Last month’s New Mexico Water Advocates workshop drew strong interest and attendance when Gretel Follingstad, PhD, and Maurice Hall, PhD, of the Environmental Defense Fund delivered a clear-eyed, compelling look at the New Mexico 360 Groundwater Report — and the urgency behind it. If you missed it, the video recording and presentation slides are available here.
The bottom line: groundwater supplies more than three-quarters of New Mexico’s drinking water, yet aquifers across the state are being depleted faster than they recharge — and another dry winter makes that reality harder to ignore.
The conversation continues in March. The New Mexico Groundwater Alliance is hosting two free webinars featuring additional report co-authors.
Thursday, March 5 | 12:30 PM MTNM Groundwater Data, Science & Administration Tools Featuring Adrian Oglesby, JD (Utton Transboundary Resources Center, UNM) and Stacy Timmons (NM Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources), moderated by Gretel Follingstad, PhD. 👉 Register here
Monday, March 23 | 5:00 PM MTNM Case Studies of Groundwater Management Featuring Ladona Clayton (Ogallala Land & Water Conservancy), Dr. Phil King (King Engineering & Associates), Ramón Lucero (RCAC), and Aron Balok (Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District), moderated by Gretel Follingstad, PhD. 👉 Register here
Authors: By Gretel Follingstad and Maurice Hall, Environmental Defense Fund
In New Mexico, like most western states, drought and climate change coupled with increasing water demands have pushed an invisible, yet vitally important natural resource — groundwater — into a crisis.
The New Mexico Groundwater Alliance recently released the New Mexico 360 Groundwater Report to elevate the urgency of the groundwater crisis facing New Mexico. The Alliance seeks to build long-term, multistakeholder collaboration to co-create resilient statewide groundwater management solutions.
The NM 360 Groundwater Report details significant data gaps, challenges and opportunities to protect the state’s declining groundwater supply.
On Feb. 19, Gretel Follingstad and Maurice Hall, both from Environmental Defense Fund, will join the New Mexico Water Advocates monthly workshop to discuss the New Mexico 360 Groundwater Report. Here’s a sneak peek at the most important points and priorities about groundwater in New Mexico from the report.
1. Groundwater is a lifeline for New Mexico’s communities and economies, serving as a critical source of water for drinking and irrigated agriculture.
More than three-quarters of New Mexico’s drinking water comes from groundwater. It’s a critical water source for community water systems, most of which are located in small rural communities. Sustainable groundwater management requires monitoring these vital underground water systems that support hundreds of communities and thousands of private domestic wells. Groundwater also underpins rural economies and agriculture, which is the largest groundwater consumer in New Mexico.
2. Better groundwater data is needed to ensure we have enough water to sustain New Mexico’s communities, economies and the environment for generations to come.
New Mexico’s high dependence on groundwater makes closing groundwater data gaps a top priority for communities, economies and the environment. Aquifer studies provide the foundational understanding of the state’s groundwater aquifers, the extensive natural infrastructure that stores and delivers our groundwater. These studies are critical for clarifying rates of groundwater depletion and shaping management responses.
The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (NMGMR) conducts the state’s groundwater mapping and characterization studies. These studies are extensive and cost a lot of money. The good news is state legislators look poised to approve $22 million for NMGMR to continue these essential studies. This funding would be a big step in the right direction for sustainable groundwater management in New Mexico.
In groundwater-dependent areas like the High Plains (Ogallala Aquifer), we know there is an urgent crisis. Recent analysis by the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy showed their groundwater supplies may only last 5 to 10 years without large reductions in use. Many other areas share stories of dropping water tables, declining water quality, wells going dry, and need for infrastructure improvements to meet water demands.
3. More groundwater metering is needed for better demand management.
The most accurate way to measure groundwater use is with meters installed on wells that pump groundwater. This is critical data for knowing how much water is pumped out of our aquifers. Without this information, the ability to effectively manage shared groundwater supplies is limited.
Currently, the majority of New Mexico’s wells are not metered. In the areas of New Mexico that are metered, such as the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservation District in Chaves and Eddy counties, groundwater pumping measurements provide essential information to meet legal obligations downstream. While metering was not popular with landowners initially, they eventually they this tool for ensuring everyone was playing by the same rules.
A recent op-ed co-authored by New Mexico Groundwater Alliance members Ladona Clayton, Aron Balock and Phil King, highlights the many benefits and positive outcomes from metered groundwater use, noting the whole state would benefit from metering to better inform local management decisions.
4. Native Nations, Tribes and Pueblos have valued water in New Mexico for time immemorial, and they have valuable knowledge to share about sustainable water management.
Climate change and water depletions are impacting New Mexico’s Tribal communities. For time immemorial, New Mexico’s 23 Native Nations, Tribes, and Pueblos have valued and recognized water as central to the existence, maintenance, and continuity of their cultural identity and physical well-being, as highlighted in the 2022 New Mexico Tribal Water Report.
“Tribes developed resilient water strategies and technologies in response to unpredictable changes in the physical, social, and cultural environment. Many Tribes developed broad systems of water management engineering, specifically for subsistence agriculture and other regenerative uses,” the report notes.
The report recommends the state of New Mexico issue formal recognition of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) as contributing to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the state and to our collective understanding of our environment. The report also recommends the state work with the NM Indian Affairs Department to develop guidance for State agencies on consultation and application of ITEK.”
Improving groundwater management in New Mexico will require partnership, collaboration and coordination with New Mexico’s Nations, Tribes, and Pueblos to advance alternative, specific solutions as each Tribal Nation deems effective.
5. Groundwater supports the health of our rivers, streams and springs.
Groundwater is largely unseen, but it plays a vital role in the health of surface water flows throughout New Mexico.
Groundwater and surface water are often thought of as separate systems, but in river corridors they are interconnected. Depending on the physical setting and drought conditions, stream flow may be recharging groundwater or groundwater may be discharging to rivers and streams.
When groundwater is over-pumped in these interconnected systems, river flows decline, which impacts the river’s ecology, harming fish and wildlife and affecting the availability of water in the river. Consequently, in areas where groundwater and surface water are interconnected, they must be managed together.
As a fifth-generation New Mexican (Gretel) and recent transplant (Maurice), we cherish New Mexico’s majestic landscapes, from the high alpine mountains to river corridors and prairies and managing New Mexico’s precious water resources above and below ground, is essential to sustaining these landscapes, our communities, cultures, and economies, for future generations.
But our water supplies are at risk. New Mexico’s drought-fueled groundwater pumping has spiraled into a statewide crisis, amplified by climate change and population growth. We hope the New Mexico 360 Groundwater Report serves as a call to action for collaborative and proactive development of statewide groundwater management co-created with Native Tribes, rural communities, municipal water managers, agricultural producers, industry, and state legislators. We all must come together to protect this vital underground resource we depend upon, before it’s too late.
The Senate Must Act—Now—to Prevent a Deepening Water Crisis
New Mexico’s water future now rests with the Senate Finance Committee.
HB2, as sent from the House, funds less than half of the State Engineer’s urgently needed requests to carry out existing statutory duties. These are not new programs. They are the core responsibilities the Legislature has already assigned to the Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission—responsibilities tied directly to interstate obligations, Indian water-rights settlements, and protection of the public welfare. The Senate is now the last line of defense against compounding legal, financial, and operational risk.
New Mexico is legally bound to comply with the Rio Grande Compact, implement federally approved Indian water-rights settlements, enforce existing water rights, and carry out laws the Legislature has already enacted. Underfunding does not make those obligations disappear. It postpones action, raises exposure to litigation, and dramatically increases long-term costs.
The Senate Finance Committee must confront this reality directly.
Where HB2 Falls Critically Short
Rio Grande Compact Compliance The State Engineer requested $50 million to implement the Lower Rio Grande settlement, reduce ongoing Middle and Lower Rio Grande depletions, and ensure water reaches Elephant Butte Reservoir and the new El Paso compact gage. HB2 provides less than half that amount. Partial funding delays corrective action and sharply increases the risk of Compact violation—now projected within two to three years in the Middle Rio Grande.
Indian Water-Rights Settlements The State’s cost share unlocks several billion dollars in federal settlement funding and implements agreed-upon projects that benefit both Tribal and non-Tribal water users. HB2 provides only $10 million of the $35 million request, despite this being an ongoing, binding obligation.
Water Security Planning and Modernization The Legislature unanimously enacted the Water Security Planning Act in 2023. HB2 cuts the funding needed to implement that law and denies FY27 funding to continue replacement of a fragile, 30-year-old water-rights database that is at risk of failure.
River Conveyance and Core Staffing HB2 eliminates funding for extraordinary Middle Rio Grande channel improvements—even though 2025 demonstrated that preventable conveyance losses directly undermine Compact deliveries. It also zeroes out critical field and settlement staff needed for enforcement, wet-water administration, and compliance—functions no other entity can perform.
The Cost of Delay Is Not Abstract
Failure to act now threatens communities, agriculture, Tribal settlements, interstate relations, and New Mexico’s economy. Deferring action guarantees higher costs later—financially, legally, and operationally.
Call to Action
The Senate Finance Committee must provide full funding for the State Engineer’s requested water resources management special appropriations and expansions that the House left out of HB2.
If you care about New Mexico’s future, contact Committee members today and demand the Senate fully fund these core State water management responsibilities. Only the State has the authority and resources to comply with the law by carrying them out. Committee members are listed here.
This is a long-form reference article. It documents what recent science shows about groundwater depletion in the Rio Grande–Bravo Basin and explains why New Mexico’s groundwater crisis is no longer a matter of insufficient data, authority, or technical capacity, but of governance. What follows provides the supporting evidence, context, and institutional history behind this conclusion.
What the Science Now Shows
In the first comprehensive basin-wide assessment of consumptive water use and replenishment, the study Overconsumption Gravely Threatens Water Security in the Rio Grande–Bravo Basin quantifies unsustainable use at sub-basin scales (smaller, localized areas) from the San Luis Valley in Colorado, through New Mexico, and on both sides of the international border to the river’s terminus at the Gulf of Mexico. A November New Mexico Water Advocates article first directed readers to this research. This article reports on its findings and explains their implications for water management decisions in New Mexico and across the basin. Together with prior reporting by New Mexico Water Advocates, the study provides a documented scientific foundation for examining why groundwater governance in New Mexico has failed to keep pace with what is already known.
The study authors’ basin-wide accounting of water use in the Rio Grande–Bravo Basin concludes that more than half (about 52 %) of all water consumed in the basin is unsustainable, meaning it is withdrawn faster than it can be replenished. The study finds that irrigated agriculture accounts for roughly 87 % of all direct consumptive water use, making it by far the dominant driver of depletion. Within that agricultural use, forage crops grown primarily for livestock feed—especially alfalfa and other hays—account for approximately half of total agricultural consumption, far exceeding the water use of food crops for direct human consumption. This pattern of overconsumption threatens long-term water security for millions of people who depend on the Rio Grande and its connected aquifers.
The New Mexico context for the report’s basin-wide findings is provided by the Office of the State Engineer’s 2020 Water Use by Categoriesreport, which estimates that irrigated agriculture accounted for approximately 78 percent of total statewide water withdrawals in 2020.[i] New Mexico facts are consistent with the Rio Grande–Bravo Basin finding that irrigated agriculture is the dominant driver of water demand and depletion. These facts reinforce the conclusion that New Mexico’s groundwater challenges are structural and governance-related rather than informational.
While municipal and industrial uses account for a comparatively small share of consumptive demand, hundreds of thousands of acres of irrigated hay and forage, much of it supplied solely from groundwater, are a primary contributor to agricultural consumptive use in the state. This state-level pattern mirrors the basin-wide findings and reinforces that unsustainable groundwater depletion in New Mexico is already well documented. The biggest challenge is not scientific uncertainty, but the willingness and capacity to govern groundwater use for greater longevity and security.
What This Means for Groundwater Governance
This scientific clarity matters. It demonstrates that we now have sufficient information to begin governing New Mexico groundwater use responsibly, rather than waiting for better information and complete characterization of every aquifer.
This point corrects a common misconception. Groundwater management does not require complete scientific certainty before action can begin. Basin-wide water balance and depletion trends are already documented at scales relevant to governance. The science and the Office of the State Engineer’s water use reports define the problem; the primary challenge is the Office of the State Engineer’s institutional follow-through.
The Role of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and State Water Resources Agencies
Ongoing hydrogeologic investigations by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources remain essential. The Aquifer Mapping Program is far more than mapping. With meaningful funding in the current fiscal year,[ii] the Bureau has already flown aerial resistivity surveys over critical aquifers, generating data that inform where wells should—and should not—be drilled. The Bureau will oversee drilling and instrumentation of permanent characterization and monitoring wells to define vertical aquifer structure, discrete water quality zones, faults, and other barriers to groundwater flow. This drilling will also help determine the volume and potential yields of deeper brackish and saline formations beneath freshwater zones. Together, these efforts provide the foundation for systematic, long-term groundwater monitoring that will steadily reduce uncertainty about aquifer behavior and define both the possibilities and limits of brackish water development.
The Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission are the agencies legally responsible for administering water rights, enforcing limits, and planning for sustainable water use. Scientific programs strengthen their technical foundation, but the desire for more complete science should not be a reason to forego initiating governance actions. The current agency approach appears to defer meaningful groundwater governance until regional water security planning recommendations are completed, even in areas where community water supplies are already threatened by continued agricultural pumping. Deferring enforceable limits under these conditions is a decision to allow ongoing aquifer depletion to continue unchecked, increasing the likelihood of irreversible impacts to local communities, higher costs, and accelerated decline.
The January 2026 New Mexico 360 Groundwater Report, published by the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance, makes clear that the State Engineer already has legal authority to preserve groundwater supplies by limiting pumping. That authority includes conditioning, limiting, or denying groundwater permits; regulating pumping in fully appropriated and mined basins; requiring metering and reporting; and managing groundwater pumping to protect connected surface waters and meet interstate compact obligations.
The regional water security planning program, unanimously authorized by the 2023 Legislature, has yet to gain traction through formally adopted rules. The Interstate Stream Commission will promulgate the rules and must then issue guidelines. After that, it can make state funding grants to regions, which must form regional councils to organize themselves to oversee preparation of their region’s plan. Plans won’t be drafted, approved by the councils and subsequently by the ISC, and funded for implementation for many years. This makes the promise of water planning an insufficient basis for delaying near-term groundwater governance, given that aquifers are already being drained by agricultural pumping to the detriment of communities.
The Real Bottleneck: Chronic Governance Incapacity
New Mexico’s experience demonstrates that groundwater can be managed effectively when the State or local institutions choose to do so—but that such management has been applied unevenly, episodically, and without being institutionalized statewide. Almost all groundwater management has been reactive to crises. For example:
Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District – The clearest example of long-standing active groundwater management is the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District (PVACD), created in 1932 in response to catastrophic loss of artesian pressure in the Pecos Valley around Roswell and Artesia. There, groundwater use has been actively regulated for decades to prevent collapse of the aquifer system. That experience shows that sustained groundwater governance is possible in New Mexico when depletion is undeniable and consequences are unavoidable.
Pecos River – Pecos River water management now seems routine, but it has been difficult, costly to taxpayers, and entirely reactive. Farmers went to jail for sabotaging the operation of water meters required by court order. New Mexico lost a Texas lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court and is now subject to a Pecos River Compact 1987 Amended Decree that it came extremely close to violating annually for more than a decade. A State-driven collaboratively developed solution became state law in 2001. It required arrangements to get more water through the last dam in New Mexico and pause farming on productive farmland in the Carlsbad Irrigation District and the PVACD. It succeeded, but increasing water scarcity driven by global warming may require action beyond the settlement.
Lower Rio Grande – A second form of groundwater management is now emerging in the Lower Rio Grande as a result of a 2013 Texas lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court. The pending Consent Decree and Settlement agreements focus squarely on New Mexico’s groundwater pumping from the irrigated valley floor’s alluvial aquifer, which is well connected to the Rio Grande. The Settlement requires that the State of New Mexico maintain groundwater levels adjacent to and beneath the river high enough to prevent the portion of the river’s flow legally allocated to Texas and the United States from instead sinking into the New Mexico riverbed. The State must meet mandatory downstream delivery obligations under tight compliance deadlines.
Notably, drinking water purveyors (community water utilities) depend on rights that the state water rights adjudication court has determined are junior to the irrigators’ 1903 priority rights to a full supply, whether from the river or groundwater. In recent years, the New Mexico share of Caballo Dam releases has not enough to satisfy the irrigators’ senior rights to a full supply. The State Engineer will be compelled to administer water in the Lower Rio Grande to prevent illegal underdelivery of water to El Paso as required by the Settlement.
Middle Rio Grande – The Middle Rio Grande presents an even more complex picture. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority proactively prevented a groundwater-overdraft disaster from the excellent aquifer it’s built over. The solution was implementing direct use of its imported surface-water rights. Groundwater levels underneath Albuquerque partially recovered and stabilized, stopping the risk of aquifer compaction that would cause differential subsidence across faults that traverse the city. Albuquerque’s achievement matters—and it contradicts the notion that New Mexico acts only after collapse.
This was a local utility response, not basin-wide governance. Conjunctive-use benefits projected in the Authority’s 100-year plan have not materialized as assumed. The volume of available surface water treated and delivered to customers is far below the plan’s assumptions. Current Middle Rio Grande surface and groundwater uses will cause a new Rio Grande Compact violation in two to three years, while the ABCWUA says publicly it will supply new high-water use industry that the State and the City of Albuquerque are recruiting. The effective ABCWUA position is that it is preferable to be upstream with junior deep wells than downstream with senior surface water rights. Santa Fe also implemented a direct river diversion for drinking water, but its motivation was to prevent running out of water. Los Lunas has been and is recruiting high water use industry to fully use their water rights, and now seeks to transfer additional water rights that may be legally abandoned into their wells. Former State Engineer Mike Hamman clearly recognized the necessity of basin-scale conjunctive management in the Middle Rio Grande, but several years later, no progress is apparent.
Taken together, these examples show that New Mexico’s groundwater management successes are isolated, situational, and non-systemic. The problem is not scientific uncertainty, lack of authority, or technical infeasibility. The problem is the failure to institutionalize groundwater governance before crisis, litigation, or compulsion makes inaction untenable.
The State’s Water Resources Management Imperatives
New Mexico’s groundwater crisis is not the result of scientific uncertainty or the absence of legal authority. It is the result of governance failure—decisions by elected and appointed leaders to defer action even as the consequences become unavoidable.
The scientific paper by Richter et al. reinforces what has been understood for decades: aquifers are finite, groundwater depletion is measurable, and continued overpumping leads to permanent losses of water supply, water quality, and economic security. These are physical limits. They do not yield to delay, political convenience, or administrative caution.
New Mexico already has the legal authority to manage groundwater use. Under existing law, the State Engineer can condition, limit, or deny groundwater permits; regulate pumping in fully appropriated and mined basins; require metering and reporting; and manage groundwater pumping to protect connected surface waters and interstate compact obligations. No new statutory authority is required to begin managing groundwater based on aquifer conditions.
Gaps in aquifer characterization and monitoring remain real and must be addressed. But neither the science nor the law supports using those gaps as an excuse to postpone management. Data development and management must proceed together. Waiting for perfect information while aquifers decline only increases costs and reduces or eliminates future options.
Despite this, New Mexico continues to rely on administration that is largely disconnected from aquifer conditions. Groundwater permits are issued and administered without enforceable limits tied to aquifer longevity, even where declines are severe and well documented. Outside the one managed basin, groundwater governance remains the exception rather than the rule.
What Is at Stake—and Who Is Responsible
New Mexico’s groundwater crisis persists not because the State lacks financial resources, but because the Legislature has repeatedly chosen not to appropriate them at the scale required. The legal authority to manage groundwater exists. What is missing is the sustained investment needed to build and maintain the institutional capacity to use that authority effectively.
Across state government, funding for water resources planning, groundwater science, monitoring, enforcement, and long-term management remains inadequate. Agencies are expected to address widespread aquifer depletion with fragmented data systems, insufficient staffing, and short-term appropriations that fall far short of the problem’s scope. This chronic underfunding ensures continued incapacity, regardless of statutory authority.
That incapacity is not accidental. It reflects legislative choices. Year after year, the Governor recommends and the House and Senate Finance Committees set budgets that do not provide the resources necessary for groundwater management.
More fundamentally, New Mexico has not been willing to explicitly acknowledge groundwater management as a core governing responsibility that requires a defined program and durable capacity. Without naming groundwater management as a priority, the Legislature avoids the obligation to fund it, and agencies are left unable to deliver it.
The consequences of this failure are already visible. Households are hauling water because wells have gone dry. Communities dependent on groundwater face rising costs, declining water quality, and increasing long-term risk. New Mexico has many ghost towns—once viable communities that declined when the resources they depended on were exhausted. Groundwater-dependent communities face the same risk if groundwater depletion for irrigation continues unchecked.
Preventing that outcome is a matter of choice. The constraint is not science, not legal authority, and not the absence of money. It is the absence of political will to name groundwater management as a governing responsibility—and to fund the capacity required to carry it out. New Mexico’s future requires top elected and appointed officials to name and describe our groundwater sustainability crises, face the sacrifices required to increase groundwater longevity, and build the state institutional capacity needed to confront and solve those crises.
[i] Office of the State Engineer / Interstate Stream Commission, 2020 Water Use by Categories, summarized at mainstreamnm.org , “How data can inspire action: A closer look at the Water Use by Categories report” (Jan. 2025). The report estimates approximately 2.97 million acre-feet of withdrawals for irrigated agriculture out of roughly 3.81 million acre-feet of total statewide withdrawals in 2020 (≈ 78 percent). Irrigation withdrawals are not directly metered in most areas and are estimated using crop acreage, irrigation requirements, and other standard water-use accounting methods. The report presents withdrawals, not consumptive use.
[ii] The Bureau of Geology requested $29 million for this year and the next two to initiate their planned $175 million aquifer characterization plan, but the Governor, the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, and the Senate Finance Committee successively reduced their appropriation to $7.5 million. The Bureau may receive a $22.5 million budget this year, having demonstrated strong performance.
New Mexico’s Groundwater Reality and the Urgent Need for Action
Groundwater is the backbone of New Mexico’s water supply. It provides more than half of all water used statewide, supplies drinking water for most communities, and sustains agriculture, industry, and ecosystems across large areas of the state. Yet in many regions, groundwater pumping has vastly exceeded natural recharge. Climate change is intensifying the risks.
The January 2026 New Mexico 360 Groundwater Reportoffers the most comprehensive, statewide synthesis to date of New Mexico’s groundwater conditions, management tools, and future challenges. Prepared by the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance with contributions from scientists, legal experts, and water managers, the report integrates data, experience, and case studies to make sound recommendations.
The authors document a clear and troubling trend: as surface-water supplies decline due to warming temperatures and prolonged drought, dependence on groundwater is increasing. In many New Mexico basins, withdrawals vastly exceed recharge year after year, resulting in falling groundwater levels, higher pumping costs, and degraded water quality. Excessive pumping from aquifers interconnected with rivers depletes the rivers and interferes with meeting interstate compact obligations. The authors also identify persistent data and governance gaps—limited metering, uneven monitoring, and incomplete aquifer characterization.
The report identifies serious gaps in aquifer characterization and monitoring that must be addressed to support durable groundwater management. It does not suggest waiting to act; it underscores that continued inaction—under the guise of needing more data—will only accelerate depletion and foreclose future options.
Practical Steps New Mexico Must Implement
The report does not stop at diagnosis. It identifies practical, New Mexico–specific pathways forward. The authors present case studies from the Pecos Valley, the Lower Rio Grande, the Southern High Plains, and other regions to demonstrate that locally driven groundwater management—when supported by state policy, reliable data, and sustained investment—can slow depletion and improve long-term resilience. The report emphasizes treating aquifers as critical infrastructure that provides irreplaceable services to water users. The report urges accelerating aquifer mapping and monitoring, expanding groundwater metering, and fully integrating groundwater into regional water security planning.
These findings are directly relevant to decisions now facing New Mexico policymakers, water managers, and communities, including implementing the 2023 Water Security Planning Act and confronting unanswered needs for groundwater governance and enforcement.
A Water Advocates Perspective
New Mexico still lacks aquifer-based limits on groundwater depletion. The report points out that the State Engineer has the authority, but has not acted. At the 2023 Water Leaders Conference, a state legislator asked a basic question: does the State Engineer manage groundwater pumping based on how much water remains in an aquifer, or the rate at which it is declining? The panelists didn’t provide the factual answer, which is neither of those.
New Mexico water law and State Engineer permits allow pumping up to the paper right regardless of aquifer condition, even where declines are severe and well-documented, as the Clovis and Portales groundwater supply crisis demonstrates,
True management of New Mexico groundwater resources for longevity and security does not exist, except for one New Mexico artesian aquifer where pumping is controlled by the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District. The District, managed by a report co-author, was initially created by a Roswell district judge’s order in January 1932. That’s because the impacts of uncontrolled uses were quite obvious. Non-artesian aquifers impacts of uncontrolled uses are generally not observed until wells run dry.
The growing number of New Mexico households hauling water because their wells have gone dry is direct evidence that aquifers are being depleted. Last fall, a Clovis-area irrigator—who is also an elected state legislator and a member of the Water and Natural Resources Committee—informed the committee that he has invested in new technology. He stated that its purpose is to fully exhaust the groundwater beneath his land.
How Other Western States Are Managing Their Groundwater
The New Mexico Groundwater Alliance news release included a supplemental document reviewing the groundwater management frameworks of other Western states. While none has solved groundwater depletion everywhere, many have established recognizable systems—defined basin goals, monitoring tied to aquifer conditions, enforceable limits, and clear triggers for action when withdrawals exceed supply.
New Mexico has not. This absence is reinforced by current budget decisions. The State Engineer’s FY27 special appropriations and program expansion requests focus on compact compliance, settlements, and enforcement, but the word groundwater or any description of the need for groundwater programs does not appear.
Preregister to Hear From the Report’s Principal Author
At 6:30 pm on February 19, Santa Fe native Gretel Follingstad, Ph.D., the report’s principal author and an outstanding presenter, will discuss what the data show, what remains uncertain, and what New Mexico must do next to address the ever-worsening groundwater crisis. The disconnect between hydrologic reality and administration is precisely why this report matters—and why this presentation should not be missed.
The State’s choices are not serving New Mexico’s water future. Continuing to allow groundwater to be mined until it is gone will end poorly—for communities, local economies, and the State.
As the new year begins, New Mexico’s water challenges are clear, but the State’s responses remain unsettled. The questions now confronting New Mexico are not about whether scarcity exists or whether legal authority is lacking, but about how effectively decisions are being made and why all meaningful discussions to tackle the problems are occurring behind closed doors. Year-end Rio Grande Compact compliance, the implementation of recent state water laws, agency priorities and capacity, and the Governor’s and Legislative Finance Committee’s budget choices together frame the current state of the State’s water—and the water governance choices now facing New Mexico.
New Mexico has the legal tools, but has not mustered the political will or built the management systems to stop excessive and illegal water uses. That will change. The consequences of continued neglect are unbearable.
I. Rio Grande Compact Compliance Emergencies as Indicators
Water uses in the Middle Rio Grande have consistently over-depleted the Middle Rio Grande’s share, shorting the Lower Rio Grande. Similarly, excessive water uses in New Mexico downstream of Elephant Butte Dam are shorting Texas. Both situations have persisted for many years and are now entangled but distinct emergencies.
Our State is required by the Lower Rio Grande settlement and consent decree now pending U.S. Supreme Court approval to,
substantially reduce New Mexico groundwater pumping,
maintain a sufficiently high groundwater table that the river can function, and
comply with a new annual water delivery requirement to El Paso.
Meeting the new mandatory compliance requirements will be very expensive and demanding. Penalties built into the pending settlement remove noncompliance as an option.
Separately, chronic overuse of water in the Middle Rio Grande has caused New Mexico’s water delivery debt to Elephant Butte Reservoir to increase from a net credit in 2018 to -131,900 acre-feet at the end of 2025. [This preliminary result is from the Bureau of Reclamation. The official result will be determined by the Rio Grande Compact Commission this spring.] New Mexico will violate the Rio Grande Compact if New Mexico allows the cumulative water delivery debt to reach 200,000 acre-feet. Texas, being Texas, will sue, as is their custom, culture, and tradition.
The author’s recent public records requests reveal recent private meetings between the agencies and the two major state-created water purveyors in the Middle Rio Grande. The progress at this time is apparently limited to initial discussions of the participants positions.
Both compact problems reflect that New Mexico’s water management institutions are not doing their jobs to regulate illegal water overuse. The results of this neglect are:
huge taxpayer burdens,
legal jeopardy for the State,
danger for water users, and
disregard for the river and species who depend on it.
The State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission are not prepared and don’t have the capacity or budget to deal with either Compact compliance emergency.
II. Legal Authority Is Not the Limiting Factor
The Legislature passed a new water law in 2003 that had been drafted and proposed by the NM Attorney General. The Governor signed it. It declares,
[T]he adjudication process is slow, the need for water administration is urgent, compliance with interstate compacts is imperative and the state engineer has authority to administer water allocations in accordance with the water right priorities recorded with or declared or otherwise available to the state engineer. Section 72-2-9.1 NMSA 1978.
In 2004, State Engineer John D’Antonio put rules in place to implement this new law. Following eight years of litigation, the New Mexico Supreme Court in 2012 unanimously upheld these rules. None of the five State Engineers that have held that office since 2012 has implemented the Active Water Resources Management program created by these rules. The fact of having five State Engineers in office since 2012 is part of the problem.
CENTER-PIVOT IRRIGATION CURRY COUNTY RANCH, NOW ABANDONED – PHOTO CREDIT DANNY FISH
Similarly, the 2019 Water Data Act, the 2023 Water Security Planning Act, and the 2006 Aquifer Mapping Program have languished. The Office of the State Engineer over decades has allowed virtually complete depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer in New Mexico for irrigation, leaving New Mexico communities that depend solely on that aquifer in jeopardy. Similar outcomes are in progress elsewhere across New Mexico.
Although inadequate funding and capacity are a big part of the problem, other overarching reasons include the Governor’s and Legislature’s lack of political will to see the State’s water is effectively managed as an essential scarce resource. We don’t even measure water uses, much less manage them. The management and culture of the agencies is a problem also. Their actions are tentative and cautious. They are slow to make decisions, take initiative, and effectively manage projects to timely completion.
III. Agency Capacity: Signs of Progress and Persistent Gaps
The New Mexico Bureau of Geology is our water science agency. Its scientists do first class work. They hit the ground running this fiscal year, utilizing a $7.5 million appropriation this year (the Governor recommended $29 million) to accelerate the Aquifer Mapping Program. Their progress report and budget needs presentation to the Legislature in November included a detailed briefing on the high-tech groundwater assessment technology and work already completed.
In contrast, the Interstate Stream Commission has not yet put required rules in place to implement the 2023 Water Security Planning Act. Those rules will become effective more than three years after this landmark law passed unanimously. The Office of the State Engineer desperately needs to begin enforcing against illegal water use, and modernizing its business processes and its obsolete information technology.
The OSE didn’t even request funding from the 2026 Legislature to continue building a new real-time water use data and reporting system that the 2025 Legislature funded at one-sixth of the OSE’s requested amount. Control of ruinous groundwater depletion like the Ogallala in other locations that depend on fossil groundwater doesn’t appear to be a priority. A Clovis area legislator and irrigator said technology now allows essentially all the water to be extracted. He said he is doing exactly that.
IV. Budgets as the State’s Policy Signal
State budgets are choices, not merely accounting. The OSE/ISC requested $130 million in extraordinary appropriations and six new positions for FY27. The Governor’s budget recommendation included most of the $130 million but not the new positions. The Legislative Finance Committee’s water resources management budget recommendation is unresponsive to the crises. Why do the State’s top elected leaders pass good laws unanimously but choose not to see them implemented?
V. 2026 Is a Test
The year ahead will determine:
Whether authority is exercised,
Whether transparency improves,
Whether elected state leaders equip the water agencies to manage scarcity, and
How well and responsively the agencies’ appointed leaders will manage their agencies’ work.
New Mexico’s water crises are certain. Whether the State responds effectively remains the open question.
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.
2025 posed many New Mexico water resources challenges, a mixed record of accomplishments for New Mexico’s water resources agencies, and a degree of success for the New Mexico Water Advocates’ work. We are grateful for over 600 new subscribers this year.
The New Mexico Water Advocates is a New Mexico nonprofit corporation and a 501(c)3. We are an informed citizens’ advocacy group that frames our water resource both as essential civic infrastructure and as a sacred right. We have institutional memory and advocate for planning and taking a long-term view. We do our best to communicate the urgency and consequences of New Mexico’s institutionalized water management neglect.
Water is life. Life is sacred. Water in the desert is precious, not a commodity. We must pay attention to growing water scarcity and chronic, unsustainable overuse.
New Mexico’s water resources management problems and opportunities came into sharper focus in 2025. Most water management problems grew. It is fair to say there were few bright spots with more neglect and excuses than progress.
Elephant Butte Reservoir at 3% full, August 2025. Norm Gaume photo
What We Did in 2025
The Water Advocates’ highlights for the year include:
A new website with many articles and substantial growth in engagement
Invited testimony confronting New Mexico’s water crises before the Legislature’s Water and Natural Resources Committee and participation in interim committee meetings
A focus on New Mexico’s interstate stream compact litigation and risk
Continued production of our monthly third -Thursday-evenings speakers series
Attention to produced water, Project Jupiter, and data centers
Expansion of public conversations across faith and civic groups
Board retreat to set our strategic priorities
What Became Clear in 2025
The Rio Grande Compact litigation that has been before the U.S. Supreme Court since 2013 proposed a detailed settlement in August that is agreed to by all the parties and amici except Las Cruces and NMSU. The settlement requires further negotiation with them. New Mexico’s explicit responsibilities will be challenging and expensive.
The State Engineer’s FY27 budget request to the Governor says, “Failure to comply with New Mexico’s interstate obligations could result in renewed litigation and the risk of adverse court rulings that could mandate severe curtailment of groundwater use in the lower Rio Grande, with catastrophic consequences for the economy.”
Unless New Mexico’s water management agencies can achieve an unprecedented decrease in Middle Rio Grande water depletions within the next two years, New Mexico will violate the Middle Rio Grande water delivery debt limit. Texas will sue New Mexico in a new case.
Aridification is taking our water. This is not a drought. Droughts are temporary. We are at risk of desertification.
Overuse of water is rampant and unaddressed, even when illegal.
Predominant short-term thinking to address water problems only when we run out or a judge orders action is still the State of New Mexico norm.
Wells are running dry in rural and exurban areas. The Ogallala Aquifer is the poster child for groundwater management neglect, with communities, institutions, and municipalities as victims.
New Mexico has some of the worst cases nationally of military base gross contamination of actively used groundwater.
The Governor’s “new water” funding and political priorities are years from bearing fruit if they are possible and economically feasible. Produced water treatment and reuse may not be feasible. Nobody is showing their math.
Brackish water development is years away at best. The water will be costly in the limited locations where development is hydrogeologically and economically feasible.
The Rio Grande is becoming an intermittent stream due to overuse.
The Legislature’s will to ignore the water crisis is real and severely limiting the State’s stewardship of the water resources we all depend on. New Mexico water resources governance has few dedicated legislative champions.
Agencies lack capacity but deserve support. They must become more publicly communicative, and internally productive, which would be aided by modernization of information technology.
New Mexico’s thinking regarding the value of the irreplaceable water resources services provided to us by our rivers and aquifers is outdated and harmful. Natures’ water distribution services to our points of diversion are irreplaceable.
Living creatures and our communities suffer when aquifers become so diminished they no longer can convey and supply water, and when unmanaged overuse of interconnected groundwater dries our rivers.
High water use industries that the State is recruiting cannot be supplied with sufficient water anytime soon unless it is taken from irrigation.
Economic development proponents who declare New Mexico is open for business seem uninterested in water resources sustainability or understanding and living within water resources constraints. They are here for the short-term.
Durable Information — What Will Still Matter Two Years From Now
At year’s end, our Operating Committee asked a simple question: what from our work will still matter when time moves on? What will still be valid, even if our elected leaders are not paying attention? Many of our monthly workshops, held at 6:30 pm every 3rd Thursday except December, have featured information from officials and experts with lasting value. The workshop video recordings provide information and document issues that will shape New Mexico’s water management decisions long after this year ends. All recordings are available here.
Workshop Recordings with Content that Will Remain Relevant
Subject
Date
Speaker(s)
Aquifer Mapping and Data Initiative Act
Oct 2024
Stacy Timmons, Rachel Hobbs, Laila Sturgis
What the Aridification of New Mexico Means
Sept 2024
David Gutzler, David DuBois
The Carrots and Sticks for Achieving Interstate Compact Compliance
July 2024
Nat Chakeres, Tanya Trujillo
Carrots and Sticks for Achieving Rio Grande Compact Compliance, Part II
May 2025
Nat Chakeres
Groundwater as Essential Infrastructure
June 2025
Maurice Hall
Project Jupiter: Corporate AI Demands Threaten Community Health
Nov 2025
Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, Rep. Angelica Rubio
Rural Perspectives on Water
Mar 2025
Bill Conner, Andrew Hautzinger, Blanca Amador Surgeon
Strategic Water Supply (Oil produced water & brackish water development)
Feb 2025
Mariel Nanasi, Melissa Troutman, Norm Gaume
New Mexico’s Water Resources, Part 1 Conventional
May 2024
Bruce Thomson
New Mexico’s Water Resources,Part 2 Unconventional
Aug 2024
Bruce Thomson
Gratitude
We are grateful to our readers, speakers, webmaster, volunteers, and financial contributors that make our work possible. Thank you. We want to recognize those who engaged with us even though it may have been uncomfortable to learn the facts.
Awareness is not enough — but it is where responsibility begins.
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.
The 
The study authors’ basin-wide accounting of water use in the Rio Grande–Bravo Basin concludes that more than half (about 52 %) of all water consumed in the basin is unsustainable, meaning it is withdrawn faster than it can be replenished. The study finds that irrigated agriculture accounts for roughly 87 % of all direct consumptive water use, making it by far the dominant driver of depletion. Within that agricultural use, forage crops grown primarily for livestock feed—especially alfalfa and other hays—account for approximately half of total agricultural consumption, far exceeding the water use of food crops for direct human consumption. This pattern of 
Water uses in the Middle Rio Grande have consistently over-depleted the Middle Rio Grande’s share, shorting the Lower Rio Grande. Similarly, excessive water uses in New Mexico downstream of Elephant Butte Dam are shorting Texas. Both situations have persisted for many years and are now entangled but distinct emergencies.
