OPINION: East Mountain communities running out of water due to irresponsible zoning laws

I have lived in the East Mountains my whole life. I grew up in the country and now I live in suburbia.

Despite the dramatic changes I still love my home and my community, and am not writing to protest people joining. But for a community to survive, the people in it must have access to basic resources like water. And the East Mountain communities are rapidly running out.

As a result of grossly irresponsible zoning laws that allow for unlimited suburban sprawl to be built out on individual domestic wells, groundwater levels in the Sandia sub-basin drop more than 2-1/2 feet per year. According to the Office of the State Engineer, groundwater is declining in the East Mountains so rapidly that more than 80% of wells will run dry within 40 years.

Bernalillo County has been monitoring the decline in groundwater levels for decades. They have even spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting against a 4,000-house development in a neighboring jurisdiction, while permitting thousands of new homes in theirs. In Bernalillo County in the East Mountain area over 7,000 undeveloped lots are permitted for residential development with only the rapidly dwindling groundwater as a water supply.

The nonviability of wells in the Sandia Basin is already driving many people to turn to private water companies that buy up agricultural water rights and pipe in water from the Estancia Basin.

However, the Estancia Basin is also over-allocated and declining at around a foot a year, with an expected nonviability in about 50 years. This is mostly due to irrigation, both for traditional crops like alfalfa, pinto beans and corn but increasingly also for cannabis production and residential use.

Besides the long-term ecological and resulting social collapse that declining water supply promises our community, we are already dealing with the predatory speculation on water it drives in the near term. A company called Vidler that specializes in water speculation spent over $10 million in a failed bid to acquire water rights to sell to developers.

Ron Chanslor, the son of the founder of Blake’s Lotaburger, invested around $600,000 into a company called Sugar Skulls, enabling them to purchase one of the only commercial water standpipes permitted for bulk water sales. Sugar Skulls buys water from a mutual domestic water association for $7 for 1,000 gallons and resells it to the public for as much as 40 cents per gallon, a 5,714% markup. A monthly household water bill of over $500 is already commonplace.

Bernalillo County has publicly abdicated any responsibility to protect our dwindling water resources or to ensure people in our community continue to have access to fresh water, with no consideration for how that affects our ability to live and grow food, the impact on neighboring communities, impact on property values, or the ability of the aquifers to continue absorbing water for use by future generations.

They actively support companies like Sugar Skulls in privatizing and monetizing our water resources. If the government thinks it’s optional to ensure that people have access to water, what does that say about any of our other basic rights?