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Water Commons

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Middle Rio Grande Compact Compliance Crisis Deepens

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The Middle Rio Grande Uses Much More Than Its Share

Water flowing down the Rio Grande that is legally owned by and destined for Lower Rio Grande water users is being intercepted and consumed in the Middle Rio Grande.

In 2025 through May, the Middle Rio Grande was entitled to 43% of the 239,900 acre-feet this year’s native Rio Grande water supply, as measured at the Otowi Bridge gage—adjusted for upstream storage changes and San Juan-Chama imported water.  The Middle Rio Grande consumed much more, including 38,400 acre-feet of the Lower Rio Grande’s water.  The Lower Rio Grande is entitled to 57%.  It got 39%.

The Middle Rio Grande’s spiraling water debt is out-of-control. New Mexico is on track to violate the compact soon. Texas undoubtedly will sue.

Nat Chakeres, General Counsel for the Office of the State Engineer, described this problem in his excellent presentation at the Water Advocates May 15th workshop. He described preparations underway for the State Engineer’s forthcoming Middle Rio Grande regulatory actions to be announced soon. Nat answered a question saying he didn’t think 2025 deliveries would fall short by more than 76,000 acre-feet—the remaining margin before an outright violation of the Rio Grande Compact. When asked for supporting data, he deferred to the Interstate Stream Commission. My calculations show the Middle Rio Grande has burned through half of that remaining margin as of the end of May.

Nat’s presentation was one of the best: extremely well organized, clearly presented, frankly informative, and very timely. He clearly explained the water the Rio Grande Compact provides to the Middle Rio Grande and what it requires. He traced the shift from the Middle Valley’s small delivery credit in 2018 to a growing water debt that reached 124,000 acre-feet by the end of 2024. He emphasized the urgent need to significantly reduce total depletions from the river. “If the next seven years look like the last seven,” Nat warned, “it will be too late.”

Unless we act now—with enforceable limits—New Mexico could face Compact violation and a loss of control over our water future.

We agree—and we believe it may already be too late. Regardless, it’s much better for the State Engineer as New Mexico’s water regulator to begin strong, appropriate actions in 2025 than to by default cede authority and control to the judiciary.

So, how are we doing this year? As a former ISC Director, I know where to find the data and do the compact math. Think of the following as my best estimate, that of an observer rather than an insider with access to the best data and current information. I’m putting forward my estimates with those caveats, transparently.

In recent years, the total of all Middle Rio Grande water uses has consumed much more water from the Rio Grande than is ours. 2025 continues the spiral. There is no effective state regulation or self-regulation by institutional water users to protect the water commons. Groundwater pumpers are not suffering a shortage and have increased pumping to offset lack of surface water and increased demand. That pumping causes increased river seepage losses and consumes stored groundwater.

The facts of 2025 per my calculations summarized below are alarming.

  1. Otowi Bridge Gage Volume to Date: 227,500 acre-feet of water have flowed past the USGS Otowi Bridge gage through May 31, per my calculation based on 15-minute gage readings over the first 151 days of 2025. Some measurements are missing but use of averages is adequate for this preliminary estimate.
  2. The 227,500 acre-foot total winter and spring runoff volume is very low. No snowpack remains, in the Colorado or New Mexico Rio Grande headwaters.
  3. Otowi Index Flow: The total volume flowing past the Otowi Bridge gage is adjusted to determine the amount of native Rio Grande water subject to the compact’s sharing requirements. To calculate the index, subtract 20,000 acre-feet of San Juan-Chama Project water and add 32,400 acre-feet of native water federal agencies stored for the pueblos. The total volume to date this year that must be divided between the Middle and Lower Rio Grande is 239,900 acre-feet.
  4. Delivery Requirement: Of that adjusted total, 57%, or 136,700 acre-feet, is legally allocated to users downstream from Elephant Butte Dam.
  5. Actual Delivery: Based on Elephant Butte Reservoir storage and release data, 99,300 acre-feet have arrived—net of all uses and losses between Otowi and the dam, meaning after accounting for diversions, evaporation, and seepage and unknown losses and errors. This is a 39% delivery, must less than the 57% required.
  6. Cumulative Deficit: The Middle Rio Grande is entitled to 43%, or 103,200 acre-feet. Middle Rio Grande overuse this year to date is 37,400 acre-feet, increasing the cumulative water debt to -161,400 acre-feet.

From a slight credit in 2018 to a deficit of -161,400 acre-feet in May 2025—our water debt has quickly grown out of control.

Figure 1. The Middle Rio Grande’s Plunge Into Compact Water Delivery Debt

Unless we have a strong monsoon, 2025 will push the Middle Valley even deeper into water delivery debt. If the monsoon is weak, none of the water stored upstream for the pueblos’ indigenous rights is likely to be delivered. Little to none of the steady summer low flows expected at Otowi will make it through the Middle Rio Grande. For much of the summer, the riverbed below Albuquerque will be dry—and when flow resumes, rewetting the channel will consume large volumes of water that will not count toward deliveries.

No emergency declared. No plan. No accountability. Most Middle Rio Grande residents remain unaware of the stakes.

Here we are once again doing little, saying less. The House Appropriations and Finance Committee stripped without comment the Governor’s request to increase the State Engineer’s annual budget $500,000 for staff, office space, and expenses for the agency to address the Compact delivery crisis.  No public emergency is declared. No action plan has emerged.  Reporting is sparse with unheeded exceptions. Most Middle Rio Grande residents remain unaware of the stakes.

The Water Advocates commends General Counsel Nat Chakeres and State Engineer Liz Anderson for their transparency in the General Counsel’s announcement in a public forum that significant policy changes are coming soon, including notices to all large water users, a metering order for all large wells, and the initiation of the Middle Rio Grande adjudication. We appreciate his frank evaluation of our basic alternatives, contrasting the benefits of negotiated agreements with fighting it out first in court only to be forced to settle or having an adverse judicial order imposed. As he put it, there are water uses that are not going away.

We need more, much more, than Nat’s introduction to forthcoming policy changes. If we do not act now—with transparency, accountability, and enforceable limits—New Mexico could face Compact violation, new United States Supreme Court litigation with Texas, and a potentially devastating loss of control over our own water future. Compliance is the barrier against all of that.

Regardless, I urge New Mexico’s two state water resources agencies to become more transparent; They must name, describe, and quantify our vexing water overuse problems. That is the first step toward solving them.

Norm Gaume, P.E. (ret.)

President, New Mexico Water Advocates

A Glossary of Terms for Middle Rio Grande Water Management is available here.

As a retired professional engineer, I have used care in completing these calculations, but they rely on incomplete information and have been checked only by me. I stand by my conclusions even though I want to make it clear the specific numbers are preliminary and my calculations are simplified. Therefore, I do not warrant the numbers I calculated from provisional and unpublished agency data. If my numbers are incorrect, I hope the ISC will let me know and provide their professional estimates, as referenced by Nat.

Agriculture Center Pivot Irrigation on Curry County Ranch - Photo Credit Danny Fish

Groundwater Crisis in Eastern NM

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Time to Treat Our Aquifers Like Infrastructure

New Mexico is standing at the edge of a crisis that many cannot see—because it lies beneath our feet. Groundwater, our state’s most vital and fragile water source, is vanishing faster than it can be replenished. In Eastern New Mexico, this crisis is no longer a distant threat, because Eastern New Mexico is almost out of water.  The threat is here. It is now.

For those of us working in land and water conservation, especially in the Ogallala Aquifer region, the warning signs have been flashing red for years. The Ogallala Aquifer—one of the largest in the world—underlies eight states and provides life-sustaining water for agriculture, communities, and military installations. But it is a finite, non-renewable resource. In Eastern New Mexico, we are draining it. It’s irreplaceable; the consequences are mounting.

More than 95% of our local groundwater is used for irrigation farming. But irrigation isn’t just “watering crops.” It is water-intensive, industrial-scale pumping that, year after year, removes vast volumes of groundwater from ancient paleochannels—buried drainage channels carved before the aquifer was formed. Because they are the deepest parts of the Ogallala Aquifer, paleochannels hold the last accessible groundwater in the region.

Center-pivot irrigation Curry County Ranch, now abandoned.  Photo: Danny Fish

In fact, from 2018 to 2023 alone, we lost more than 20% of the remaining groundwater in the paleochannel region northwest of Cannon Air Force Base.

That loss isn’t just data—it’s a large permanent loss of the remaining water supply.

For every year irrigation farming continues in the paleochannel, we lose the equivalent of four years of future groundwater availability for our communities’ future. At this pace, the aquifer will be functionally depleted over most of the Eastern New Mexico High Plains region by 2028. The 2017 report Lifetime Projections of the High Plains Aquifer in Eastern New Mexico by New Mexico Tech geologists Geoff Rawling and Alex Rinehart warned us—loud and clear—that only about 10 years of water remained for agricultural use in Curry and Roosevelt Counties. We’re nearly there.

Despite its importance, groundwater is too often treated as invisible or secondary—governed inconsistently, measured incompletely, and managed with outdated frameworks.

Emptying the huge but finite Ogallala aquifer is the legacy of policies that reward extraction over conservation, like an economy based on mining.  We learned the finite limits of Ogallala Aquifer groundwater and then did nothing to reduce its rapid and thorough depletion.  Supplemental wells were authorized and drilled to restore production volumes as the saturated groundwater zone thinned. High commodity prices incentivized water-intensive crops. Meanwhile, severe sustained drought accelerated groundwater pumping to replace the absent precipitation. Climate change increased evapotranspiration.

Statewide, many communities face similar concerns. Groundwater supports not only agriculture, but drinking water systems, ecosystems, and industrial sectors across New Mexico. Yet despite its importance, groundwater is too often treated as invisible or secondary—governed inconsistently, measured incompletely, and managed with outdated frameworks.

But it’s not too late—if we act decisively and collaboratively.

And to lead, we must understand the full picture.

That begins by recognizing that groundwater is infrastructure. It may not be visible like a road or a dam, but it functions as the underlying support system for our economy, food supply, ecosystems, and national defense. Without it, communities cannot survive, agriculture cannot function, and our military readiness is compromised.

Recognize that groundwater is neglected infrastructure. Without it, communities cannot survive

We don’t think twice about maintaining highways or reinforcing bridges—yet we often overlook the aquifers beneath us that make everyday life in New Mexico possible. Groundwater storage and availability should be treated with the same level of urgency and investment as any other critical asset. Groundwater expert Maurice Hall puts it plainly: we must stop treating groundwater as a passive byproduct of weather and start managing it as the lifeline it is.

That’s why we’re honored to feature Maurice in this month’s Water Advocates speaker series. His upcoming workshop—“Groundwater as Essential Infrastructure”—invites us to rethink how we view, manage, and protect this hidden but essential resource. He’ll explore why New Mexico depends more heavily on groundwater than any other state and why proactive management has been the exception—not the rule.

Join us June 19 from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. for this important conversation.

The water beneath our feet is not just a resource—it’s the infrastructure of survival

Maurice will also share how groundwater governance is evolving across the West, offering insight into new models of aquifer stewardship, state policy, and collaborative action. Whether you’re a producer, policymaker, planner, or community leader, this session will open your eyes to what’s possible when we begin to treat groundwater not as an afterthought, but as a foundation for the future.

Bring your questions. Bring your ideas. Bring your commitment. Because the water beneath our feet is not just a resource—it’s the infrastructure of survival, and it’s time we start treating it that way.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Zugf2LXrS0WF3e-XgI8zUw

Dr. Ladona Clayton is Executive Director of the Ogallala Land & Water Conservancy and a NM Water Advocates board member and volunteer. Ladona is leading water conservation efforts in Curry County in an official collaboration that includes Clovis, Curry County, Cannon Air Force Base, and local irrigators.

Rio Grande River

To Thrive in a Climate-Challenged World, New Mexicans Should Govern Water as a Commons

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by John R. Brown

This essay argues for an alternative to a mechanistic application of “priority administration” to allocate the “waters of New Mexico.” The 2023 Water Security Planning Act (WSP) provides flexibility at local and regional levels to move water and share shortages more democratically and intentionally. It allows us to think anew about how to govern our water resource: as a Commons.

“Conventional wisdom” (or more accurately, the ideology that there’s a “free market” solution to every economic problem) insists that to allocate scarce water efficiently to its “highest and best uses,” governments should leave buyers and sellers free to sort out through their market transactions who “owns” what “rights” to particular sources and flows of water. Taken to an extreme, and in the absence or weak enforcement of externally imposed rules, such a private ownership regime would make every water right owner (and claimant) their own governor. Each is incentivized to protect their interest in their private holdings. This scheme provides no incentive to protect the resource as a whole; nor does it account for water’s value in the context of its many critical functions in a social-ecological system.

Why would treating water as a Commons be better? At first glance, it would seem unlikely. A Commons (or common pool resource – CPR) is a shared “good” that under conditions of scarcity is subtractable—where one person’s use can take away from another’s ability to use it (that is, it can be depleted or contaminated), and limiting or excluding people from using (or overusing) it is difficult or costly.

The evolutionary biologist Garrett Hardin[1] declared it a matter of fact that people would “free-ride” on a good they have not helped provide or pay for, and thus a tragedy—where “freedom in a Commons brings ruin to all”—is inevitable. Hardin thought there were only two ways out of this dilemma: privatizing the resource, or strict regulation by the “Leviathan” (state control). But in this assertion Hardin was demonstrably wrong, as Elinor Ostrom and many others have shown. Thousands of cases of long-lasting and self-governing CPRs around the world provide empirical evidence that alternative institutional arrangements are feasible.[2], [3] New Mexico’s indigenous tribal communities, as well as its historic acequias, offer examples of self-organization and adaptive cooperation.[4] Can New Mexico’s water stakeholders (all of us) learn and benefit from viewing our water resources as collective goods, and governing them as such, in pursuit of a shared goal—in this case to thrive in a warmer, drier world?

Under provisions of the WSP Act, the NM Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) is given authority to “establish and conduct a regional water security program.” The Act requires the ISC to promulgate rules that establish regional boundaries, criteria for approving regional plans, and the composition of regional water planning bodies, as well as procedures for the regional entities to consider public welfare values and report any issues and concerns to the ISC. To what extent will those rules support self-organization and self-governance within regional planning entities? A great deal depends on how the ISC views its role(s) and those of each prospective regional water resilience planning entity in crafting them.

Would recognizing and constituting such entities merely add another “layer of bureaucracy” to an already top-heavy system? Or would it strengthen decision making by ensuring that values important to communities within each region are thoroughly considered? Here the concept of polycentric governance is relevant. It suggests that successful governance of scarce shared resources needs to operate at several levels or scales, on the premise that many social problems are best dealt with at the level most closely related to the problem. From this perspective, polycentric governance aims to create an adaptive system of multiple self-governing units of different scales interacting with each other.

Planning coordination within any region, including identifying and helping to resolve conflicts among community planning efforts and their implications for strengthening regional water resilience, ought to be an important aspect of a regional entity’s work. While subject to state law (the WSP Act), these planning entities should not be merely a creature of the ISC. Their composition should reflect the diverse preferences, interests, and concerns of all regional stakeholders—water users, providers, managers, and regulators—and ensure their representation in its deliberations and decisions. Face-to-face interaction in appropriate forums can have profound implications for building trust among heterogeneous actors, which is a vital resource to enhance cooperation for taking collective action.

Closely related to trust-building, a polycentric approach to governance emphasizes mutual learning and decentralized experimentation and takes fully into account traditional technical knowledge as well as 21st century scientific findings. Some functions of regional entities consistent with polycentric governance might include:

  1. authority to approve or to recommend funding for grants and contracts to itself and/or to communities within the region for enhancing water resilience;
  2. monitoring agencies’ and non-governmental actors’ activity affecting the region’s water supply and reporting issues to the public;
  3. defining the public welfare of the region, and testing agencies’ policies, plans and projects against public welfare criteria it adopts;
  4. executing governance arrangements (via memoranda of understanding) within our existing legal framework. [5] 

For collective action to succeed, perception of the benefits of cooperation to the common good must outweigh in actors’ judgments the perceived costs of participating in the collective effort over the long haul. In the case of sustaining, protecting, and equitably allocating New Mexico’s scarce water resources, the stakes have never been higher.

John R. Brown is an active member of the Water Advocate’s board and was the New Mexico Water Dialogue’s Executive Director from 2002 to 2006. John is an independent public policy professional and has written several articles and papers on water planning and policy. 

[1] Garrett Hardin 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162:1243-8.

[2] Elinor Ostrom 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press

[3] Digital Library of the Commons https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/

[4] J. R. Brown and Rivera, José A. 2000. Acequias de Común: The Tension between Collective Action and Private Property Rights. Conference Paper. PDF. Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium, the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/       https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1869

[5] A regional entity might for example serve as a negotiating forum for developing a shortage sharing agreement for use in an alternative administration process under Active Water Resource Management.

NM_Water_Dialogue_098

Guiding Principles for NM Regional Water Security Planning

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Introduction

The NM Legislature intended regional water security planning to be a New Mexico regional and community water resilience problem-solving tool and unanimously passed the 2023 Water Security Planning Act to authorize it and provide for state funding.

For the planning program to be effective, the rules must provide a clear, high-level framework for the Regional Water Security Planning Program, defining objectives, responsibilities, and implementation processes. The rules must describe the relative roles of ISC, regions, and communities in their cooperative endeavor to understand the limits and trends of their water supplies and evaluate alternatives for improving their resilience.

Perhaps most important is that the Rules articulate essential Guiding Principles, such as these:

✅ Proposed Guiding Principles for Effective Regional Water Security Planning

✅ Water planning is to solve water problems; the problems must be named.
✅ Data-driven problem definition must come before intensive planning.
✅ Legal water rights must be balanced with long-term water supply protection.
✅ Water planning must be grounded in independent science and holistic analysis.
✅ Regional planning must be efficient, practical, and produce actionable solutions.
✅ Stakeholder engagement must be designed to ensure meaningful participation.
✅ Planning efforts must be well-funded and include clear implementation pathways.

To create the New Mexico’s regional water security planning program as a powerful tool for solving water challenges, regional water security planning must be structured around the following core principles.

  1. Water Resource Planning Is a Tool for Solving Water Problems

🔹 Water planning should be structured around identifying and solving water problems.

✅ Clearly define the core water problems that regional planning must address—such as water overuse, climate-driven scarcity, aquifer depletion, and long-term sustainability.
✅ Require regional plans to develop, compare, and prioritize alternative solutions, rather than just listing projects.
✅ Emphasize adaptive decision-making that allows regions to revise strategies as water conditions change.

  1. Data-Driven Problem Definition Before Intensive Planning

🔹 Water planning should not begin as an expensive, time-intensive process until the region’s water problems are clearly defined using data.

✅ Require an initial problem-definition phase based on scientific, hydrologic, and economic data before launching full-scale planning efforts.
✅ Ensure that regional planning processes begin with a shared fact base, reducing confusion, inefficiency, and unproductive debates.
✅ Structure planning timelines to allow for early-stage data collection and assessment, so that stakeholders engage meaningfully once problems are well-defined.

  1. Water Planning Must Balance Legal Water Rights with Water Supply Protection

🔹 Regional water security planning must explicitly balance the strong legal protections for the right to use water with the need to protect the water supply itself.

✅ Require explicit water balance evaluations that consider how water availability, climate change, and usage patterns affect long-term supply.
✅ Ensure that regional plans consider and evaluate the public welfare of the region, the needs of future generations of New Mexicans, equitable access to safe water, and the economic and environmental trade-offs of different water management choices.
✅ Enable regions to tailor solutions to their unique hydrologic, economic, and environmental conditions while ensuring that long-term sustainability is a core consideration.
✅ Require that regional plans include climate resilience measures that protect both the physical availability of water resources and users’ rights.

  1. Water Planning Must Be Grounded in Science and Holistic Analysis

🔹 Planning efforts must be based on the best available data while also supporting the development of new scientific and hydrologic information where data gaps exist.

✅ Require standardized scientific methodologies—such as water balance models, scenario planning, and risk assessments—to guide regional water security planning.
✅ Require that regional plans analyze the effects of continuing status quo water management and identify the specific actions needed to secure water for future generations of New Mexicans.
✅ Cumulative impacts of proposed projects should be evaluated holistically, ensuring that regional plans account for interconnected effects across communities and water use sectors.
✅ Ensure that data collection and analysis remain independent from political pressures, protecting the integrity of scientific assessments.
✅ Require that each proposed project, program, or policy is vetted for feasibility and that costs and projected water savings are developed for those that pass initial review, ensuring that scenario analysis is based on realistic options.

  1. Water Planning Must Be Efficient, Practical, and Actionable

🔹 Regional planning should focus on producing clear, actionable solutions, rather than getting lost in bureaucratic complexity.

✅ Ensure that regional councils are structured efficiently, balancing broad representation with practical decision-making capacity.
✅ Ensure that each regional council has qualified leadership and the necessary resources to conduct and manage the water planning process effectively.
✅ Planning timelines must be realistic and structured, preventing unnecessary delays while allowing for thorough problem and solution analyses.

  1. Water Planning Must Engage Stakeholders Meaningfully, Not Just Formally

🔹 Public participation should be structured to ensure that engagement is productive, inclusive, and directly informs decision-making.

✅ Equip regional councils with the resources and strategies needed to engage local communities effectively in the planning process.
✅ Ensure that public input is meaningfully incorporated into planning decisions, with clear mechanisms for responding to concerns and adapting plans based on stakeholder feedback.
✅ Adopt transparent and fair decision-making processes to balance competing water interests while maintaining accountability.

  1. Water Planning Must Be Well-Funded and Supported for Implementation

🔹 The ISC’s rulemaking and implementation approach should be proactive and well-funded, ensuring that planning efforts are not constrained by a lack of resources or political hesitation.

✅ Ensure dedicated funding streams for both planning and implementation, so that well-developed plans do not languish without action.
✅ Require regional councils and the ISC to establish clear pathways for implementation, including funding mechanisms, monitoring requirements, and accountability measures to track progress.
✅ Ensure that statewide objectives lead to solutions that comply with planning law and effectively support both statewide and regional water security needs.

Final Takeaway:

A successful regional water security planning process must go beyond bureaucratic compliance to serve as a problem-solving tool that applies the facts, the law, human creativity and community, and stakeholder input to ensure long-term water security. The NMISC Rules & Guidelines should be revised to explicitly incorporate these principles, ensuring that New Mexico’s approach to water planning is efficient, actionable, and capable of addressing the state’s most pressing water challenges.

Time

From the President’s Desk: Preventing New Tragedies of NM’s Water Supply Commons

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The Tragedy of the Commons: A Lesson from an 8th Grader

Why do we struggle to act on problems we know are urgent? An 8th-grade Santa Fe girl’s January 28, 2025, public comment in support of passing Senate Bill 4 to comprehensively limit greenhouse gas emissions defines the problem and a simple solution.

“I have learned about the Tragedy of the Commons, which occurs when each well-meaning individual takes or uses only what they need, but the total is greater than the resource available. In the case of our environment, this plays out in small emissions that total more than our atmosphere can handle. … One of the best things we can do is impose regulations that cap resource use at a level that is sustainable for a long period of time.”

The concept applies to our water. The total of our individual, well-meaning uses are more than our water supplies can handle. As the Water Advocates explain in Our Water Crisis, overuse is causing growing New Mexico water supply security deficits for many communities. Opportunities are lost as time passes without action.

Water in New Mexico: Sacred Resource or Commodity?

We know that water is sacred, essential for all life. But we also see it as a mineral resource to be mined. The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, after all, is New Mexico’s (top quality) water science agency. We have been using groundwater as a mineral resource, mining it across New Mexico for more than a century, Vast volumes have been removed. We don’t know in any dependable way how much groundwater remains, nor how fast our collective overuse is using up what is left.

New Mexico has many ghost towns, vibrant places until the minerals were mined out.

The Consequences of Inaction

Some aquifers don’t recharge at all or very much.  Water users who depend on such aquifers have two choices. One is to mine the water until it’s gone and suffer the consequences, including more ghost towns. The other is to reduce and stop unsustainable high-volume mining to leave enough water to meet the relatively small water needs of local communities long into the future. The sooner that step is taken, the more water remains for all future uses.

For example, the Ogallala aquifer is New Mexico’s first large-scale case of mining the water until it’s virtually gone, until municipal wells have faltered or run dry. Think of the people in Portales who are saying, “if only I had known.”

Think of Deming and the surrounding Mimbres Basin farming community, which formerly grew fruit and vegetables from accumulated groundwater in this closed basin, back when farm labor from Mexico was available. Now, the farmers mine groundwater to grow hay for mechanized harvest. Surely running out of water is a bad outcome. Inaction will surely deliver that outcome to Luna County. We don’t know when.

Pumping groundwater from aquifers interconnected with rivers is more complex because the aquifers do recharge from their rivers. Pumping groundwater takes water from the river, but days to decades in the future, depending on the hydrologic connection.

Diversions from the river, wells, and ditches by well-meaning individual Middle Rio Grande water users and institutions together take more water than the Middle Rio Grande’s share of of the river. The water delivery debt accrued since 2019 is dangerously close to the maximum allowed.

NM Water Deliverables Chart

Make no mistake. This overuse will stop, not because the water runs out but because we are using water that belongs to others downstream. Most of that water is allocated to Elephant Butte Irrigation District, for New Mexico farms.

Recent Interstate Stream Commission staff reports document official state estimates of current Rio Grande overuse:  17,000 to 18,000 acre-feet/year in the Lower Rio Grande and about 26,000 acre-feet/year in the Middle Rio Grande. It will take resources and political will to rein in that overuse.

The Challenge of Human Attention to Long-Term Problems

Human beings naturally struggle to focus on long-term issues like water security. Evolution has wired us to prioritize immediate threats over distant risks and to seek immediate rewards. This cognitive bias, known as present bias, causes us to underestimate future dangers and delay action until it is too late. Complex, slow-moving problems like growing water scarcity lack the urgency of immediate disasters, making them easier to ignore.

Another bias, normalcy bias, leads us to assume that the future will be much like the past, blinding us to the signs of an impending crisis. This is why, even as wells run dry and rivers shrink, many fail to recognize the urgency of sustainable water management.

However, this tendency can be overcome. Societal change often begins with heightened awareness, followed by collective action. When informed citizens demand accountability, leaders are compelled to act. Recognizing the slow-moving nature of water crises is the first step in shifting public consciousness and, ultimately, policy.

The Role of Political Will and Citizen Action

The primary barrier to effective water management is not technical expertise or scientific knowledge—it is political will. Politicians operate in environments driven by immediate demands, often prioritizing short-term issues over long-term sustainability. This is not a failure of leadership but a reflection of where public pressure is applied.

Citizens have the power to change this dynamic. By:

  • Raising Awareness: Talk about water issues in your community, with friends, and on social media.
  • Engaging with Leaders: Contact your legislators, attend public meetings, and demand that water security is prioritized.
  • Supporting Advocacy Groups: Collaborate with organizations working to influence water policy.

When citizens speak with a unified voice, leaders listen. Creating political will is not just about holding leaders accountable—it’s about giving them the mandate and public support they need to act boldly on long-term challenges.

The Call to Action

The 2025 Legislature faces a clear choice:

  1. Continue to underfund essential water management functions, risking avoidable crises; or
  2. Invest wisely in the future of New Mexico’s water security, ensuring resilience for generations to come.

This is not about optional programs; it’s about the fundamentals that determine whether our communities thrive or face preventable water crises.

New Mexico must finish what it has started, with adequate funding for water data, agency modernization, enforcement against illegal water use, and building the scientific understanding that supports sound decisions. The primary barrier is not technical; it’s political will. Let 2025 be the year we overcome that barrier. Citizens, your voices matter—now is the time to use them to secure our water future.

P.S. Don’t just read about the water crisis—understand it. The Water Advocates’ new website is your go-to resource for learning about the challenges facing our state. Explore the site, learn more, and share this and other vital articles with your friends and family. Our water future depends on it.