For legislators serious about water governance, these two presentations are essential viewing
At recent NM Water Advocates workshops, Nat Chakeres, General Counsel for the Office of the State Engineer, and Dr. Maurice Hall, an expert water resources engineer and senior advisor at the Environmental Defense Fund, delivered two of the clearest and most compelling explanations yet of New Mexico’s urgent water governance challenges—and how to address them. Click the images below to access the video recordings.
1. Nat Chakeres – State Engineer’s Strategic Approach
Chakeres, the state’s lead water attorney, argues that the time for delay is over. His key messages:
In western water management, there is no better alternative to a negotiated agreement.
Litigation is not a prerequisite to serious negotiation.
We must act now to prevent a new U.S. Supreme Court case with Texas.
The State must quantify all Middle Rio Grande water rights, including the time-immemorial rights of six Pueblos.
The state must begin active measurement and administration of diversions.
Priority Administration doesn’t work well or consider cities, hospitals, schools, homes and the sacred, the spiritual, and the living.
These water demands and other equitable claims are not going away.
Above all, New Mexico needs bold state and local leadership to manage our way out of crisis.
We don’t need another lawsuit—we need negotiated agreements, real water measurement & management, and bold leadership now.
2. Dr. Maurice Hall – Managing Aquifers as Infrastructure
Hall calls for a fundamental shift in how New Mexico manages groundwater. He explains that aquifers—natural underground formations that store and move water—must be treated as essential infrastructure. To cope with rising temperatures and shrinking water supplies, aquifers must be actively managed, not passively depleted. Hall emphasizes that building groundwater resilience requires the State to:
Invest in scientific understanding through sustained support for aquifer mapping and monitoring.
Organize and modernize water use data, including full implementation of the Water Data Act and new digital tools to track and automate water use data availability for effective balancing of supply and demand.
Delegate real authority to local leaders who are closest to the challenges and solutions.
Set enforceable statewide standards for regional water plans.
Support meaningful local control of shared water resources within a clear and accountable statewide framework.
“Resilience requires local leadership, real authority, and aquifer management grounded in science—not wishful thinking.”
— Maurice Hall, Ph.D., P.E., Environmental Defense Fund
Why These Presentations Matter for Legislative Action
Together, these presentations deliver essential insights. They lay out the reasons for actions by the 2026 and 2027 Legislatures. Legislators must authorize and help New Mexico to move from overuse and inadequate information to a much more resilient and secure water future.
Legislators: watch these briefings. They offer the foundation for the water governance policy decisions New Mexico must get right before it’s too late.
As of May 2025, the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that Albuquerque is gripped by Drought Stage D3—Extreme Drought. Nearly 97% of Bernalillo County is in the same condition, along with most of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Basin.
Yet, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority says we’re in Drought Stage D0—a designation that, in the Authority’s framework, means customers are conserving more water than the utility’s target. This internal metric, however, is not a hydrologic drought indicator. It contradicts observable realities and misleads the public.
This disconnect matters. The Authority is heavily pumping groundwater to meet demand. The Middle Rio Grande’s surface water is already over-allocated, and vast stretches of the river from Elephant Butte to Albuquerque will likely be dry this summer. Despite this, the utility tells customers there’s no cause for concern.
Two slides below are copied from a water resources presentation posted for the May 21 Water Authority Board meeting. They show that the utility’s definitions are decoupled from actual drought conditions, such as those recognized by federal agencies.
At the same meeting, the Board adopted its FY2026 budget. Discussion revealed that customer conservation is reducing utility revenue, threatening the Water Authority’s ability to meet debt service and annual operating costs.
So what does the utility do? It downplays the drought. Never mind that:
Middle Rio Grande water users are consuming water legally allocated to downstream users under the Rio Grande Compact,
Without urgent state action, the region’s cumulative water debt could exceed the Compact’s legal limit this year or next, subjecting New Mexico’s water management to judicial discretion.
From the Water Advocates’ perspective, the problem is deeper than misleading messaging. No one is taking effective charge. No public agencies are acting with the urgency that increasing aridity coupled with extreme drought conditions demand.
The Water Authority undermines its own credibility — and fails its customers and the region’s economy — by using internally defined drought stages that obscure reality rather than reflect it. We urge the Authority to adopt transparent, science-based drought metrics and to communicate honestly with the public about the very real risks we all face.
The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (NMBGMR) is recognized nationally as a leading state geological and water science agency, and is responsible by law for multiple essential missions leading New Mexico’s historical and contemporary water science. The NMBGMR has consistently excelled despite constrained resources.
The 2019 Legislature directed the Bureau to spearhead implementation of the New Mexico Water Data Act. Overwhelming interest in the May 10, 2024, annual New Mexico Water Data Workshop, with a full day of events from 8 AM to 5 PM, featuring parallel tracks with a multitude of speakers in the afternoon is evidence of success. The workshop is at capacity.
At this year’s workshop, I will address an ongoing issue during the morning plenary: the systematic underfunding of New Mexico’s water agencies by the Executive and Legislature. Despite the complete backing of the State’s Department of Higher Education for the NMBGMR’s budget expansion, which is vital to provide the foundation of science-based water management plans, the Governor’s Office and the 2024 Legislature approved exactly half of the Bureau’s request to do the essential work of providing data for water management and planning.
Chronic underfunding underscores a disregard by the Legislative Finance Committee and the House Appropriations and Finance Committee to fund water governance for the 21st Century. The legislature’s various finance committees and professional budget staff don’t work with the Legislature’s water committees, while the Governor’s office prioritized investments in badwater reclamation over managing and being stewards of our vital water resources. Such neglect demonstrates a profound lack of understanding, much less commitment, to the principles of effective water governance. Transformative change is essential for the health, safety, and welfare of living and future generations of New Mexicans.
The 2023 Water Security Planning Act explicitly links the implementation of the 2019 Water Data Act to regional water planning, yet both the Executive and the 2024 Legislature have failed to provide necessary funding, continuing a trend of ignoring the financial needs for implementing state water laws.
The 2019 Water Data Act mandates that all state-acquired water data be publicly available and managed properly. Unfortunately, this has not been a priority, with the Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department being the only one of four Water Data Act “Directing Agencies” to cite its obligations under the Act in its fiscal year 2025 budget request.
The “Directing Agencies” collect, process, use, and own water data. Their 2019 Water Data Act roles include making their data internally and publicly available so it can be used! I am not familiar with the NMED efforts to comply with the Act, if any. The Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission may be making progress with the resources departing State Engineer Mike Hamman has succeeded in getting, but they face major problems. Their staff doesn’t essential infrastructure like adequate computer hardware, which is currently limiting their productivity. My guess is a finance person somewhere decided to prohibit the agencies from even requesting what they needed during the most recent budget cycle.
Office of the State Engineer (OSE) and the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) have these glaring opportunities to improve compliance with the Water Data Act but the hardworking professional staff don’t have the resources or management direction to accomplish them and are frustrated by the wholly inadequate resources requested by the Governor’s budget and appropriated by the 2024 Legislature.
The OSE is heavily investing in water metering and data collection in the Lower Rio Grande, which is crucial for a pending SCOTUS decree. However, the OSE does not make the resulting data accessible as mandated by the Water Data Act.
OSE public data is not dependable. The OSE maintains water data without adequate quality control. Due to public demand, the OSE has made some of its data available on-line. Some of the on-line data are very poor quality but are made available without appropriate metadata and caveats.
Water use data are critical to water planning. The OSE still publishes its once-every five years “water use report” as it has done for decades. The report that will poorly document water use from 2016 through 2020 is not yet available. Data users don’t find these reports very useful. Staff responsible for these reports defend the outdated methodologies adopted in the last century used to prepare them in the absence of reliable hard data. The reports consider consumptive and non-consumptive water uses together, which becomes the basis of misleading graphics and interpretations by others, including internal users who prepare public presentations.
OSE and ISC professional staff laborious assemble essential water data and maintain it in spreadsheets accessible only to themselves. Agency policies and managers do not encourage them to make their data available on-line where it would be accessible internally and outside the agencies.
The ISC interstate stream compact data are essential for water management and planning. This specific case is an example of #4. The 2019 Water Data Act requires these and all other state-funded water data to be online and accessible through the New Mexico Water Data Catalogue.
Vital water data mismanagement due to lack of sufficient Directing Agencies’ executive support and Executive and Legislature negligence and disregard of true priorities will continue to hamper effective water governance planning and management long after adequate funding to really tackle this essential task is first and then annually thereafter made available..
New Mexico is at a crossroads. Without a significant shift towards a water governance framework that recognizes and integrates hydrologic and climate realities with actionable data informing and motivating real action, parts of the state risk becoming uninhabitable.
This shift requires a departure from the Legislature’s practice of passing laws without funding their implementation. It is imperative that the Governor’s Office and the Legislature fully commit to funding the necessary changes outlined in the 2019 Water Data Act and the 2023 Water Security Planning Act. Only through such transformative changes can New Mexico hope to secure a sustainable water future for all its regions and residents.
Internet of Water has published Data 101 as a guidebook for water data users and decision makers.
Around the globe and here in the United States, water challenges are mounting. As climate change, population growth, and other drivers of water stress increase, decision makers at every level of society—from governors, to reservoir operators, to city planners, to industry, to businesses, to individuals in their own kitchens—need answers to critical questions about water. Do the people in my state have access to clean, affordable water? How many days of water does my city have? How much can my city grow without straining water resources? Is there enough water to grow my business? Is the water in my home safe to drink?
The mission of the Internet of Water (IoW) is to promote and support efforts to improve our nation’s water data infrastructure. An important part of this mission is the development of critical, but often missing, technical tools. But also essential to the IoW mission is to address the knowledge gap that exists between traditional and modern data management practices. This guidebook provides foundational knowledge about water data infrastructure in clear and non-technical language. A background in data science or information technologies is not needed.
Click here to view the entire document (then click “Full Screen” and the right caret “>”).
