New Mexico lacks drought tools

While we city folk are doing fine, there’s a scrap under way up on the Rio Chama that illustrates the deeper problems. With water low in the Chama in northern New Mexico, it looked like state officials and local water managers had a deal earlier this year to share shortages, rotating allocations among the acequias that withdraw water from the river to water crops on the valley floor. The Chama was looking like a success story: water users coming together to figure out how to share during the bad times. That changed July 29 when David Ortiz, representing the Acequia de Chamita, filed a notice in federal court demanding a “priority call.” Under New Mexico law, the first water users on a river have the highest priority water rights. When things run short, they’re supposed to get water while later arrivals are cut off. And the Acequia de Chamita is among the oldest water rights you’ll find, with a legally certified priority date of 1600. Upstream from the Acequia de Chamita are water users who unquestionably came later. But the legal niceties to settle their priority dates and the amount they’re entitled to – the formal process known as “adjudication” – haven’t been completed. That means the state lacks the legal tools needed to curtail their use, and to make sure Ortiz and his fellow farmers, the folks with the senior rights, get their water. It’s a problem repeated all over the state. On the Pecos, Carlsbad farmers with senior rights are going dry this year while their lower-priority neighbors upstream have plenty of water. And in Albuquerque, I can’t help but point out that valley farms that faced shortages this year have been here a lot longer than Altura Park or Arroyo del Oso Golf Course. In other words, the legal mechanism established in the New Mexico Constitution for protecting water users’ property rights and allocating in times of shortage is dysfunctional. The New Mexico Supreme Court, in a water rights decision last month, poked the state’s legislative and executive branches with what amounted to a legal sharp stick for their failure to come to grips with the problem: “We urge our Legislature to be diligent in the exercise of its constitutional authority over – and responsibility for – the appropriation process. We equally urge the State Engineer to fulfill its superintending responsibility by applying priority administration for the protection of senior water users.”...more