At a momentous hearing on April 5, 2024, more than 100 community members from Catron County crowded the court room and hallways of the Seventh Judicial District court in Reserve to hear oral argument on the Augustin Plains Ranch LLC’s continuing and relentless requests to mine and hoard 54,000 acre-feet of water a year from the arid San Augustin Plains. District Court Judge Roscoe Woods heard arguments from Augustin Plains Ranch (APR) and the many allied parties opposing the transfer including the State Engineer Water Rights Division, the Catron County Commission, the Helen Hand Ranch, and two groups of area residents including the Community Protestants group, represented by NM Environmental Law Center. Agreeing that the Ranch’s request to transfer this groundwater was pure speculation, Judge Woods ruled from the bench in favor of denying the transfer as contrary to NM law on beneficial use.
The district court granted the State Engineer’s Motion for Summary Judgment, ultimately preventing APR from pumping water from 30 proposed wells, which APR hoped to pipe upstate to municipalities north of Socorro such as Los Lunas and Belén. The San Augustin Plains basin is a closed groundwater basin meaning it has no perennial water source to recharge the basin. The groundwater in the basin is considered fossil water with calculations that the water is 9,000 to 11,000 years old. It is unconscionable to think that the water could be mined and delivered via pipeline to municipalities to dangle it in front of developers for unsustainable growth in our state, which is already in a water crisis.
Since 2007, NMELC has fought alongside Catron County residents against APR’s determination to hoard the fossil groundwater and to protect the water which residents rely on for their homes, gardens and livestock. This marks a major win for water, people and ecosystems. The decision will be precedential for the State Engineer in determining when applications to transfer water are speculative and the applicants do not have an imperative need for the water they seek. The long course of the APR litigation has included two speculative, nearly identical applications from APR to appropriate groundwater and multiple appeals from the State Engineer’s decisions denying these applications to both the district court and the New Mexico Court of Appeals. It is our hope that APR will finally take NO! for an answer. APR will have 30 days after the entry of a written order from the April 5 hearing to appeal the decision to the Court of Appeals. No written order has been entered to date.