State water bills down to trickle

New Mexico’s water problem is simple. We’re using more than we’ve got.

When it’s framed this way, the solutions are simple. Get more. Use less. Or, at the very least, stop using more every year.

But watching the 2013 New Mexico Legislature wrestle with these questions suggests that, while the concept might be simple, this is hard stuff.

You could hear the tired tension in the voice of Sen. Pat Woods, a Republican who represents drought-stricken farm country on New Mexico’s east side. The bill on the floor was aimed at making it harder to transfer water rights away from farmland and then replace the crops with housing developments fed by domestic groundwater wells.

“Someday we’ll need that land for food,” Woods told his colleagues before voting “yes” on the bill, helping send it over for consideration in the House.

A third dry year, pushing New Mexico into unprecedented territory, is driving the discussion, said Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, who wrote the bill that earned Woods’ “yes” vote. But the problem is deeper.

“Yeah, it’s drought,” Wirth told me as we talked in the hallway behind the Senate chamber Thursday, waiting for his bill to come up on the floor. “But it’s the new climate reality.”

Getting more water, most likely by piping it from rural areas to the Rio Grande Valley, is politically popular, because it doesn’t require us to confront the hard reality of using less. But major legislation in this direction looks unlikely this year, given the cost, the time it takes to build pipelines and objections about potential damage to rural areas that would lose water.

Curbing the expansion of our water use has the most traction, which is why I was stalking Wirth through the Roundhouse. He’s sponsoring a pair of bills aimed at ending water rights “double dipping” — selling water rights attached to a piece of farmland, then building houses served by new domestic wells.

Selling the rights means the farm will be dried up and its water used elsewhere, most often for city use. But if the new homes on the site then meet their needs by pumping groundwater, net water use goes up. “It’s the classic double dip,” Wirth told his Senate colleagues during the floor debate.

Wirth’s bills cleared the Senate and passed their first House committee test Monday.

In terms of water saved, relative to the size of New Mexico’s shortfalls, this is small stuff. But it’s instructive that in the midst of what is arguably the worst short-term drought on record, and calls about the need for action, Wirth’s bills are just about the only legislation to deal seriously with the demand side.

The other bill that comes closest to calling for a reduction in water use is Senate Bill 440, from Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces. In its current form, it would set aside $120 million “to acquire, retire, protect and conserve water rights and conserve water in the Lower Rio Grande Basin.”

Having the government buyout farmers’ water rights, which is saving water by taking the land out of production, has serious downsides. But given that politics is the “art of the possible,” this seems to be the main water conservation tool New Mexico government agencies have had at their disposal.

Cervantes likely won’t get the whole $120 million, but at least he’s started a useful discussion about this approach to dealing with the Lower Rio Grande’s water problems.

That leaves a political and policy vacuum around the one issue that may be the most important — the immediate need for functioning tools to curtail water usage.

In the abstract, we have rules for that. The “doctrine of prior appropriations,” enshrined in the state’s Constitution, says the first people to put water to beneficial use have the highest-priority rights.

In a drought, newcomers are supposed to be cut off first, leaving water for the people with the most senior rights. But in practice, the state rarely does that.

“That water really is life to me,” Valencia County farmer Janet Jarratt told members of the Senate Conservation Committee during a hearing on water rights administration. Jarratt was testifying as an expert witness in support of other Cervantes-sponsored legislation aimed at clarifying the authority and responsibility of the New Mexico Office of State Engineer to ensure senior water rights holders get their water in times of drought.

The legal issues were arcane, the discussion, dragging late into the evening, was intense and fascinating.

Cervantes and Jarratt argued the State Engineer had failed to protect senior water rights users. State officials, led by Steve Farris, director of the Water, Environment and Utilities Division for the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, said the bill would have the opposite effect of the one intended, crippling the state engineer’s ability to protect senior water rights users.

The two bills Cervantes was pushing died that night in committee on a split vote, suggesting that for 2013, New Mexicans will have to deal with the drought using the legal and policy tools we’ve got, however inadequate they might be.

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