NM Supreme Court declines to take up Navajo water rights case

The New Mexico Supreme Court has given a quick “no” to a group of state legislators who had asked the court to intervene in a dispute over allocation of San Juan River water rights to the Navajo Nation. In a one-page ruling written Friday and made public today, the court denied without comment a petition from three legislators and a San Juan Basin water user who had claimed the Navajo water settlement should be invalidated because it had never gone before the legislature for approval. The agreement, approved by a judge in New Mexico’s 11th Judicial District Court in San Juan County last August, allocates enough additional water to the Navajo Nation’s farming operation to irrigate about 40,000 acres of farmland. The agreement is based on a 1948 compact among New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming that allocated New Mexico an unusually large share of San Juan River water based on the argument that the water was needed to meet the needs of members of the Navajo Nation living in New Mexico...more