Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows:
The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation literally broke ground on Tuesday afternoon to let the waters flow into a mile of empty river bed in Medanales.
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation
Reduction Act Funding Handbook
Congress set aside substantial sums of money in 2021 and ’22 in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to address needs for access to safe, clean drinking water. But, as John Echohawk puts it:
While the appropriation of funding for infrastructure is a critical first step, it is only that – continuing and concerted efforts must be made to ensure that Tribal communities are able to access and deploy this funding and that meaningful gains are made in reducing the water access gap in Indian country.
Echohawk makes those comments in the introduction to the new Handbook from the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities project, out today. The challenge now is for Tribal communities to navigate the complexities of federal funding process which are, to see the least, a significant challenge.
We’ve written about this challenge before in this space – a staggering 48 percent of tribal homes, according to the Universal Access project’s analysis, lack access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. Money helps, but getting the money to the communities that might benefit requires negotiating a maze of federal process.
The new handbook (link to the handbook and a summary document here) outlines the many different pathways and requirements to translate Congressional intent to water projects on the ground.
The report is crucial for helping move down the path. Also, bonus points to the team that put it together for the stunning Tara Kerzhner photos.
Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?”
My answer:
We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure we’ve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended.
We seem to be living through a grand convergence of aging water infrastructure failure on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande this year.
We’ve talked in this space before about El Vado – built in the 1930s, unusable today. But it is only one example among many right now. If we are frank in recognizing that the main Rio Grande channel is a human artifact, dug in its current place and form in the 1950s, the list right now is long. The Flood Control Acts of 1948 (Public Law 80-858) and 1950 (Public Law 81-516) established the Middle Rio Grande Project and assigned the Bureau of Reclamation the job of performing Rio Grande channel maintenance.
The channel is infrastructure.
And it’s not just human water use that has optimized around the infrastructure. I was very careful in my comment to Jake – “entire human and natural communities” have optimized around the temporal and spatial flow of a century of altered river systems. When we taught together in the UNM Water Resources Program, my friend and collaborator Benjamin Jones spent significant time on the concept of “coupled human and natural systems”. This is that.
Here’s my current list, feel free to add your favorites in the comments.
The Army Corps of Engineers has had to curtail releases out of Abiquiu Dam on the Rio Chama because sediment has plugged the river. That means decreased flows downstream. They’re working like crazy to dig a pilot channel. It is not yet working.
The Corrales Siphon, built (like El Vado) in the 1930s as part of the early Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District works is (like El Vado) broken. The district has installed temporary pumps, but with the reduced flows out of the Chama, there’s not enough water in the Rio Grande to feed the pumps, which means irrigators in Corrales have no water.
The Rio Grande’s Lower San Acacia reach, heavily altered by channel reconstruction and management from the 1950s onward, is – I believe the technical term is “a fucking mess”. It’s increasingly difficult to get water through this reach to users downstream who depend on it. Lots more on this situation here.
The Low Flow Conveyance Channel (Yay 1950s engineering!) sprang a kinda big leak the early 1990s. It’s still leaking, much to the delight of endangered willow flycatchers – to the human water users not so much.
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.”
Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, which is a tributary of the Colorado, where producers use flood irrigation on timothy grass to grow livestock forage.
Flood irrigation is often seen as “wasteful.” One approach is to install “more efficient” irrigation technology. But – and this is one of my repetitive talking points with students in the graduate water policy course I teach every fall – you need to flag the word “waste” when you see it in a water policy discussion and think carefully about how you’re using it.
That water is going somewhere, and doing something. You have to include this in your analysis. Maybe it’s really being “wasted”. But you may find that the place the water is going, and the thing that it’s doing, is valuable!
That’s what the Wyoming team found. Flood irrigation recharges the shallow aquifer – reducing the spring peak in the area’s streams, and slowly releasing that water back into those same streams in late summer. Which is crucial, in this case, for economically valuable fisheries – recreational brown trout fishing, to cite their analysis.
This is at the heart Bruce Lankford’s oddly named work on the “paracommons,” which has provided an enormously helpful analytical framework for my thinking about this stuff.
Cleaning up our urban sewage for reuse is super popular right now, and can in some cases be an enormously powerful water policy response to scarcity. But we’ve got to be mindful about where that “wasted” water is going and what positive benefits it is providing. Lots of inland urban cities in the southwestern United States treat their wastewater and return it to rivers, where it feeds ecosystems and downstream users.
We always have to consider the tradeoffs.
In my book Water is for Fighting Over, I delighted in this cheap shot at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office –
… a grandiose white building atop a hill … surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year.
I am happy nine years after I wrote that, via Daniel Rothberg’s excellent water news, to correct the record. In response to Southern Nevada’s “non-functional turf” regulations, Reclamation will be tearing out the lawn. In classic federal fashion, the project is accompanied by a 400-page NEPA analysis:
According to the report, about 4 million gallons of water were used to maintain the landscapes at the two building. Redesigning them as desert-friendly xeriscape could result in water savings of more than half, or about 66%. The bureau started this work, at a cost of more than $4 million, and it recently opened up the project to the public.
I’ll be back in Boulder City week after next, I’ll check on how things are going.
A friend visiting New York, knowing of my fascination with Mark Rothko, texted me a picture of one of his paintings (in MOMA or someplace?).
This led to a conversation with my wife, Lissa, who reminded me that she and I, years before we knew one another, had both been to see the 1979 retrospective of Rothko’s work at the LA County Museum of Art.
It’s a fun game for us, remembering the shows we’d both been to see in those years, disentangling the memories of things we saw separately, and those we saw together once we met. Lissa was a young artist living that life in L.A. I was the son of an artist – Dad took me to see all the most interesting shows. It was a way of life for both of us.
My sister, Lisa, joins in the game sometimes. She was around both before and after Lissa and I met, and art.
Lisa wasn’t around for the Rothko show, but we all three for sure saw the Art and Technology show at the LA County in 1971. There were lasers and bubbling mud pots and Claes Oldenburg’s giant undulating ice bag. Dad took teenage John and sister Lisa. My future wife, Lissa, who I wouldn’t meet for another dozen years, went as a young art school student.
In 1986 – by that time Lissa and I were married, and my wife and my sister, Lisa, were converging on their own deep, lifelong friendship – the three of us were back at LACMA together to see what remains one of the most significant art exhibits I have ever seen. It was a collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings from the Hermitage in then-Soviet Russia. It was a magnificent unfolding, in a single time and place, of the birth of the modern.
There was this through line you could see, standing before these magnificent canvases, all compressed into a single show, one after the other, from the Impressionists to Matisse to this ragged Picasso, Three Women, one of the companion pieces to Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. There was Lissa, the young love of my life, leading me through it, talking about what she saw. I’d lived around cubism my whole life – some of my earliest art memories are Dad’s cubist landscapes from the ‘50s – but I’d never really thought through what the birth of the modern meant.
I’ve written before about how Lissa taught me to see. The Hermitage show is one of the places where that happened.
I don’t write about homelessness much here because I don’t know enough to feel like I have much useful to add to the words and work of those who do. But I do think about it a lot. I also think a lot about the challenges of collective choice and collective action. Which is at the heart of this, from Steve Berg:
Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
It’s important to note that this case may prevent certain lawsuits, but it doesn’t force communities to take any specific actions or to actively engage in criminal punishment of unsheltered people. Instead, it makes it easier for communities to do exactly that if they choose.
Elected officials who insist on going down that path will quickly learn that it won’t change the realities of homelessness. Criminal penalties such as fines, tickets, and arrests make homelessness worse, and cost communities a lot of money that should otherwise be spent on housing, supportive services, and street outreach. With record numbers of people entering into homelessness systems for the first time (more than 18,000 people per week in 2023, according to new U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] System Performance Measure data) we must remind leaders that what solves homelessness is housing, together with supportive services needed to help people stabilize in housing. And these are investments that benefit the entire community, not just folks who are experiencing homelessness.
Of concern in the majority opinion in this case are the statements that basically repeat the “homeless by choice” contention. These comments were based on gratuitous statements in amicus briefs in the case, written by people who are looking to cast blame on people other than themselves. The only choice involved in homelessness is the choice by alleged leaders to ignore the housing needs of people with the lowest incomes.
We know what to do to end homelessness. We still have homelessness because we haven’t done those things. This Supreme Court has made clear that we shouldn’t look to them for help. We intend to succeed without them.
Janet Wilson had a super helpful piece this week in the Desert Sun about steps being taken (in a hurry) to get the institutional widgets in place to meet Lower Basin commitments to reduce water use under a deal hashed out in spring 2023 to head of Colorado River NEPA litigation.
If all goes as planned, growers and owners of farm fields could be paid $300 per acre-foot for not irrigating alfalfa and other perennial feed crops for between 45 and 60 days. The plants would be stressed but would survive, and substantial water supply would instead be left in drought-depleted Lake Mead, which provides water for millions of people and millions of acres of farmland in California, Arizona and Nevada.
I wrote (with youthful enthusiasm) in my book Water is For Fighting Over about the potential of “deficit irrigation” as a water use reduction tool in Imperial and places like it. One of the reasons we have converged on alfalfa as a crop in the arid southwestern United States is how robust it is when the water runs short. From the book:
Farmers have known for years that when their water supply runs short, they can get away with skipping an irrigation cycle and their plants will survive. They’ll just have fewer bales to feed to their cattle or send off to their dairy industry customers.
Do that intentionally, for money, and you have an adaptation tool that avoids fallowing entire fields or “buy and dry”. This also works with Bermuda grass and klein grass, two other forage crops grown in Imperial. Taken together, the three crops accounted for 233,000 of Imperial’s 333,000 acres under active irrigation in June, according to IID’s latest irrigation acreage report. (Total Imperial “farmable” acreage is 436,000 acres, the rest is either being fallowed or between crops right now.)
Deficit irrigation is one of three water conservation tools on the table for Imperial, as discussed in a draft Environmental Assessment released last week. Also on the table are on-farm efficiency improvements and straight up fallowing.
All involve federal money to compensate farmers (and their irrigation district).
Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
We’re currently 121,500 feet behind in deliveries, up from basically zero six years ago. If our debt rises above 200,000 acre feet, according to the letter:
Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the use of water rights under state law is subordinate to a state’s obligations under an interstate compact. In Hinderlider v. La Plata River & Cherry Creek Ditch Co., 304 U.S. 92, 108 (1938) the Supreme Court ruled that a State could curtail uses by senior water users when necessary to honor interstate obligations, because no user within a state is entitled to use any greater right than the state’s equitable share under the compact.
If New Mexico exceeds the 200,000 acre-foot threshold, Texas could file an original action against New Mexico seeking an injunction requiring New Mexico to take all actions necessary to deliver water to Texas until the debit falls below 200,000 acre-feet. While it would be impossible to know what relief a court would ultimately order, all diversions of native surface or groundwater within the middle Rio Grande, other than Pueblo water rights, could be vulnerable to a Compact call.
The only water rights that would not be subject to curtailment in the event of a Compact call would be Pueblo water rights, which are protected against impairment under Article XVI of the Compact, and San Juan-Chama Project (SJC) contract allocations, which are protected under Article X of the Compact. The amount of SJC water that MRGCD could use, however, would be limited to MRGCD’s SJC allocation in that year, any carryover SJC storage from previous allocations, or any leased water acquired from other SJC contractors.
The use of groundwater wells, including pre-basin wells and wells with pre-1907 rights, for irrigation, stock, municipal, and domestic use would all be vulnerable to a Compact call as well. This would have an impact on many farmers and ranchers, as well as many municipalities. While New Mexico would seek to protect the ability of municipal and domestic users to utilize water indoors, there could be extreme restrictions on other municipal and domestic uses of water, such as outdoor watering or washing cars.
To be clear, this is separate from the ongoing Texas v. New Mexico litigation on the Lower Rio Grande. This is the scary new Compact threat that Norm Gaume and others have been warning about as the Compact debt creeps inexorably higher.
The full letter is included at the tail end of Monday’s (7/8/2024) MRGCD board packet, and is on the agenda for a possible discussion at that meeting.
Rio Grande at Albuquerque, July 1, 2024
The graph uses day-long averages. The actual peak yesterday was over 3,000 cfs at the Central Avenue Bridge.
Here’s what it looked like around noon:
Rio Grande, Albuquerque, 10 a.m. June 30, 2024
