Putting the monitoring back into "AWRM"?

For this month's post, I'm choosing to focus on the state of New Mexico's "active water resource management" program, which I'm unofficially re-naming the active water resource monitoring program. Why? Read on...

I'm just back from the Rio Mimbres, in southwestern New Mexico, a beautiful and verdant valley even in this horrible drought year (the driest on record for most parts of the state, serious business). In past posts, I'd made mention of the Mimbres as both fully adjudicated and already in the AWRM program that the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) runs. About eight years old as a piece of state statute, less old in terms of actual existence, AWRM has triggered controversy, grumbling, and one lawsuit that questioned its legality.

On the Mimbres, the trigger was the Bounds case, and it has created real difficulties for folks on the so-called "upper Mimbres" (basically north of Rt 152 that runs E-W across the valley) with folks downstream less affected by the consequences. The Bounds case involved one of the few actual priority calls in the state of New Mexico, and people of all stripes scrambled to find a solution or implement some version of a fair system to address it. AWRM has involved a system of "signed agreements," done with OSE regional staff out of the Deming office, to have stream flows and ditches monitored with water meters. These have been of a couple of varieties: one has been the ditch kind, a rather restricting concrete flow device with a scale slapped to the side. The other is a larger metering device meant to monitor larger tributary flows around the state (see the photo), such as the one picture here at the outlet of Bear Canyon before it hits the ditches and stream banks of the Rio Mimbres. You can also read more about this metering and measurement program here, courtesy of the OSE.

There have been on-going claims of alleged bullying by the OSE's personnel to "sign" these metering agreements (without the "or else" usually involved in such tactics) and this has not exactly created a favorable environment in many parts of the state where AWRM is in place (see the prior post on the Gallinas near Las Vegas, for example). Now, that said, it's nearly impossible to begrudge a parastatal agency charged with water administration. After all, the OSE is supposed to adjudicate (done for the Mimbres), monitor (nearly there for the Mimbres according to this .pdf map), and then manage through priority administration (not really, for the Mimbres), right? You do have to wonder what "99% complete" actually means for AWRM on the Mimbres, considering that most folks on the lower Mimbres are not monitored or metered, nor have they signed off on the plan. I am not arguing that management isn't necessary or important in a state that will see on-going lack of rain for the foreseeable future. Perhaps we should not even be using the rather antiquated word "drought" anymore, if this will be the new normal in the Greater Southwest.

Once again, if I harp on anything, it is the scale and nature of water governance and management in this state and frankly all others in the western U.S. Instead of building more, or relying on, massive infrastructure, why not emphasize and enrich the institutions that already exist on the ground that clearly have more adaptive capacity on more watersheds in New Mexico? Yes, I'm talking about community ditches and acequias. Yes, I favor a strong role for agricultural producers (the ones that remain at least).

One of the recurring themes in travel, reading, and attendance at conferences is that the era of "big water development is over." Really? Have these people been paying attention? New pipelines, regional water systems, trans-basin diversion projects are all in the works. Just because we aren't building Hoover Dam II doesn't mean that hydraulic infrastructure of a serious sort is gone. The Iron Triangle (feds, senators, state engineers) is alive and well. On a side-note, as we drove down to the Mimbres, we made a pit-stop at the mother of all dams in New Mexico, Elephant Butte. The dam and its irrigation district is once again in the news, because of New Mexico's concerns about a new operating agreement that seemingly favors Texas in its new balance sheet of delivered water. That's debatable. This is the same area that has the LRG adjudication to deal with, a now one of the sides of the iron triangle is suing the EBID over the new arrangement. And as anyone on the Rio Grande knows, the LRG adjudication may trigger new difficulties upstream towards Albuquerque (MRGCD) and Santa Fe, as Staci Matlock has recently suggested. It's not even close to being over, folks. Given the long and complicated re-engineering of the entire basin of the Rio Grande (see Reining in the Rio Grande, a new book) to serve human needs, perhaps we need to add a leg to the triangle. The iron square? What was missing in the iron triangle? Water law, and how it facilitated and complicated these situations. How's that for a teaser?

Until next time...