City Water Savings: Half Full or Half Empty?

As chemistry sets go, John Stomp’s is on the large side.

The ponds alone, out back behind the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s 4-year-old drinking-water treatment plant, cover 30 acres. The chemistry stuff takes place in big block buildings, where polymers, ferric chloride and other bits and pieces are mixed in to help clean water that has been scooped out of the Rio Grande after flowing from the high country of southern Colorado via the San Juan-Chama project.

The goal of the $400 million project is to secure Albuquerque’s long-term water future and wean ourselves from unsustainably over-pumping our regional aquifer.

About 30 million gallons of water a day is passing through the plant – water we don’t have to pump from underground.

By some measures, four years after the project was completed, the effort is working. An underground aquifer that was dropping at a rate of 3 feet a year is now rebounding, Stomp, chief operating officer for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, told me.

He said he is seeing “remarkable reversal of the regional drawdown, with the aquifer rebounds ranging from a few feet to almost 10 feet in some areas.”

Combined with a continued success on the conservation side, our water management efforts look like a success, for which Stomp and his colleagues, along with the community as a whole, should rightly be proud. Water use in Albuquerque has dropped from 161 gallons per person per day back in 2008 (averaged across all uses in the city – homes, businesses, parks, etc.) to less than 150 gallons per person per day in 2012, continuing a steady water conservation slide going back nearly two decades. When water conservation efforts began in 1994, we were using 252 gallons per person per day.

But by another measure, there are questions about whether we are doing as well as we should.

In 2012, according to the water utility’s year-end report to the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, water diverted from the river and run through Stomp’s water treatment plant met 43 percent of the Albuquerque area’s needs. As Stomp points out, that is 19 billion gallons of water that we would otherwise have had to pump out of our aquifer.

But it is a lot less than Stomp and his colleagues said we would be saving by now.

Pinning down the water utility’s goals is tricky. Over time, they have been a moving target, with little public discussion by the agency’s board of city councilors and county commissioners. In 2008, as workers were getting ready to turn the project on, the agency’s annual budget said river water would supply “up to 70 percent of the metropolitan area’s future water.”

In 2009, an agency fact sheet said the project should provide 90 percent of our annual water needs by 2011. That 90 percent figure is roughly what the utility’s plans called for when the project went through its arduous permitting process with the New Mexico Office of State Engineer.

Stomp has repeatedly said he expected it to provide 25 percent of our water in its first year of operation, rising to 50 percent in the second year as the utility refined plant operations, and 75 percent after that.

In actuality, the plant produced 21 percent of Albuquerque’s water in 2009, its first full year of operation. That rose to 42 percent in 2010; 40 percent in 2011; and 43 percent in 2012. The rest of the water we needed for our toilets and lawns came from our aquifer.

The polymers and the rest of the vast chemistry set that is a water treatment plant is one reason actual performance has lagged behind the project’s original goals. Held in sacks the size of a La-Z-Boy chair, the polymers are one of the key ingredients in making the water treatment process work. Mixed with incoming water, they adhere to particles of dirt and other contaminants, making it easier to remove them. Because of the unique chemistry of the incoming water, it took years of experimentation and adjustment to get the formulas just right, Stomp said as he led me around the plant last week.

“We’re still tweaking it,” he told me.

Drought has hurt. During the dry summers of 2011 and ’12, the water utility shut down the plant because there was not enough water in the Rio Grande, switching back to full-scale groundwater pumping for the key summer months. Without the summer drought shutdown, the data suggest the river water operation could have met 60 percent of Albuquerque’s needs in 2012.

Stomp’s argument is that every gallon from the river is a gallon we don’t need to suck from our aquifer, so by that measure the project is a success.

But Elaine Hebard, an Albuquerque citizen advocate for better water management, turns Stomp’s argument on its head. While the rising aquifer levels, the “rebound” we’re seeing now, are good, would it not be better if the project were meeting its goals? If we get a 10-foot rebound in aquifer levels when the drinking water plant replaces 40-some percent of Albuquerque’s groundwater pumping with river water, wouldn’t the aquifer recovery be even better if the project was meeting its goal of 60 or 75 or 90 percent of our water needs, as planners at various times projected?

“We are probably not seeing the rebounds that we might otherwise see,” Hebard said. “We’re taking more out than we thought we were going to.”

Hebard is sympathetic to the difficulties in getting a giant, one-of-a-kind water treatment plant up and running and tweaked just right. She understands the way drought has cut into the project’s operations over the past two years. But if we’re going to be serious about our water future, Hebard argues, we need a serious public discussion of the project’s success to date and our strategy for actually relieving the stress on our groundwater in the long run.

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 505-823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.ABQjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal