An inventory of New Mexico’s water woes

Kay Matthews at the always-interesting La Jicarita has a remarkably thorough inventory of New Mexico’s water management woes, from the intricacies of the various Indian water settlement deals to the legislative effort to buy our way out of our troubles. Matthews does a good job of getting beyond generalities of the fact that we’re in drought and using water unsustainably to deal with the specifics.

It’s all worth a read, but in particular her summary catches one of the central problems now that we’re really starting to run out – the unwillingness of state water managers to really enforce the “doctrine of prior appropriation” and reduce water to, or cut off, junior users. Why is that? Paraphrasing the comments of veteran New Mexico water lawyer Peter White, Matthews writes:

[T]he (Office of State Engineer) is always reluctant to enforce priority administration because so many municipalities have junior water rights.