My friend David Alire Garcia interviewed me for this week's In Focus on KNME, talking about brackish water, desalination and growth on Albuquerque's west side. (Friday, 7 p.m. - watch especially to see if they use the hilarious footage of me being pelted by little balls of snow during Tuesday's wild storm.)

David asked me a great question about the relationship between growth planning and water management that I don't think I answered terribly coherently, so let me take another crack at it here. (Warning, long wonkish policy discussion to follow, click through at your own risk)

But there is a risk in the developing political dynamic surrounding this issue that water policy will become a proxy for growth policy, and we need to remember that they are two very different things. There is a risk that if you try to turn water policy into growth management policy, you could end up doing both badly.

Elizabeth Kolbert captured this dilemma nicely in a widely read and frequently misunderstood quote in the Jan. 12 New Yorker from Robert Stavins, a climate-energy-economics guy from Harvard:

Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.

The photo above, by my colleague Richard Pipes, is a vast stretch of empty out west of Albuquerque that might be considered prime development land if only the water could be found. It is possible that brackish water, pumped from deep underground and cleaned up for municipal use, might provide that water. It is also possible that a sprawling development out in that direction, another endless Phoenix-style sprawling suburb, would be disastrous, a final gasp of the sort of housing-development-as-economic-engine that Richard Florida chronicles in this month's Atlantic:

“We had a big bubble here, and it burst,” Anthony Sanders, a professor of economics and finance at ASU, told USA Today in December. “We’ve taken Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams and now it’s Field of Screams. If you build it, nobody comes.”

It is tempting to respond to this possibility by thinking about water, and to respond to the problem of poorly managed growth by seeking to control the tap, reasoning that a poorly managed water supply could lead to unsustainable development. That argument is right as far as it goes. As I argued in the piece linked above, poor management of that water supply could be a disaster, leaving us in a century with a city many times the size of Albuquerque with no water to drink. So it's critical to get the water supply piece of this problem right.

But it also is the case that we could get the water management piece right here - proper pricing to account for the scarcity of the resource, for example, and careful consideration of the effect of pumping on surface water and shallow aquifers. Done right, it could ensure a long term sustainable supply for whatever ends up built out there - and still leave us with a sprawling city that is auto-dependent, with poor transit and long commutes and the rest of the problems that we really need to figure out how to avoid as we envision a greater Albuquerque metro area of the 21st century.

This is why water policy, while offering tempting leverage for those interested in managing growth correctly, should not be mistaken for growth management policy.

(Special thanks to Coco for bringing the Richard Florida piece to my attention and the Env-Econ team for helpful discussions of the Stavins shower-dinner metaphor.)