroys aquifer services and leaves communities without water;
- Meeting fiduciary responsibilities to manage large cash flows, contracts, and state funding transactions; and
- Modernizing the agencies’ business practices and information technology to improve productivity.
Assuming the OSE/ISC’s FY27 budget request reflects their priorities, the agencies are deprioritizing items #3 and #5 from the list above.
II. The Governor’s Budget Recommendation: Necessary, but Not Sufficient
The Governor approved much or most of the non-recurring funding requested by the Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission, implicitly acknowledging the seriousness of the agencies’ missions and needs. That recognition matters. However, the Governor’s budget stopped short of improving the increased institutional capacity the agencies requested to respond more effectively to Middle Rio Grande water management imperatives and Indian water rights settlement implementation.
The need for this capacity is overwhelming and time-sensitive. Without it, enforcement against illegal water use, financial administration, and technical oversight will remain constrained at a moment of expanding workloads and agency expenditures and grants, shrinking supplies, and diminishing discretion.
At the same time, the State has placed increasing emphasis on treating oil field fracking waste and brackish groundwater as “new water” to support industrial development. While such efforts may facilitate specific economic projects, the costs will be prohibitively expensive for most uses. As a result, these “new water” approaches are not a feasible way to resolve Rio Grande Compact compliance, stabilize groundwater levels, or protect most New Mexico communities from shortages.
III. The Legislative Finance Committee Budget: Acute Water Crises Ignored
The Legislative Finance Committee’s budget recommendation widens the gap between New Mexico’s acute water-resource crises and the State’s capacity to confront and manage them. Only the State has the power to close that gap, but the LFC continues to deny funding. The LFC budget recommendation would generously fund speculative “new water” initiatives while providing almost nothing to address immediate statewide water-management crises and imperatives.
The LFC budget does not fund the ongoing water rights database modernization project despite the essential nature of water rights information. It provides no meaningful funding for either of New Mexico’s two Rio Grande Compact crises.
- Meeting New Mexico’s costly and demanding requirements under the pending Lower Rio Grande U.S. Supreme Court settlement, including deadlines and penalties; and
- Preventing a new, separate compact violation that would trigger renewed U.S. Supreme Court litigation, driven by the Middle Rio Grande’s water-delivery debt rapidly accrued since 2018.
IV. Lower Rio Grande Compact Compliance: Immediate, Enforceable Obligations
The pending Lower Rio Grande settlement is ending more than a decade of costly U.S. Supreme Court litigation with Texas, joined against New Mexico by the United States. The settlement’s specific, enforceable water delivery accounting and requirements will be in immediate effect after Court approval expected in 2026.
The settlement imposes specific requirements with near-term deadlines and penalties for excessive cumulative under deliveries. New Mexico must deliver water to pay the onerous penalties and remedy the under deliveries quickly.
New Mexico shall purchase from willing sellers and retire 9,100 acre-feet per year of active groundwater pumping (that undermines the river’s flows) within five years and a total of 18,200 acre-feet per year in 10 years. That will be insufficient to meet new requirements for El Paso deliveries during sustained dry climatic conditions.
The settlement requires a plan for adhering to El Paso delivery requirements that is in legal accordance with the facts and hydrologic reality. The vast majority of municipal and industrial groundwater rights in the Lower Rio Grande are junior to the adjudicated 1903 priority date of EBID farmers’ rights to a full supply. In future dry years—such as 2025, and what 2026 appears to be bringing—Elephant Butte Irrigation District farmers will have insufficient supply to meet their 1903 senior rights because pumping a full supply would illegally deplete the river. They must cut back to meet El Paso delivery requirements.
Under those circumstances, all junior uses will be out of priority, though judges likely will refuse to cut off water for schools, hospitals, and humans’ basic needs. The settlement authorizes EBID’s water to be used to meet needs other than irrigation but also depends on transactions with EBID’s willing sellers or leases.
The State is required to figure all of that out. It has started to do so, but behind closed doors. Within two years, the State must produce a comprehensive work plan for permanent groundwater retirements, replacement supplies, accounting, enforcement, and impacts to junior users.
V. Middle Rio Grande: Preventing an Imminent Compact Violation
The Middle Rio Grande now presents a separate and immediate compact compliance emergency that demands decisive state action. Recent chronic overuse there of surface water and hydrologically connected groundwater is depleting Texas’s share of the total annual flows entering the Middle Rio Grande. Cumulative annual delivery deficits that have occurred since 2018 have placed New Mexico at near-term danger of a new Rio Grande Compact violation, within one to three years.
Violation of specific limits on the Middle Rio Grande’s accrued water debt will breach the barrier the Rio Grande Compact creates between the Lower and Middle Rio Grande regions. The result would be what Sen. Pat Woods publicly said he feared: “the Hatfields and the McCoys.”[2]
Preventing this outcome requires active water resources management now: substantial ongoing reductions in Middle Rio Grande depletions, curtailment of illegal uses, improved metering and measurement of water uses, driven by sustained state effort. Preventing a second compact crisis is essential—and failure to act is a grave and avoidable error.
VI. Groundwater: Preserving Aquifer Function Where No Alternatives Exist
New Mexico has only one managed aquifer. Yet in large areas of the state, groundwater is the only available water supply, supporting communities, agriculture, and local economies. New Mexico depends on groundwater more than any other state. Many New Mexico aquifers have been pumped for more than a century but today we have only a limited understanding of how much water is left and how fast it is being depleted.
New Mexicans deserve to know how much groundwater remains, how fast it is being depleted, and what levels of use are sustainable if aquifers are to continue serving future generations. That information does not yet exist at the scale or resolution required for responsible governance. Without it, continued pumping risks the economic consequence of running low or out of water.
New Mexico must accelerate its long-standing but underfunded aquifer mapping program and a new groundwater resilience and security planning effort equal in importance to surface-water compact compliance. Managing groundwater to preserve aquifer function is not a discretionary environmental goal—it is essential infrastructure planning for regions with no other water supply. Continued delay guarantees avoidable loss and future crisis.
Conclusion: Political Will, Governance, and a Closing Window
The water crises confronting New Mexico are not the result of uncertainty or lack of knowledge. They reflect political avoidance—resistance to regulation and enforcement, refusal to acknowledge limits, and chronic underinvestment in the institutions responsible for governing scarcity. That avoidance is no longer tenable.
Every region of the state is using more water than can be sustained. Compact compliance risks are immediate in both the Lower and Middle Rio Grande, groundwater depletion threatens communities with no alternative supply, and governance systems are falling further behind reality. Delay now increases costs, legal exposure, and the likelihood that the Courts will impose their decisions consistent with Texas’ arguments and damage claims.
The Governor and legislative leadership must act while discretion remains. That means funding institutions, not just projects; restoring enforcement credibility and administrative capacity; and implementing enforceable reductions and compliance with the law. The choice is between governing now or paying far more later, with fewer options.
[1] The author obtained the OSE/ISC’s FY27 Budget Request Submitted to the Governor’s Office in response to his [date] public records request. A Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources public flyer summaries its request for the aquifer mapping program and other important program.
[2] Sen. Pat Woods was the last member of the LFC Water Subcommittee to speak following the OSE/ISC’s budget presentation the afternoon of November 20, 2025. He understood the basics.
1/12/25 – 2/5/26 from Carlsbad, NM to the State Capitol in Santa Fe, NM on Climate Action Day – 320 miles, 12,425 ft./elevation, 25 days
This trek echoes that of the father of George Munoz, Chair of the NM Senate Finance Committee, who walked to the Capitol in 1989. As mayor of Gallup, he was furious that his concerns about addiction in his beloved community were not being addressed. Now George Munoz, his son, has not taken seriously the concerns of New Mexican communities who need healthier air, land & waters. Walking this path is a call to address needs of New Mexicans living with extraction caused air & water pollution health problems, as well as water shortages.
