Coal kills - Rio Grande Chapter

WATER
State water plan being updated
By Sig Silber
Northern New Mexico Group
Water Chair
In 2003 the first New Mexico State
Water Plan was adopted. It is the
intent of the Legislature that the
Interstate Stream Commission,
in collaboration with the Office of
the State Engineer and the water
trust board, prepare and implement a
comprehensive state water plan. The
state water plan shall be a strategic
management tool.
The details of the water-planning
statute can be viewed at www.ose.
state.nm.us/PDF/Publications/
StateWaterPlans/State_Water_Act.pdf
The statute seems to imply that the
Water Plan should be updated every
five years, although some interpret
this as a need only for a review of
the situation with an update of the
Plan required only if conditions have
changed substantially. Indeed, an Inter-
Agency study was conducted in 2008
that led to “12 Areas to Prioritize.” But
factors including funding limitations
and the change in administration has
delayed the process until recently. Now
it seems that the updating process is
shifting into high gear and the draft
chapters of the plan will begin to be
released for comment.
The Interstate Stream Commission
(ISC) hopes to begin releasing chapters
of the State Water Plan update in
August, according to Planning Director
Angela Bordegaray. A possible sequence
of release: Water-Related Infrastructure
and Funding, Statewide Water Supply
and Demand, Climate Variability
(including drought management),
Canadian Basin, and San Juan Basin.
These chapters will include updated
information on current issues, information
from the regional plans and will be
a means to inform the public on funding
needs and key projects.
The New Mexico Office of the State
Engineer(OSE)/Interstate Stream
Commission(ISC) has many waterrelated
duties and works with many
other organizations, so the State Water
Plan produced and issued by the ISC
is not the only vehicle for planning
water management in New Mexico.
Plus, the OSE/ISC has only partial
jurisdiction over New Mexico’s water,
focusing on quantity. The New Mexico
Environment Department regulates
quality, and the Oil Conservation
Division has partial jurisdiction over
water used or produced by oil and gas
activities. The state Department of
Agriculture, representing the largest
user, agriculture, is to some extent left
out of the planning process. Other state
agencies that have an impact on how the
OSE/ISC operates include Game and
Fish and the Department of Finance.
An alphabet soup of federal agencies
exercise jurisdiction over some of
New Mexico’s water, especially rivers
and reservoirs, including the Bureau
of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, Forest Service, Bureau of
Public Water Supply
Self-Supplied Domestic
Irrigated Agriculture Surface Water
Irrigated Agriculture Groundwater
Off-farm Conveyance Losses
Livestock
Commercial, Self-Supplied
Industrial, Self-Supplied
Mining, Self-Supplied
Power, Self-Supplied
Evaporation from Reservoirs
Oil and Gas, Self-Supplied Not available
Total
Depletions minus Reservoir Uses
0 3,500,000
Author's estimated 2005 depletions, in acre-feet
Land Management, Bureau of Indian
Affairs, and Department of Defense.
We also have 16 regional water-planning
districts that each produce their
own regional water plan.
Most cities and counties, water
utilities, the state’s Soil and Water
Conservation Districts and Irrigation
Districts and in some cases acequias
have their own plans.
Thus, the State Water Plan is important
but exists within a myriad of
perhaps a thousand water plans. It is a
tangled web of activities and jurisdictions
in need of more coordination for
sustainable water management. That
is one reason New Mexico tends to
receive mediocre grades for its water
planning, especially in terms of implementation.
Given that we are so dependent
on a small number of interstate
streams, our decentralized approach
may not be optimal.
Water use by category
The 2003 version of the plan focused
on providing the Office of the State
Engineer with better legislative authority
to fulfill its mission. The challenges
of climate change, which is referred
to by the Martinez Administration as
“climate variability,” is now obviously
on the minds of the administration.
This year an unusually small percentage
of the state’s only slightly-belowaverage
precipitation has translated into
Rio Grande stream flow, jeopardizing
agriculture and ecosystems. Impacts on
aquifer recharge usually show up with
some delay, so there may be yet another
shoe to drop. In a separate analysis, I
have concluded that the Rio Grande
Project which encompasses Elephant
Butte Irrigation District and a similar
Irrigation District in El Paso County,
Texas, is approximately 25 percent efficient,
which is very low. Recent changes
in administration of the Rio Grande
Project have put even more reliance on
EBID’s aquifer, and a settlement with
the Office of the State Engineer that
seems to authorize greater than historical
groundwater usage in EBID may
now be of concern to the state.
A change in the way the plan update
is organized will be a closer integration
of the 12 major river and groundwater
basins (see map insert) into the body
of the report. Looking at areas from
a hydrologic as well as jurisdictional
perspective is becoming increasingly
common in other states and makes a
lot of sense but presents implementation
challenges as there are no basin
water administrative agencies. But in
most cases there are no agencies with
authority over each of the 16 formally
defined water regions either. It is
perhaps hoped that those with authority
over part of a River Basin or Water
Region will work with neighboring
entities to implement strategies. That
does happen in New Mexico, but on a
long river like the Rio Grande or Pecos,
a large number of entities is involved.
The ISC will request feedback
from the public. Those with a strong
interest may join a discussion group
I organized by sending an email
to NMStateWaterPlan-subscribe@
yahoogroups.com. It is likely that some
of the groups within the Sierra Club
and the Rio Grande Chapter as a whole
will provide feedback to the ISC.
Participation is an opportunity to
influence what is in the plan, and to
learn a lot about the complexity of
water issues and competing interests in
New Mexico.
An estimate of the depletion (use
that actually consumes rather than
simply uses and returns) by category for
2005 is shown in the bar chart above.
The Office of the State Engineer does
not record and report water related to
the oil and gas industry, so that row is
shown as a blank. Notice that the public
water supply depletes a relatively small
amount of water in New Mexico. In
general about half of municipal water
withdrawn is treated and returned or
recycled within the water system (it
makes no difference to the State Water
Budget if treated effluent is returned to
the river for use downstream or recycled
within the originating water system).
Within municipal water systems,
outdoor uses are the main contributors
to depletion, and that is where conservation
efforts should be focused.
One hopes that the extensive
resources at New Mexico universities
and our national labs will be brought
to bear on New Mexico’s water challenges,
especially in the area of agriculture,
the largest water user. A Chapter
on Research Initiatives would be a
useful chapter in the Plan Update.
I wrote a related story for the Santa
Fe Reporter. To read it, go to
www.sfreporter.com/santafe/
article-6778-plan-b.html
10 Rio Grande Sierran July/August/September 2012