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Tag: Water rights

  • Western states seek to end long-running water dispute over dwindling Rio Grande

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    ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A simmering feud over management of one of North America’s longest rivers reached a boiling point when the U.S. Supreme Court sent western states and the federal government back to the negotiating table last year.

    Now the battle over waters of the Rio Grande could be nearing resolution as New Mexico, Texas and Colorado announced fresh settlement proposals Friday designed to rein in groundwater pumping along the river in New Mexico and ensure enough river water reliably makes it to Texas.

    New Mexico officials say the agreements allow water conservation decisions to be made locally while avoiding a doomsday scenario of billion-dollar payouts on water shortfalls.

    Farmers in southern New Mexico increasingly have turned to groundwater as hotter and drier conditions reduced river flows and storage. That pumping is what prompted Texas to sue, claiming the practice was cutting into water deliveries.

    It will be up to the special master overseeing the case to make a recommendation to the Supreme Court.

    If endorsed by the court, the combined settlements promise to restore order to an elaborate system of storing and sharing water between two vast, adjacent irrigation districts in southern New Mexico and western Texas.

    Still, tough decisions await New Mexico under its new obligations.

    In 1939, when New Mexico was a young, sparsely populated state, it ratified a compact with Texas and Colorado for sharing the waters of the Rio Grande. The agreement defined credits and debits and set parameters for when water could be stored upstream.

    From the San Luis Valley in Colorado to below Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, the compact called for gages to monitor the river, ensuring downstream obligations were met.

    Meeting the nearly century-old metrics has become harder as snowpacks shrink in the mountains that feed the Rio Grande. Thirsty soil soaks up more snowmelt and runoff before it reaches tributaries, warmer temperatures fuel evaporation, and summer rainy seasons that once boosted flows and recharged reservoirs are more erratic.

    The equation is further complicated by growing populations. The Rio Grande provides drinking water for about 6 million people and helps to irrigate millions of acres of cropland in the U.S. and in Mexico.

    While the Colorado River gets all the headlines, experts say the situation along the Rio Grande is just as dire.

    The proposed settlements would provide a detailed accounting system for sharing water with Texas.

    New Mexico could rely on credits and debits from year to year to navigate through drought and wet periods, though it could be responsible for additional water-sharing obligations if deliveries are deferred too long.

    The international group Sustainable Waters is wrapping up an extensive study on how the river’s water is being used.

    Brian Richter, the group’s president, said that over the last couple of decades, New Mexico has lost more than 70% of its reservoir storage along the river while groundwater has been extracted faster than it can be replenished. Add to that New Mexico has fallen behind in its water deliveries to Texas.

    Richter called it a triple whammy.

    “We’re definitely in a precarious situation and it’s going to become more challenging going forward,” he said. “So I think it’s going to require sort of a major reenvisioning of what we want New Mexico’s water future to look like.”

    The parties in the case say the proposed agreements will facilitate investments and innovation in water conservation.

    “The whole settlement package really provides for the long-term vitality, economic vitality, for the communities in both New Mexico and Texas,” said Hannah Riseley-White, director of the Interstate Stream Commission.

    New Mexico would have two years to adopt a plan to manage and share water along its southernmost stretch of the Rio Grande. The state can still pump some groundwater while monitoring aquifer levels.

    “The burden is on New Mexico,” said Stuart Somach, lead attorney for Texas in the Rio Grande dispute.

    In Albuquerque, it looks grim.

    It’s common to have stretches of the Rio Grande go dry farther south, but not in New Mexico’s largest city. Prior to 2022, it had been four decades since Albuquerque had seen the muddy waters reduced to isolated puddles and lengthy sandbars.

    Aside from a changing climate, water managers say the inability to store water in upstream reservoirs due to compact obligations exacerbates the problem.

    Many of the intricacies of managing the Rio Grande are as invisible to residents as the water itself.

    Sisters Zoe and Phoebe Hughes set out to take photos during a recent evening, anticipating at least a sliver of water like usual. Instead they found deep sand and patchwork of cracked, curled beds of clay.

    “It’s so dystopian. It’s sad,” Phoebe Hughes said, adding that the river isn’t so grand now.

    Looking for a silver lining, the two collected pieces of riverbed clay, hoping they could fashion it into something. Other curious visitors played in the sand and walked dogs.

    Downstream, Elephant Butte stands at less than 4% of capacity. The reservoir is an irrigation lifeline for farmers, fuels a hydropower station and serves as a popular recreation spot.

    The settlements call for reducing groundwater depletions to a rate of 18,200 acre-feet per year. While that’s about one-sixth of the drinking water supplied to New York City each day, for the arid West, it’s a monumental amount.

    New Mexico officials expect to achieve most of those reductions from buying water rights from willing sellers, meaning more than 14 square miles (36 square kilometers) of farmland would be retired.

    Many details — and the price tag — have yet to be worked out, the general counsel for the New Mexico state engineer’s office told state lawmakers this month. The Legislature in 2023 set aside $65 million toward the settlements and related infrastructure projects, and the state is tapping additional federal dollars. But it will still need more funds, experts say.

    Riseley-White said it will take a combination of efforts, including long-term fallowing programs, water conservation and more efficient irrigation infrastructure.

    “There isn’t one answer. It’s going to be necessarily an all-of-the-above approach,” she said, acknowledging that there will be less water in the future.

    Attorney Sam Barncastle, who worked for years on behalf of irrigators, worries small farming operations and backyard gardeners could ultimately be pushed out.

    “Farmland does not come back once it’s gone,” she said.

    The overall idea is to avoid abruptly curtailing water for users, but farmers in southern New Mexico have concerns about how much water will be available and who will be able to use it.

    New Mexico is the nation’s No. 2 pecan producer, and the sprawling orchards would die without consistent water. The state also is home to world-renowned chilies — a signature crop tightly woven into New Mexico’s cultural identity.

    Ben Etcheverry, a board member of the New Mexico Chile Association, said farmers have transitioned to drip irrigation to save water and energy but are continually told they have to do more with even less water and pay higher rates.

    “It just becomes a game of whack-a-mole while we try to do better,” he said. “Every time we do better, it seems they turn it into a punishment.”

    ___

    Lee reported from Santa Fe.

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  • Maui wildfires renew tensions around water rights in a centuries-old conflict over sacred streams

    Maui wildfires renew tensions around water rights in a centuries-old conflict over sacred streams

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    LAHAINA, Hawaii — Shortly after the ignition of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, a developer of land around a threatened Maui community urgently asked state officials for permission to divert water from streams to fight the growing inferno.

    West Maui Land Company, Inc. said it eventually received approval from the Hawaii commission that oversees water management, but suggested the state body didn’t act quickly enough and first directed the company to talk with a downstream taro farmer who relies on stream water, according to letters by a company executive obtained by The Associated Press and other news outlets.

    Community members, including Native Hawaiian farmers, say the water the developer wanted for its reservoirs would not have made a difference in the fires. The reservoirs don’t supply Maui County’s fire hydrants, and firefighting helicopters — which could have dipped into the reservoirs for water — were grounded by high winds.

    The Aug. 8 fire that killed at least 115 people took place below West Maui Land Company’s developments and the Hawaiian communities that rely on the water. But the dispute over water access during the blaze has sparked new tension in a fight that dates to the mid-1800s, when unfair water distribution practices took root with colonization.

    “This is a 2023 rendition of what’s been happening in Lahaina for centuries,” said Kapua‘ala Sproat, director of the Native Hawaiian law center at the University of Hawaii.

    Glenn Tremble, who wrote the letters, told the AP via text that the company didn’t share the letters with the media and didn’t want to distract from West Maui’s losses. AP obtained the correspondence from various people familiar with the dispute.

    “All we have asked is for the ability to make water available for fire prevention and suppression, to help people while we recover and to rebuild what we have lost,” he wrote.

    The complex push-pull over Maui stream diversions recalls other battles over water rights in drought-stricken Western states that have pitted Native American tribes against farmers and farmers against urban areas.

    Native Hawaiians have long fought to protect what they consider a sacred resource. Stream diversions continued even after the plantations closed, and booming development contributed to West Maui’s arid conditions. The West Maui Land Company’s subdivision — including multimillion-dollar gated homes that use diverted water — was untouched by the Lahaina fires, noted Native Hawaiians who live off the streams and farm taro, a cultural staple.

    “At one time, Lahaina was known to be very verdant and very lush,” said Blossom Feiteira, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and Lahaina native. Hawaiians revere water so much and its abundance was why Lahaina became the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom from 1820 to 1845, she said.

    When sugar cane and pineapple fields from the plantation era shut down in the 1980s and 1990s, the water was redirected to gated communities with lush green lawns and swimming pools, she said. Overgrown brown brush and invasive grass cropped up around these developments.

    “There has been resentment in the community about that kind of picture,” Feiteira said.

    In one of the letters, West Maui Land Company said the state Commission on Water Resource Management should not prioritize “one individual’s farm” over fighting a wind-whipped fire.

    “No one is happy there was water in the streams while our homes, our businesses, our lands, and our lives were reduced to ash,” the company said. The letter said the company requested “approval to divert more water from the streams so we could store as much water as possible for fire control” at 1 p.m. on the day of the fire, but that they were directed to first inquire with a downstream taro farmer.

    At about 6 p.m., the commission approved the diversion of more water, the letter said.

    West Maui Land’s suggestion that Kaleo Manuel, first deputy of the commission, delayed the release of stream water has struck a nerve among Native Hawaiians and others who say the company is making him a scapegoat and using the tragedy to take yet more water.

    A Lahaina stream sustains Keʻeaumoku Kapu’s taro patches on his ancestral lands deep in Kauaula Valley in the mountains above Lahaina. He fled the town on the afternoon of the fire as flames approached and spent a night in his truck. The fire didn’t get close to his home and farm in the valley, but in 2018 area residents used water from the stream to fight a wildfire, he said.

    He called West Maui Land’s characterization of the stream diversions “bogus” and disingenuous.

    “They’ll do anything to get it,” Kapu said of the water.

    The company is “trying to use this incredibly difficult time to get a legal and financial advantage, especially over their water resources, when that’s something they were not able to accomplish legally before the fire,” said Sproat, of the Native Hawaiian law center.

    The letters caused such a commotion that the state Department of Land and Natural Resources re-assigned Manuel, drawing a lawsuit from West Maui residents decrying the move. The department said in a statement that Manuel’s reassignment didn’t suggest he did anything wrong, but would allow officials to focus on Maui.

    Manuel couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Community groups urged supporters to go to Manuel’s Honolulu office last week to bestow lei upon him in gratitude for his efforts.

    Conflicts over stream diversions are not just a West Maui issue. Soon after the fires started, the state attorney general’s office filed a petition with the state Supreme Court blaming an environmental court judge’s caps on East Maui stream diversions for a lack of water for firefighting.

    The court didn’t immediately issue a ruling after hearing arguments Wednesday.

    “This is what happens when there’s literally not enough water anymore,” said Kamanamaikalani Beamer, a former trustee of the Commission on Water Resource Management, calling streams “the veins that fill up our aquifers.”

    “Water brings together like the multitude of interests — economic, cultural,” he said. “But it’s because no one can just create it out of nothing.”

    ___

    Kelleher reported from Honolulu.

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  • Living in Phoenix Makes Perfect Sense

    Living in Phoenix Makes Perfect Sense

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    In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling up with burn and heat-stroke victims have reached capacities not seen since the height of the pandemic.

    “Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” You might ask that question to the many hundreds of thousands of new residents who have made the Arizona metropolis America’s fastest-growing city. Last year, Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, gained more residents than any other county in the United States—just as it did in 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

    At its core, the question makes a mystery of something that isn’t a mystery at all. For many people, living in Phoenix makes perfect sense. Pleasant temperatures most of the year, relatively inexpensive housing, and a steady increase in economic opportunities have drawn people for 80 years, turning the city from a small desert outpost of 65,000 into a sprawling metro area of more than 5 million. Along the way, a series of innovations has made the heat seem like a temporary inconvenience rather than an existential threat for many residents. Perhaps not even a heat wave like this one will change anything.

    My first morning in Phoenix, more than 20 years ago, the sun broke the horizon two miles up a trail in South Mountain Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the United States. I had arrived the previous night from Michigan, leaving behind the late-March dreariness that passes for spring in the Midwest for several months of research that would become my book, Power Lines. As the sun turned the mountain golden and I stripped down to short sleeves for the first time in months, I realized the Valley of the Sun’s charms.

    Outside the summer months, the quality of life in Phoenix is really quite high—a fact that city boosters have promoted stretching back to before World War II. They traded the desiccated “Salt River Valley” for the welcoming “Valley of the Sun.” Efforts to downplay the dangers of Phoenix’s climate go back even further. In 1895, when Phoenix was home to a few thousand people, a local newspaper reported that it had been proved “by figures and facts” that the heat is “all a joke,” because the “sensible temperature” that people experienced was far less severe than what the thermometers recorded. “But it’s a dry heat” has a long history, one in which generations of prospective newcomers have been taught to perceive Phoenix’s climate as more beneficial than oppressive.

    Most people surely move to Phoenix not because of the weather, but because of the housing. The Valley of the Sun’s ongoing commitment to new housing development continues to keep housing prices well below those of neighboring California, drawing many emigrants priced out of the Golden State. Subdivisions have popped up in irrigated farm fields seemingly overnight. In 1955, as the home builder John F. Long was constructing Maryvale, then on Phoenix’s western edge, he quickly turned a cantaloupe farm into seven model homes. Five years later, more than 22,000 people lived in the neighborhood; now more than 200,000 do. Even today, the speed of construction can create confusion, as residents puzzle over the location of Heartland Ranch or Copper Falls or other new subdivisions that include most of the 250,000 homes built since 2010.

    Even in the summer, you might not always notice just how harsh of a terrain Phoenix can be. Developers engage in a struggle to secure water rights, tapping groundwater aquifers, drawing water from the Colorado River brought to the city by aqueduct, and purchasing water from local farmers. Air-conditioning is the lifeblood of Phoenix, as much a part of the city as the subway system is in New York. In 1961, Herbert Leggett, a Phoenix banker, spoke of his normal summer day to The Saturday Evening Post: “I awake in my air-conditioned home in the morning … I dress and get into my air-conditioned automobile and drive to the air-conditioned garage in the basement of this building. I work in an air-conditioned office, eat in an air-conditioned restaurant, and perhaps go to an air-conditioned theater.”

    In the kind of air-conditioned bubbles Leggett described, it is actually possible for people like me, who work indoors, to forget the heat and oppression of Phoenix’s summer—that is, until we have to scurry across a parking lot or cross concrete plazas between buildings. Starting in late April, when high temperatures regularly hit over 90, many residents fire up their AC, using it until October, when highs once again drop into the 80s. At the height of summer, Phoenix becomes virtually an indoor city during the day. Remote car starters become valuable amenities for taking the edge off the heat. Runners wake before dawn to exercise, and dogs are banned from hiking trails in city parks on triple-digit days. With air-conditioning, the benefits of Phoenix outweigh the drawbacks for many residents.

    But this lifestyle comes with a cost. Electricity consumption has soared in Phoenix, almost doubling in the average home from 1970 to today. At the height of its operation, Four Corners Power Plant, only one of five such coal-fired power plants built north of Phoenix to help power the region’s growth, emitted 16 million tons of carbon annually, equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 3.4 million cars. Even today, with most coal-fired generation retired, Phoenix relies heavily on carbon-emitting natural gas for its electricity. Both the past and present of Phoenix’s energy worsens the very heat its residents are trying to escape.

    Air-conditioning protects most people, but especially as the heat intensifies, those without it are left incredibly vulnerable. Elderly women living alone, many of whom struggle to maintain and pay for air-conditioning, are particularly susceptible, accounting for the majority of indoor heat-related deaths. Unhoused people, whose population in Phoenix has increased by 70 percent in the past six years, suffer tremendously and make up much of the death toll. One unhoused man recently compared sitting in his wheelchair to “sitting down on hot coals.”

    This heat wave will end, but there will be another. Still, the horror stories of life in 115 degrees is hardly guaranteed to blunt Phoenix’s explosive growth. There are currently building permits for 80,000 new homes in the Phoenix metro area that have not yet commenced construction—homes that will require more water, more AC, and more energy.

    But in a sense, nothing about Phoenix is unusual at all. The movement from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space that Leggett described—and the massive energy use that makes it all run—is now typical in a country where nearly 90 percent of homes use air-conditioning. Clothing companies such as Land’s End advertise summer sweaters that “will come to your rescue while you’re working hard for those eight hours in your office, which might feel like an icebox at times.” And heat has claimed lives in “temperate” cities such as Omaha, Seattle, and Boston. Indeed, one 2020 study concluded that the Northeast had the highest rate of excess deaths attributable to heat.

    “Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” serves as nothing more than a defensive mechanism. It makes peculiar the choices that huge numbers of Americans have made, often under economic duress—choices to move to the warm climates of the Sun Belt, to move where housing is affordable, to ignore where energy comes from and the inequalities it creates, and, above all, to downplay the threats of climate change. In that way, Phoenix isn’t the exception. It’s the norm.

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    Andrew Needham

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  • Tribes seek invitation to Rio Grande water commission

    Tribes seek invitation to Rio Grande water commission

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    ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A commission that oversees how the Rio Grande is managed and shared among three Western states has adopted a recommendation that could set the stage for more involvement by Native American tribes that depend on the river.

    The Rio Grande Compact Commission voted unanimously Friday during its annual meeting in Santa Fe to direct its legal and engineering advisers to look into developing protocols for formal discussions with six pueblos that border the river in central New Mexico.

    Pueblo leaders have been seeking a seat at the table for years, saying their water rights have never been quantified despite an agreement made nearly a century ago between the U.S. Interior Department and an irrigation district to provide for irrigation and flood control for pueblo lands.

    Isleta Pueblo Gov. Max Zuni told the commission that progress has been made over the last year after the Interior Department established a federal team to assess the feasibility of settling the pueblos’ claims to the river. He requested that commissioners extend an invitation to the pueblos to address the commission at its next annual meeting.

    Zuni said any discussion of a water rights settlement with Isleta, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana and Sandia pueblos would be of interest to the commission, which is made up of officials from Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Each state is responsible for delivering a certain amount of water to downstream users each year.

    While record snowpack in the mountains of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico is resulting in spring runoff not seen in years, commissioners acknowledged that future supplies remain uncertain as the region remains locked in a long-term drought.

    For Isleta Pueblo, Zuni said the river is more than just a source of water for crops.

    “We use it for traditional purposes,” he said. “I don’t know how we could quantify that amount of water but carrying on our traditions and our customs, our water is very essential to us. It is important to us, our livelihood. That river is very sacred.”

    One of the longest rivers in North America, the Rio Grande supplies water for more than 6 million people and 2 million acres of land in the U.S. and Mexico.

    There has been much disagreement over management over the decades, including one fight between New Mexico and Texas that is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The states have reached a proposed settlement, and commissioners at Friday’s meeting said they were hopeful a federal judge serving as special master will recommend approval of the agreement.

    The commission’s engineers also presented accounting sheets for water deliveries based on a new accounting method that was approved last fall. That allowed the engineers to reconcile deliveries dating back to 2011 based on more timely streamflow and reservoir storage records and other data.

    They say New Mexico still owes Texas about 93,000 acre feet of water. An acre foot is roughly enough to serve two to three U.S. households annually.

    “We need that water,” said Bobby Skov, who represents Texas on the commission.

    He also pointed to concerns his state has about evaporative losses in reservoirs along the Rio Grande, a proposed copper mine in New Mexico that he said could effect flows to the river and the build-up of sediment that is compromising reservoir storage capacities.

    Mike Hamman, New Mexico’s state engineer and a member of the commission, noted that New Mexico marked its worst wildfire season on record in 2022 and that watersheds that feed the Rio Grande were damaged. That means there will be higher flows of ash and debris coming off the mountains and that runoff patterns will be altered for years to come.

    Hamman said the Rio Grande system was designed over the last century to deal with flood control and the delivery of water downstream, but the pressures of climate change and the needs of endangered species have shifted the mission and complicated management.

    He said it’s time to reevaluate how managers can balance demands on the Rio Grande.

    “We can no longer afford to be micro-focused on our own interests,” he said. “This is one complete system. We need to manage it that way in order for us to survive as our water systems evolve here in the 21st century and that means some creativity and some work in Congress and work within our legislatures to make sure we can pull it off together.”

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  • Tribes seek invitation to Rio Grande water commission

    Tribes seek invitation to Rio Grande water commission

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    ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A commission that oversees how the Rio Grande is managed and shared among three Western states has adopted a recommendation that could set the stage for more involvement by Native American tribes that depend on the river.

    The Rio Grande Compact Commission voted unanimously Friday during its annual meeting in Santa Fe to direct its legal and engineering advisers to look into developing protocols for formal discussions with six pueblos that border the river in central New Mexico.

    Pueblo leaders have been seeking a seat at the table for years, saying their water rights have never been quantified despite an agreement made nearly a century ago between the U.S. Interior Department and an irrigation district to provide for irrigation and flood control for pueblo lands.

    Isleta Pueblo Gov. Max Zuni told the commission that progress has been made over the last year after the Interior Department established a federal team to assess the feasibility of settling the pueblos’ claims to the river. He requested that commissioners extend an invitation to the pueblos to address the commission at its next annual meeting.

    Zuni said any discussion of a water rights settlement with Isleta, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana and Sandia pueblos would be of interest to the commission, which is made up of officials from Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Each state is responsible for delivering a certain amount of water to downstream users each year.

    While record snowpack in the mountains of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico is resulting in spring runoff not seen in years, commissioners acknowledged that future supplies remain uncertain as the region remains locked in a long-term drought.

    For Isleta Pueblo, Zuni said the river is more than just a source of water for crops.

    “We use it for traditional purposes,” he said. “I don’t know how we could quantify that amount of water but carrying on our traditions and our customs, our water is very essential to us. It is important to us, our livelihood. That river is very sacred.”

    One of the longest rivers in North America, the Rio Grande supplies water for more than 6 million people and 2 million acres of land in the U.S. and Mexico.

    There has been much disagreement over management over the decades, including one fight between New Mexico and Texas that is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The states have reached a proposed settlement, and commissioners at Friday’s meeting said they were hopeful a federal judge serving as special master will recommend approval of the agreement.

    The commission’s engineers also presented accounting sheets for water deliveries based on a new accounting method that was approved last fall. That allowed the engineers to reconcile deliveries dating back to 2011 based on more timely streamflow and reservoir storage records and other data.

    They say New Mexico still owes Texas about 93,000 acre feet of water. An acre foot is roughly enough to serve two to three U.S. households annually.

    “We need that water,” said Bobby Skov, who represents Texas on the commission.

    He also pointed to concerns his state has about evaporative losses in reservoirs along the Rio Grande, a proposed copper mine in New Mexico that he said could effect flows to the river and the build-up of sediment that is compromising reservoir storage capacities.

    Mike Hamman, New Mexico’s state engineer and a member of the commission, noted that New Mexico marked its worst wildfire season on record in 2022 and that watersheds that feed the Rio Grande were damaged. That means there will be higher flows of ash and debris coming off the mountains and that runoff patterns will be altered for years to come.

    Hamman said the Rio Grande system was designed over the last century to deal with flood control and the delivery of water downstream, but the pressures of climate change and the needs of endangered species have shifted the mission and complicated management.

    He said it’s time to reevaluate how managers can balance demands on the Rio Grande.

    “We can no longer afford to be micro-focused on our own interests,” he said. “This is one complete system. We need to manage it that way in order for us to survive as our water systems evolve here in the 21st century and that means some creativity and some work in Congress and work within our legislatures to make sure we can pull it off together.”

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