Middle Rio Grande Depletions Are Pushing New Mexico Toward a Compact Violation
May 15, 2026
Written Public Comments to the ISC for its May 21 meeting.
Dear Chairman Sanchez, Vice-Chair Timmons, Secretary Anderson, Commission Members, and Director Riseley-White,
New Mexico’s Top Priority Water Resources Management Problem
Rio Grande Compact – Middle Rio Grande compliance ccmpliance metric history and trend
The facts are not in dispute. ISC Director Hannah Riseley-White and State Engineer General Counsel Nat Chakeres presented them plainly as invited speakers at the Water Advocates’ March 19, 2026, workshop. New Mexico carries an accrued compact debit of -132,000 acre-feet. The average annual debit is -19,800 acre-feet per year. The accrued debit limit is -200,000 acre-feet. New Mexico will violate that limit in three years if the trend continues or after one bad year.
New Mexico still has the ability to prevent a compact violation — but only through strong, proactive water resources management, and only if that management begins now. New Mexicans are far better off reordering their own affairs than drifting into a compact violation with the certainty that Texas will have its say at U.S. Supreme Court water bankruptcy proceedings.
The Middle Rio Grande is home to about half of the State’s economy and population and has the highest regional diversity. The State’s two water resources management agencies must protect the water supply that the compact provides for the economy and residents while also protecting the Middle Rio Grande and the State from the risks of Supreme Court litigation for using too much of the Lower Rio Grande’s water for too long.
The Rio Grande Compact is a perfect barrier protecting the Middle Rio Grande from the water demands of the Lower Rio Grande. A New Mexico compact violation opens the door.
The Interstate Stream Commission, A State Water-Policy-Making Body, Should Publicly Consider New Mexico’s Top Water Resources Management Problem
We are grateful that Director Riseley-White and OSE General Counsel Nat Chakeres spoke frankly about this problem at our March 19 workshop. We now urge you as a State Commission with purview over this emergency to take up the problem formally.
The Interstate Stream Commission is a State water resources planning and management policy-making body. It holds statutory authority and responsibility for compact compliance performance monitoring and is graded on Rio Grande Compact Compliance accrued debit status by a Legislative Finance Committee performance measure. That performance measure scale should now be deep in the red. The ISC also has a physical role and substantial funding to reduce Middle Rio Grande conveyance losses that annually worsen New Mexico’s compact deliveries.
This Commission Should Be Briefed, Deliberate, and Take Action.
We request that deliberations consider public comment before choosing or endorsing the State’s approach to prevent the dangerously close compact violation.
The State is quite late in addressing this problem. Because OSE and ISC are late, ISC Commissioners should consider whether resources should be marshalled for a more active compliance program — especially given that Director Riseley-White and State Engineer General Counsel Chakeres announced in March that staff would proceed slowly, through voluntary negotiations, with no metering order forthcoming until late in the year.
Several ISC Commissioners have openly expressed a preference for priority administration, yet the Commission has never been briefed on whether or how it could apply here, what the alternatives are, or what the consequences of each path might be.
We are convinced that water users will not consider the necessary sacrifices they must make Rto prevent a compact violation unless they are motivated by a potentially worse outcome in the absence of their participation, such as cutting off all non-essential uses for a period of time to make compact deliveries.
The Active Water Resources Management program provides a NM Supreme Court-approved legal framework. The Commission must take actions now to protect the Middle Rio Grande water supply in accordance with its statutory mission and broad powers “to protect and to do any and all other things necessary to protect, conserve and develop the waters and stream systems of this state.” Section 72-14-3 NMSA 1978.
Requested ISC Actions
New Mexico Water Advocates calls on the Interstate Stream Commission to take the following steps without further delay:
First, schedule a formal public briefing at the next Commission meeting on the state of compact compliance — the debt, the trend, the trajectory to violation, and the consequences of failure.
Second, deliberate and take a position on the management alternatives available to prevent a violation, including the regulatory authorities the State Engineer holds and has not yet exercised.
Third, direct staff to report publicly and on a regular schedule on progress — or the lack of it.
Fourth, become transparent about this problem in the name of advancing public education and public understanding of the issues, choices, and consequences and the quantity of depletions that must be stopped or prevented to maintain compliance.
The compact violation now in view would bring severe legal and economic consequences to New Mexico — consequences New Mexicans would live with for decades, administered by a federal court that does not forgive debt. This Commission has the authority, the responsibility, and the obligation to the public to address that threat openly. This problem must have a solution framework. ISC must lead its development.
The moment demands it.
Sincerely,
/s/
New Mexico Water Advocates
The New Mexico Water Advocates submitted this public comment to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission on May 15, 2026. The ISC requires written public comment 72 hours in advance of its meetings but does not read comments into the record, post them publicly, or take oral public comment. It is the only state agency in New Mexico known to operate this way. We are publishing this comment here so that our 1,700-plus members, subscribers, and the interested public have access to it.
A landmark court settlement will force dramatic reductions in New Mexico groundwater pumping — and reshape who pays for water in the desert Southwest.
By Beth Bardwell and Norm Gaume
A Settlement That Changes Everything
For generations, Southern New Mexico residents and farmers have enjoyed cheap, seemingly unlimited water. That era is ending. A complex legal settlement between New Mexico, Texas, the United States, and the two major irrigation districts is expected to receive U.S. Supreme Court approval before this summer. If approved, it will become immediately effective. The consequences will be felt in every water bill, every farming operation, and every municipal water plan across the region.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit Texas filed in 2013, claiming that New Mexico groundwater users were pumping so aggressively that they depleted surface water flows legally owed to Texas. The United States joined Texas. The case wound through the courts for over a decade. New Mexico has agreed to substantially reduce groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande basin — a region that has, for years, been drawing far more water than is sustainable.
The years of cheap water are over.
The Hidden Aquifer Problem: Why Most Residents Don’t See It Coming
Freshwater has always been something of an illusion in the Chihuahuan Desert. The sole source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and daily life is underground. Unlike a reservoir, you can’t look at an aquifer and see how much is left, or how quickly it is dropping. Water flows from the tap. It is relatively cheap. The population is growing. Outwardly, everything appears fine.
N Gaume photo Nov 2025
Meanwhile, the Rio Grande — New Mexico’s major river — runs dry through most of southern New Mexico’s cities and towns. Over the last 25 years (2000–2025), the Bureau of Reclamation and farmers have released streamflow into the river below Caballo Reservoir for less than six months on average each year. The 2026 irrigation season will be worse, with EBID farmers expecting just a four-inch allotment of surface water due to very low storage in Elephant Butte Reservoir and extremely low snowpack in the Rio Grande headwaters.
Many Southern New Mexicans do not realize that Lower Rio Grande streamflow and the Rincon and Mesilla valleys’ underground aquifers are directly connected. When too much groundwater is pumped, it intercepts water that would otherwise flow downstream. That is precisely what Texas argued and what the scientific and litigation record demonstrates.
How We Got Here: The Pecan Boom and a Policy Decision That Shaped the Crisis
To understand the depth of the problem, you have to understand what grows in the valley — and why.
Historically, Lower Rio Grande farmers grew hay, vegetables, and row crops. These are seasonal crops with moderate water demands that could be fully satisfied by a full Rio Grande Project surface water supply of about three acre-feet of water per acre. Over the past several decades, that changed dramatically. Today, more than half of the acreage within Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID) — approximately 40,000 acres — is planted in pecans. Pecans are a permanent, high-water-use crop. Unlike seasonal crops, they cannot be fallowed during drought years. They require full irrigation every single year.
Pecan orchard irrigation requirements are staggering. Growing a single pecan requires more than eight gallons of water. A mature pecan orchard produces roughly 187,900 pecans per acre and consumes almost five feet of water annually — nearly twice the allotment of surface water EBID farmers can expect in a full supply year.
It takes more than eight gallons of water to grow a single pecan.
Pecan acreage had been climbing for years, but it took a dramatic leap in the early 2000s following a specific policy decision. The late Governor Bill Richardson[1] directed then-State Engineer John D’Antonio to recognize a special water right for pecan orchards — nearly five feet per acre per year. That administrative determination was subsequently affirmed in the State District Court’s ongoing Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication, locking it in. This crop-specific water right is unique due to its political origin and because it departs from New Mexico’s previously uniform practice of adjudicating a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region, based on the total crop mix.
The question that now hangs over the settlement is an uncomfortable one: farmers on the Lower Rio Grande dramatically expanded production of a permanent, high-water-use crop during a period of documented drought, declining reservoirs, and growing interstate water obligations. Was that a poor investment decision — or a calculated bet that, at the end of the day, public taxpayers would absorb the cost? See Jeremy Miller’s “The Rio Grande’s Pecan Problem: How Big Ag Is Threatening New Mexico’s Water Supply,” High Country News, September 2025.
By the Numbers: How Much Has Been Pumped
The scale of groundwater extraction in the Lower Rio Grande basin is significant. During the three years ending in 2024, groundwater users pumped an average of 281,000 acre-feet per year from the basin’s shallow alluvial aquifer and the deeper Santa Fe Group basin-fill sediments. EBID farmers account for 83% of that total — approximately 235,000 acre-feet per year. Municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) users represent the second-largest share at 14%, or roughly 40,000 acre-feet per year. Dairy farms account for 2.3%. These figures come from this table in the State Engineer’s Lower Rio Grande Water Master Report for 2024.
The cumulative impact of this extraction is substantial. State Engineer experts estimate that approximately 250,000 acre-feet have been drained from the shallow alluvial aquifer that underlies the valley floor. Another 1,000,000 acre-feet have been removed from the deeper Santa Fe Group aquifer system. The voids left by this pumping are being partially refilled by gravity flow from the Rio Grande itself — meaning the river is being pulled underground rather than flowing to Texas.
To offset the drawdown’s effect on Rio Grande streamflow, estimates suggest New Mexico would need to replenish approximately 750,000 acre-feet into its combined aquifers. That is roughly equivalent to three full years of current total groundwater diversions across the entire Lower Rio Grande basin.
On the municipal side, proactive conservation programs have kept MDCI pumping relatively stable despite population growth — a meaningful achievement that stands in notable contrast to the dramatic expansion of agricultural pumping. The State Engineer chart below illustrates the divergence between agricultural and municipal pumping trends over time.
Office of the State Engineer slide showing total agricultural and lumped non-agricultural groundwater pumping trends
Aquifer conditions and groundwater pumping levels, 1951–2021. Green lines reflects irrigation pumping; black lines reflects municipal, domestic, commercial, and industrial (MDCI) pumping. The lowest irrigation pumping was in 1985, less than 25,000 acre-feet. 2021 irrigation pumping was 280,000 acre-feet. Source: NM State Engineer.
What the Settlement Requires: Four Consequences for Southern New Mexico
The settlement is nearly finalized. When the Supreme Court approves it, four major changes will follow.
New Mexico Must Retire Groundwater Rights
The Settlement requires New Mexico to purchase and retire 18,200 acre-feet of actively used groundwater rights from willing sellers. The State must acquire half of those rights by 2030; the remainder by 2035. This represents approximately 5–7% of current total groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande — the equivalent of retiring roughly 9,240 groundwater-irrigated acres within EBID, or 83% of the City of Las Cruces’s annual groundwater pumping.
These retirements are a starting point, not a finish line. Achieving full compact compliance will ultimately require groundwater pumping reductions well beyond this to meet other specific settlement requirements.
New Mexico Taxpayers Will Foot a $150 Million Bill
The State Engineer estimates that implementing the settlement will cost New Mexico taxpayers more than $150 million. Approximately $27 million in additional public funds is being spent this year and the following two years paying EBID farmers to fallow their fields — leaving irrigated land unplanted to reduce pumping.
There are legitimate arguments on both sides of using public funds to compensate private agricultural operations for adjusting their water use. What is harder to defend is that the conditions requiring this expenditure — a pecan-dominated landscape in a water-constrained desert, during a documented period of drought and compact obligation — were foreseeable, and in some respects policy-enabled.
Water Will Cost More — for Everyone
Southern New Mexico residents are facing higher water bills regardless of whether they live in a city or run a business. Farmers will suffer shortages. The reason is rooted in water rights priority.
The settlement formally recognizes a 1903 priority date for EBID’s surface and groundwater rights of 3.024 acre-feet per acre. That portion of EBID farmers’ total diversion rights is senior to almost all others. Under New Mexico’s constitution and water law, junior groundwater rights — including those held by the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — cannot legally impair senior rights.
The settlement requires New Mexico, EBID, and the United States to negotiate with the City of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University — the affected water users participating as amici — to develop an alternative administration plan that would replace strict priority administration. That deadline is October 2026.[2] If those negotiations fail, strict priority water law prevails: junior municipal users get cut before a single senior agricultural right is touched. The negotiations are not open to the public.
In dry years such as 2021, 2022, and 2025, fully satisfying EBID’s senior rights would require more water than New Mexico’s total share of Caballo Dam releases, meaning agricultural groundwater pumping may need to be partially curtailed. In better years, EBID rights will claim all the water. As a consequence, cities may need to pay EBID farmers to reduce their pumping or develop alternative water supplies — none of which are inexpensive.
Possible alternatives include more aggressive municipal conservation, importing groundwater from outside the basin, reuse of treated wastewater effluent, and desalination of brackish water. All of these approaches are in active use in El Paso. All of them cost significantly more than the groundwater Southern New Mexico currently relies on.
More Rio Grande Streamflow — But Perhaps Not for Wildlife
One potential benefit of the settlement is that Southern New Mexico residents and wildlife may see more water flowing in the Rio Grande as New Mexico works to meet its delivery obligations to Texas. The 105-mile stretch of river that has run bone-dry for six months of most recent years could see more sustained flows.
However, even this outcome may be more limited than it appears. The Bureau of Reclamation and the NM Interstate Stream Commission are investing millions of dollars helping EBID improve operational efficiency and capture “surplus” stormwater — the wild water once allowed to flow freely in the Lower Rio Grande. This water, which once supported riparian habitat and downstream ecosystems, will be systematically captured for groundwater recharge. The environmental benefits of increased streamflow may be largely offset before the water ever reaches wildlife.
What This Means for You
The Lower Rio Grande Settlement is not an abstract legal proceeding. It is a turning point in how water is managed, priced, and prioritized across Southern New Mexico. The aquifer that supplies drinking water to Las Cruces, Doña Ana County, and dozens of smaller communities is connected to the same system that has been heavily drawn down for decades. The bill for that drawdown is now coming due — in court-mandated pumping reductions, in taxpayer-funded buyouts, and in the rising cost of water for every household in the region.
Southern New Mexico has long operated under the assumption that water from the ground is reliable, cheap, and essentially unlimited. The Settlement forces a reckoning with a different reality: that the desert’s water supply was never inexhaustible, that decisions made over the past two decades have accelerated its depletion, and that state taxpayers and Lower Rio Grande water users will broadly share the costs of those decisions.
Beth Bardwell is a water policy researcher and writer focusing on the Rio Grande basin. Her work appears in publications covering water law, environmental policy, and Southwestern water management.
Norm Gaume is a retired water engineer and former director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
[1] The State Engineer’s offers in the Lower Rio Grande water rights adjudication recognized a unique, crop-specific diversion right of nearly five acre-feet per acre for pecan orchards — a significant departure from New Mexico’s historic practice of recognizing a single water right amount for all farmers in an irrigated region based on the total crop mix. Among all adjudications statewide, the pecan offer stands as the outlier. This crop-specific right emerged during the Richardson administration. The political origins of the pecan crop water right in the Lower Rio Grande remain incompletely documented in the public record. The Salopek family, operators of one of the largest pecan farming operations in the region, were prominent stakeholders during this period. Co-author Norm Gaume has firsthand knowledge of these events from his work with the Office of the State Engineer during this time, including a contemporaneous conversation with the late Mark Salopek in which Salopek described the political origins of the water right.
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
February 18, 2025. Despite worsening scarcity, compact obligations, illegal water overuse, and the requirement to implement binding settlements, the Senate Finance Committee reduced funding for the Office of the State Engineer and Interstate Stream Commission — the only agencies with authority to manage the state’s water.
State Water Institutions Left Underfunded as Crisis Deepens
The Senate Finance Committee amended next fiscal year’s state budget in a manner that fails to provide the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) and Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) with the resources needed to confront New Mexico’s escalating water crisis. These agencies are the State’s primary institutions for managing water rights, ensuring interstate compact compliance, implementing settlements, protecting river systems, and planning future supply — functions no other entity has legal authority to perform.
Budget Decisions Disregard New Mexico’s Inability to Manage Its Water
The House-approved committee substitute budget already fell far short of what OSE/ISC identified as necessary to address mounting water governance failures, including compact compliance risks, groundwater depletion, and settlement obligations. The agencies requested approximately $132.78 million in special appropriations and program expansions, while the House-passed committee substitute provided about $73.05 million. The Senate Finance Committee authorized seven additional staff but without the $150,000 requested for office space and removed an additional $4.55 million from the House total. The cuts reject the State’s need to carry out essential statutory duties — enforcing water rights, reducing unlawful depletions, implementing the Lower Rio Grande Settlement, replacing the mission-critical water rights database software, and planning for worsening scarcity. The Senate also cut the aquifer mapping program appropriation from the $22.5 million to $10 million.
Committee Chair George Muñoz publicly acknowledged that key budget decisions were shaped through committee members’ rolling discussions outside public hearings and were changed at the last minute. The resulting proposal — including the unexpected removal of a 1% pay increase for teachers and state employees — surprised legislators and highlighted concerns about a back rooms process that also produced major funding decisions affecting the State’s ability to manage its water crisis.
To be frank, it’s our opinion that Sen. Muñoz’s arrogant disregard of New Mexico’s water crises in creating “his” budget is worse than mere fiscal malpractice. Fiscal malpractice means failing to meet State obligations now at the cost of enormous risk and exorbitant future costs. Senator Muñoz is doing more than mismanaging a budget—he is actively undermining the water security of every community in this state.
Evidence of the Senate Finance Committee’s arbitrary decision-making is revealed in the answers to Senator Soules’ (D-Las Cruces) questions of Chairman Muñoz. See the February 16 recording of the Senate Floor debate. The recording can be found here. Senator Soules’ questions begin at 12:26:25. Other Senators also objected to the process and the outcome.
The Outcome For Water
The table linked here provides the Water Advocates’ detailed analysis of the Office of the State Engineer and Interstate Stream Commission’s funding requests and the Legislature’s revisions, comparing the agencies’ original line-item requests with the Executive Budget, the House-approved committee substitute, and subsequent Senate changes.
Without sufficient funding and institutional capacity, OSE and ISC cannot enforce water rights at the scale required, implement interstate and tribal water settlements, reduce depletions, modernize critical data systems, or conduct the long-term planning needed to adapt to declining supplies. These responsibilities cannot be shifted to local governments or private actors; they rest solely with the State.
The funding shortfalls represent a failure to support the institutions responsible for protecting New Mexico’s water future at a time of intensifying drought, climate heating, and chronic overuse of rivers and aquifers. New Mexico cannot manage 21st-century water realities with 20th-century institutional processes, information technology, and thinking.
The funding shortfalls represent a failure to support the institutions responsible for protecting New Mexico’s water future at a time of intensifying drought, climate heating, and chronic overuse of rivers and aquifers. New Mexico cannot manage 21st-century water realities with 20th-century institutional processes, information technology, and thinking.
The 2026 Legislature has once again failed to strengthen the State’s water management system while there is still time, allowing underfunding to compound risks and invite Texas and the U.S. Supreme Court to determine how New Mexico manages the Middle Rio Grande.
The Lower Rio Grande settlement imposes onerous requirements, firm deadlines, and new Texas state-line delivery violation penalties promptly payable in actual water deliveries.
Statewide groundwater overuse — including along the Rio Grande — must be reduced, or New Mexico will suffer permanent and irreversible damage.
Corrections: edited Feb. 19 at 10:40 am to conform to this table included in today’s Interstate Stream Commission staff report that Director Riseley-White presented to the Commission this morning. She said the State Engineer did get seven new positions to administer water in accordance with several Indian Water Rights Settlements and in the Middle Rio Grande to prevent a Rio Grande Compact violation. The ISC Staff Report is online and can be found clicking here and drilling down three layers.
Feb 20, 2026. Added the italicized last sentence of the second paragraph. The Senate Finance Committee also cut that appropriation to less than half the amount approved by the house.
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.
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.
This excellence water science and policy paper has a lot to say. It should be required reading for all New Mexico elected officials. The report’s discussion of the data it summarizes and presents begins with this contrast between the Colorado River Basin’s and the Rio Grande/Río Bravo Basin’s water security problems and policy-makers’ attention.
The water scarcity challenges within the RGB basin have received much less attention from media outlets and national policymakers as compared to the Colorado River Basin (CRB) in the American Southwest. This can largely be explained by the comparatively smaller volume of water it carries (natural flows of 11,225 MCM/yr or 9.1 million AF/ yr) in the RGB [25] vs. 18,996 MCM/yr (15.4 million AF/yr) in the CRB [26], as well as the smaller population it serves with drinking water (15 million in RGB vs. 40 million in CRB) and the area of irrigated farmland it supports (7,800 km2 in RGB vs. 22,300 km2 in CRB) [2]. However, the water crisis facing the RGB is arguably more severe and urgent than the CRB, as illustrated by these conditions.
Data collection and interpretation by the authors leads to this conclusion.
We estimate that only half (48%) of water directly consumed for anthropogenic purposes is supported by renewable replenishment; the other half (52%) has been unsustainable, meaning that it is causing depletion of reservoirs, aquifers, and river flows. The over-consumption of renewable water supplies is primarily due to irrigated agriculture, which accounts for 87% of direct water consumption in the basin.
And this opportunity.
This water crisis presents an opportunity for the residents of the RGB to envision a new, more sustainable water future. The ‘Multi-benefit Land Repurposing Program’ underway in the water-stressed Central Valley of California provides one example of productive community dialogue around possible future scenarios [42]. The “Exploratory Scenario Planning” approach being advanced by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in various communities in the western US similarly offers ways to engage local communities in planning for their water future [43]. Any transformational strategies will require careful and inclusive planning, provision of strong financial incentives for farming communities to facilitate needed changes, and a bold willingness of water management agencies and decision makers to ensure water and food security for the region. Alternate pathways toward a sustainable water future are available for the RGB basin, but time is of the essence in correcting the highly unsustainable conditions that presently exist.
October’s Big Storm Helped the River But the Middle Rio Grande Depleted 40% of the Lower Rio Grande’s Share
An intense rainstorm centered on the San Juan River mountain headwaters spilled over into the headwaters of the Rio Grande, sending a surge of mountain runoff into the San Luis Valley. This is the storm that flooded Pagosa Springs. The October 14 Alamosa Citizen story headline on the flood was followed by the reporter’s understanding of routine Colorado water management in the subtitle, “Now it’s time to measure and account for the extra water in management of the Rio Grande Compact.”
The Rio Grande at the Del Norte gage peaked at 7,000 cubic feet per second—a very high flow for autumn. The Colorado Division of Water Resources contemporaneously estimated 20,000 to 25,000 acre-feet entered the San Luis Valley in Colorado, and reported that 15,000 acre-feet was diverted into the Valley’s canals. Colorado’s Rio Grande Division Engineer, Pat McDermott, told the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable that the Middle Rio Grande might see roughly 5,000 acre-feet of this water, but that it would likely not extend as far south as Elephant Butte Reservoir. The Rio Grande benefit in New Mexico actually was much larger but he was right about Elephant Butte.
Because the Rio Grande Compact divides the river’s flow among Colorado, the upper, middle and lower Rio Grande in New Mexico, and the Lower Rio Grande in Texas, how each state measures and manages water determines whether its downstream obligations are met.
The irrigation season in Colorado and New Mexico ended November 1. Colorado flows increased as a result but are tapering down. Deliveries into Elephant Butte are now slowly increasing, but didn’t benefit from the Colorado flood. The contrast between Colorado’s prompt accounting and New Mexico’s limited conveyance is striking.
A Growing Water-Delivery Debt
The Middle Rio Grande entered the year 124,000 acre-feet behind in its accrued annual water deliveries to Elephant Butte Reservoir. Throughout the year, that debt has inexorably grown due to the complete failure of this year’s spring runoff and the Middle Rio Grande’s excessive depletions over the last 15 years. New Mexico does not manage the Middle Valley’s groundwater pumping, which accelerated due to lack of river water, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s diverting more than New Mexico’s share, and poor channel conveyance.
Neither the State Engineer nor the Interstate Stream Commission have publicly discussed this year’s growing debt. Neither has emphasized New Mexico’s serious risk of a new violation of the Rio Grande Compact due to the Middle Rio Grande’s chronic taking of the Lower Rio Grande’s share, year after year.
I decided to calculate what happened on the Rio Grande in New Mexico from the storm. I used online river and reservoir gage data from October 12 through November 9, the last day for which a complete data set is available online. My calculations show that between those dates, 40,900 acre-feet of water flowed under the highway bridge to Los Alamos as measured at the Otowi Bridge gage. Colorado state-line water deliveries were about 60 percent; the other 40 percent came from New Mexico springs and tributaries. The Lower Rio Grande’s share of that, which is the same thing as the Middle Rio Grande’s delivery obligation, was 23,300 acre-feet.
Elephant Butte’s storage increased only 14,000 acre-feet and releases were 100 acre-feet, creating an actual water delivery during this period of 14,100 acre-feet. The result: this a deficit of 9,200 acre-feet over this 29-day period was added to New Mexico’s 2025 debit. Roughly 40 percent of the water that should have reached the reservoir disappeared within the Middle Valley.
Some unknown combination of Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District diversions, increased groundwater pumping that induces recharge from the river, and the poor water-conveyance condition of the river channel upstream from and into the nearly dry Elephant Butte Reservoir absorbed or intercepted much of the flow. This is why so little of the high flows reached Elephant Butte, leaving New Mexico much worse off with regard to its Compact obligations.
Why I’m Tracking Deliveries Monthly
The Water Advocates for several years has urged the Interstate Stream Commission staff to begin paying public attention to water deliveries through the Middle Rio Grande each month and forecasting the year-end results. Sure there are uncertainties and unknowns, but both tracking intra-year progress and forecasting the year-end results are an essential first step to recognizing and managing this serious problem.
The State can’t manage what the State doesn’t measure—and that includes contemporaneous annual compliance as a year progresses. Water delivery debt has grown significantly during 2025, without any Interstate Stream Commission acknowledgement of that fact. Both the facts and state agency silence should alarm the Legislature and the public.
My independent review of this year’s Compact deliveries began this summer. I requested data at the end of each recent month from the Bureau of Reclamation’s engineer who operates the official Rio Grande water accounting model. Last month he discovered a problem with the initial condition for the 2025 accounting. We both made bad estimates because Reclamation’s Elephant Butte Reservoir instrumentation, which measures the reservoir’s water-surface elevation and determines its storage volume, became stuck. I misunderstood how the model accounts for federal storage of New Mexico water in Rio Chama reservoirs to ensure the six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos’ Prior and Paramount water rights have a full supply. The release of unused prior and paramount water between now and the end of the year should materially improve net Compact deliveries over the remainder of the year because it was properly accounted when it was stored.
The Outlook
I project the year will end with an annual 2025 Middle Rio Grande water-delivery debt of about 26,000 acre-feet and an accrued water debt of about 150,000 acre-feet. If so, that may give us two years to avoid a Compact violation rather than only one. We must use this time to stop and reverse the current trend, prevent the violation that continued inaction will cause, and begin working our way out of Compact debt. Any accrued water debt above about 50,000 acre-feet effectively prevents Middle Rio Grande water from being stored upstream in Rio Chama reservoirs.
A public agency can’t deal with a complex problem that impacts the public unless and until the agency names the problem and describes it. A problem can’t be managed if progress toward the desired outcome is not measured. The State Engineer’s job is to comply with the Compact. The ISC’s job is to gather accurate information, professional analysis, and make it publicly available. Both have the duty to communicate openly and promptly.
I speculate this crisis is getting the silent treatment by both state agencies because they don’t have the Governor’s consent to confront it. Dealing with this compact emergency is not in the Governor’s 50-Year Water Action Plan. Neither is water planning. If we have to wait for a new Governor to attend to New Mexico’s water emergency, it may not be in time to prevent a brand new Texas v. New Mexico case before the US Supreme Court. Failing to take serious action now is another step toward the huge risks and costs of the litigation that will follow a violation. That’s a poor legacy for everyone involved.
New Mexico needs transparent water management to prevent the looming Compact violation. It needs funding. It needs it now.
Committee Chair George Muñoz 
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 
