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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.