A recent comment on one of our articles posed a great question: What actually happens if the Rio Grande Compact is violated? Here’s a brief answer from NM Water Advocates board member Bob Wesley. Keep the questions and comments coming, and we’ll share them when we can!
Q: As a relatively ignorant citizen, I find a great deal of useful information and excellent research at this site. IMO, however, I would appreciate more specifics concerning the consequences of violating the compact debit limit of 200 K acre-feet and subsequent Supreme Court litigation. I have found one example: “cutting off all non-essential uses for a period of time to make compact deliveries.” But even with this example, I do not understand what that would entail. For instance, for citizens of Santa Fe or Albuquerque, what are the non-essential uses that would be forbidden? All watering of outside plants? Car washing? For farmers, what would be non-essential uses? For businesses? For well owners?
A: Fundamentally, no one can credibly predict the outcome of a lawsuit in the Middle Rio Grande (Los Alamos Highway to Elephant Butte). However, we have two smaller examples which we could use to make guesses.
(1) “The 1980’s Pecos River decree included a requirement to deliver sufficient Compact-directed water downstream each and every year, regardless of weather conditions. That caused the state to buy and retire a significant quantity of expensive farmers’ irrigation water rights. To ensure New Mexico meets that delivery requirement, the state also drilled multiple new wells in order to pump its limited groundwater into the river. The immediate decree cost was a $14 million penalty and has since grown to over $100 million to maintain compliance.
(2) “In the Lower Rio Grande (Elephant Butte to Texas state line), just conducting recently completed 13-year litigation has cost New Mexico taxpayers well over $100 million dollars. It’s too soon to know the cost of implementing the resulting decree. However, to avoid federal micomanagement of New Mexico’s water, the severe limitation on aggregate groundwater pumping 5-7% will force New Mexicans to apportion the impacts among user groups such as Elephant Butte Irrigation District (traditional farmers), the pecan industry, and the city of Las Cruces. Each group, in turn, will have to decide how to apportion its share of the pain among its water users. For irrigators, the likely costs will appear as limits on crop acreage. For urbanites, it could mean the appropriate utilities precluding certain types of water use (probably insufficient), rationing customers’ water, and scaled increases in water pricing.
Again, the bottom line is that the Middle Rio Grande’s water use, driven by courts and water masters in Washington, D.C., will almost surely be worse than management properly conducted from Santa Fe and/or locally.
– Bob Wesley
Bob Wessely has worked with and led the Water Assembly, now the New Mexico Water Advocates, for over twenty-five years. In Bob’s previous 30-year career, he co-founded and served as Technical Director of SciSo, Inc., an Albuquerque software system engineering and management consulting firm supporting diverse industries nationwide. Although Bob holds a PhD in Theoretical Solid-State Physics, at heart he is a systems engineer who enjoys finding solutions to problems important to NM and its communities, especially water.