In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, paying for the water they use

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Folks in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are engaged in a bold experiment in western water management – charging farmers for the water they use. Jerd Smith explains:

A new rule approved by the area’s largest irrigation district, known as Subdistrict 1, and the Alamosa-based Rio Grande Water Conservation District, sets fees charged to pump water from a severely depleted underground aquifer at $500 an acre-foot, up from $150 an acre foot. The new program could begin as early as 2026 if the fees survive a court challenge.

The challenge in the valley is that, with climate change inexorably chomping at the Rio Grande, and the groundwater used to replace the river’s dwindling irrigation supplies, there simply isn’t enough water to keep farming all the acreage they’ve got up there.

The valley is operating under the same two constraints that we see up and down the river – less water flowing in, and requirements established in the Rio Grande Compact to pass some of what does come in to folks downstream – Colorado can’t use it all, but must pass some water along to water users in central New Mexico. Those of us in central New Mexico’s “Middle Rio Grande” (the stretch from Cochiti through Albuquerque to Socorro) get to use some, but must pass some of on to farmers in Southern New Mexico. Under the deal now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the southern New Mexican’s (the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and Las Cruces area) must then pass some water across the border to people in Texas and Mexico.

Paying to Reduce Use: Private v. Public Goods

In each of those stretches – Colorado, central New Mexico, and southern New Mexico – we face the challenge of reducing use in order to meet downstream obligations.

In New Mexico, our approach to problems like this has been to treat the water as a private good, and pay its users to not use the water. This year, for example, a pipeline of money from the federal government, through the state, to our local water agency, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, is paying irrigators $700 an acre to not irrigate.

The approach in the San Luis Valley is different. There, farmers who want to pump groundwater (recognizing that groundwater and surface water are an interconnected part of a single system, and that as river flow declines farmers have been pumping groundwater to replace it) have to pay for it. If you want to pump more, you have to pay more. And as it gets scarcer, the price needs to go up.

The legal terminology involving the notion of property rights here is tricky, but as a practical matter this suggests two very different approaches. In New Mexico, we are treating the water as the irrigators property, and paying them to forego its use. In Colorado, they’re treating it as public property, and requiring them to pay if they want to use it.

The Coasian Solution

Students of the Berrens-Fleck Lab will recognize this as a version of the classic problem of assigning the property right, as laid out by Ronald Coase in his classic 1960 paper The Problem of Social Cost. Overuse of water in a climate change-constrained system is a classic “externality” – a burden pushed off onto others, rather than the people who get to benefit from the use of water.

Coase’s answer – “assign the property right!” – has made his paper one of the most-cited papers in the history of papers, and won him a Nobel prize. Coase’s argument is that by assigning the property right, and starting from that point to figure out who pays and how much to solve the problem, we can converge on solutions. You can either make the people being harmed pay to stop the harm, or the people causing the harm pay to stop the harm.

We can, for example, require the factory polluting our river pay the cost of installing pollution control equipment. Or we can make the folks downstream, or the community as a whole, pay. Either way will work. The question of which approach we take is an ethical and political question.

Colorado has chosen (or at least is trying to chose – this’ll end up in court) one approach. New Mexico has chosen another.

Cartoon Coase

This is a cartoon of Coase’s argument. In the paper (which is a terrific read) he’s making a more nuanced argument involving transaction costs. In both the New Mexico and Colorado cases, the cost of setting up the payment system makes actually carrying out the policies we need super hard. But the cartoon helps frame our approach to western water management challenges more broadly.

A container ship in a southwestern desert river.

This image is fake. There also is no Large Container Ships Full of Money Act. I made that up too. It’s really the “Build Inflation Better Act” or something, I can never get that right.

The Colorado example – charge more to use water! – is rare. In the Lower Colorado River right now, we’re paying farmers, through their agricultural districts, giant container ships full of money to reduce their use – the New Mexico approach. We’re treating the water as their property, and paying them not to use it. This is an ethical and political (and possible legal?) choice.

But the key difference between the New Mexico/Lower Colorado approach and the classic Coasian cartoon is who’s doing the paying. In both cases, at least for now, we’re using Other People’s Money (OPM), via the recently passed Large Container Ships Full of Money Act (LCSFMA). Those of us in the West have somehow worked a racket where folks in Maine and Georgia and elsewhere are paying to bail us out of our mess. (To be fair, I’m sure we’re bailing them out in some way too.)

The processes by which we have to figure out how to move all this money and water around – to pay people to not use water, or to charge them for the water they use – are a great example of the power of the deeper insights in Coase’s 1960 paper. Working out the ways things don’t match up to Cartoon Coase is where the real value of the intellectual framework is found.

Sources and Methods

Two huge thanks. First, to Daniel Rothberg, whose Western Water Notes alerted me to the issue. And to Jerd Smith and the Colorado Sun, for supporting and publishing the great water journalism we all need to understand these issues. If you can, I’d encourage you to contribute to one or the other or both, to support the fundamental underlying knowledge base we all need to move forward on climate change and western water issues.

The Magic of Alleys

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A blue and red touring bicycle with bags attached to the frame and handlebars is parked against a wooden post in an urban setting. The area is strewn with dry leaves and some litter on the ground. There's a chain-link fence in the background with a concrete post beside the bike. The setting appears to be a neglected urban corner with no people in sight.

A tiny alley, connecting two larger alleys. Old Town Albuquerque, New Mexico

The secret corridor proves an amazing fast shortcut to any explorer determined to brush aside low-hanging branches and to risk broken glass and rusted wire. And it offers the probing and poking explorer another view of the chrome-and-glitter commercial strip, even of the regional mall, for it makes clear the stealth with which change comes.

– John Stilgoe, in his book Outside Lies Magic

Off the western edge of Albuquerque’s historic “Old Town”, the plaza settled in the early 1700s, runs an over-named street called “Hollywood Avenue.” It’s not clear when it acquired the name, but it was an unnamed street by the time modern mapping created the legibility necessary to draw property lines so early 20th century governments could tax people to pay for roads, schools, and water management.

Soto Avenue came later, running behind the strip mall along Route 66.

“Avenue” seems a bit grandiose as a naming convention. Both feel like alleys. Hollywood especially is a favorite bike route for detouring around one of those stretches of road urban cyclists will nod about, knowingly – places built for cars that cyclists need to detour around.

But the best bit is the little cut-through between them. Perhaps 50 feet long, accessible only to pedestrians and bicycles, a square wooden bollard on either end. My bike in the picture above is parked a the Soto (south) end.

Bollards are always a clue. Look for the bollards, and when you see them, go that way.

 

Senate hearing next week on Tribal access to clean water: it takes more than just a pile of money

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The U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee is holding an important hearing Thursday on S. 2385, a bill to refine the tools needed to help Tribal communities gain access to something that most non-Indian communities in the western United States have long taken for granted: federally subsidized systems to deliver safe, clean drinking water to our homes.

Inkstain readers should find these numbers familiar:

  • 48 percent of households on Native American reservations don’t have the sort of basic plumbing we all mostly take for granted – piped (and clean!) water into our houses, sanitation systems to take away waste
  • Per the Universal Access to clean water for Tribal Communities project, “Native American homes are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing.”

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act allocated a lot of money to fix this stuff, but as is so often the case with large government investment efforts, there remain capacity issues associated with getting the money effectively spent. As the Universal Access folks explain:

While groundbreaking and long overdue, the funding now available for construction and repair of domestic water systems in Indian country is not a complete solution. Technical assistance is urgently needed to allow Tribes to plan and design the systems necessary to remedy the longstanding problem of lack of access to clean drinking water and bring those plans to the “shovel ready” stage where they can take advantage of available construction funding. In addition, Tribes need support to develop the managerial, financial, and regulatory capacity necessary for a fully functional and self-sustaining utility. Construction funding is not currently available to connect essential community facilities, like schools and clinics, to centralized water and sanitation, and this support is absolutely necessary to support a basic level of Tribal economic development. Finally, because Tribes cannot rely on the same types and volumes of revenue streams to support operation and maintenance of water systems, initial and temporary O&M assistance helps to ensure that the benefits of the historic investment in infrastructure are fully realized.

This is the sort of bill (there’s a companion on the House side) that makes a huge amount of sense, but could easily get sidetracked in the chaos of Congress. The ideal path is for the crucial vetting to happen in a process such as Thursday’s hearing, and then to attach it to one of those omnibus things that Congress uses these days to get non-controversial stuff done.

Clean water for Native communities should pretty clearly be non-controversial.

Rio Grande flow at Otowi in decline, fancy graph edition

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Graph showing decline in Rio Grande flow at Otowi comparing 1980-2000 to 2001 to present. It has gone down.

Changing Rio Grande flow at Otowi over time

I’ve been updating the crufty old code I use to generate graphs to help me (and colleagues) think about river flows.

This one’s a little busy, so maybe for specific nerd colleagues’ use, and not general consumption?

It’s based on a request from a friend who uses these, and asked for a visualization of the wet 1981-2000 period compared to the drier 21st century. This is an important comparison given that a whole bunch of New Mexicans (including me!) moved here in the wet 1980s and ’90s, which created a sense of what’s “normal.”

It’s important to note that this is not a measure of climate, at least not directly. This is a measure of how much actual water flows past the Otowi gage, which is a product of:

  • climate-driven hydrology adding water
  • trans-basin diversions adding water (“trans basin diversion” singular, I guess, the San-Juan Chama Project)
  • upstream water use subtracting water
  • reservoir management decisions moving water around in time (sometimes reducing the flow by storing, sometimes increasing it by releasing)

I get so much out of staring at these graphs. A few bits from this one, which I did a few evenings ago curled up with my laptop in my comfy chair:

  • Look at the curves around Nov. 1 – a drop as irrigation season ends, following by a rise as managers move compact compliance water down the river to Elephant Butte. Makes me curious about what they were doing back in the ’80s and ’90s in November.
  • This year’s winter base flow is low.

At some point soon I’ll get the updated code onto Github, but it’s not quite ready for sharing. (I’m rewriting it in Python, because learning is fun!)

Thanks to the supporters of Inkstain’s crazy busking business model.

New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: forest of cottonwoods, forest of pecans

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Belen AT&SF Rio Grande crossing, looking east, March, 1943. Note lack of trees. Jack Delano, courtesy Library of Congress

 

This Rio Grande crossing, just south of Belen, 30-plus miles downstream from Albuquerque, has changed dramatically since Jack Delano took the picture above in spring 1943.

The Bosque

Irrigation ditch crossing with trees in the background.

Beyond drains, a forest. John Fleck, January 2024

I’ve stared at Delano’s picture often, because of the story it tells – a broad open river valley. It’s nothing like that today.

I pieced together some dirt roads and ditchbanks to visit the site on this morning’s bike ride. I had hopes of duplicating Delano’s picture, but the train traffic made standing in the middle of the tracks seem ill-advised. The picture to the right, facing the river looking east, should give you a feel. The Rio Grande here is now flanked by a magnificent cottonwood gallery forest, with low stands of coyote willow and salt cedar and some other stuff. We call it “the bosque.”

Looking at the picture last night as I was doing the map work to figure a sane bike route to get to the bridge, the date clicked: Spring 1943. In thinking about the modern relationship between human communities and the Rio Grande, 1941-42 is a dividing line – the last big flood years, the floods that drove the major changes in river management that created an ecological niche that the cottonwoods exploited in the second half of the twentieth century with full-throated glee.

Delano’s picture can be misleading. It wasn’t all treeless like that. The 1917-18 Rio Grande drainage survey, which is our best “before” snapshot of the valley, shows clumps of cottonwoods up and down the river. Following the 1941-42 floods, the federal Middle Rio Grande Project reengineered the main river channel with a series of sediment traps on the banks that were intended to push the river into a narrower central channel. In the process, they created ideal seed bed habitat for the cottonwoods to fill in the empty spaces.

The result is a linear cottonwood gallery forest more than 150 miles long. I’ve always called it “continuous,” but I just scanned the whole length using satellite imagery and found two short gaps. So “nearly continuous,” to add precision.

The bosque is often treated as one of the Middle Valley’s great natural treasures, and I don’t disagree. But “natural” may not be quite the right word.

Pecans

Belen High Line Canal, feeding pecan orchards in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. John Fleck, January 2024

Next stop: one of the most interesting climate change adaptation experiments underway in Middle Valley agriculture.

Past the railroad bridge, I found a ditch crossing and peeled away from the river toward the sand hills to the east, winding through the small farms of Jarales that make this stretch of the valley a lovely exemplar of the “ribbons of green” we talk about in the new book. Nearly all the farms were less than 10 acres – non-commercial, “custom and culture” agriculture, mostly alfalfa or other forage crops, lots of horses. Dodging the one busy highway the best I could, I veered into a neighborhood and under the interstate, where the road kicked up to a geomorphic bench in the sand hills maybe 30 feet in elevation above the nearby valley floor.

The pecans are in the distance in the picture to the right, though you can’t really see them. I was on relatively unfamiliar ground, and was cautious in my interpretation of the “No Trespassing” signs on the ditchbank road. It’s land that was once scrubland just like the land in the foreground. Now it’s irrigated with water from the ditch in the picture, to the tune of more than 1,000 acre feet per year. (We don’t know exactly. We don’t meter this use of water here.) There was a lot of controversy nearly 20 years ago when the land was brought into production. Critics (included regular Inkstain commenter Bill Turner, who was on the MRGCD board at the time) argued it wasn’t entitled to irrigation water from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s ditches. I’m not going to relitigate that argument here. Those objecting to serving the land with MRGCD irrigation water lost. Now the land is home to a fascinating experiment in climate change adaptation.

With a warming climate, the optimal range for pecans has moved north. (UNM Water Resources Program grad Tylee Griego took a deep dive into the pecans’ migration here.)

We have seen a century of failed efforts to foster a commercially successful crop in the valley – wheat, tomatoes, sugar beats, pinto beans, tobacco (!). Pecans are the latest, and rather than climate change making it harder to grow stuff, in this case it has made it easier. By increasing irrigated acreage in the valley. We usually think of agricultural climate change adaptation as “crop switching,” not “crop adding.” In addition to the big orchards by the river, the latest USDA CroplandCROS dataset, which uses satellite data and algorithms to identify crop types, is showing more pecans in small patches across the valley. I don’t full trust CroplandCROS – it gets a lot of pixels wrong ’round here, unfortunately. But this just means more bike rides needed to “ground truth” my blog posts. This is a part of the valley I don’t know as well, so fun ahead!

As I was riding through Jarales this morning and writing this post in my head, I was playing with the theme suggested by the two forests – each spread across a niche created by human alteration of the hydrologic system. Not sure it quite works, but I’ll leave it here.

A note on Jack Delano

Diesel train with Alvarado Hotel in the background.

“Santa Fe R.R. streamliner, the “Super Chief,” being serviced at the depot, Albuquerque, NM. Servicing these diesel streamliners takes five minutes”. Jack Delano’s original caption. Courtesy Library of Congress

Jack Delano’s 1943 trip through New Mexico is worthy of note.

Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Ukraine, was one of the Farm Service Administration/Office of War Information photographers whose work dominates our visual understanding of the 1930s and early ’40s in the United States. His photographs of the AT&SF rail yard in Albuquerque, taken on the same spring 1943 trip that he took the Belen railroad bridge above, represent a remarkable documentation of a moment in time, as freight bustled through Albuquerque in service of the war effort.

We tend to think of the classic FSA photography as “documentary” work of the highest order – which it was. But it also was government propaganda – artists paid by the government to tell particular kinds of stories, and share particular kinds of messages.

Much of the classic visual vocabulary of the FSA pictures – think Dorothea Lange – is very much black and white. But with the development of Kodachrome in the 1930s, photographers of the period were beginning to shoot in color too. Most of Delano’s Albuuquerque pictures are in black and white, but his color picture of the Albuquerque rail yard, taken from the Lead Avenue orverpass circa 1943, is a classic.

 

Are We Headed for the First Colorado River Compact Tripwire?

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By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck

The Bureau of Reclamation’s January 2024 “Most Probable” 24-month study forecasts that annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam for both Water Years 2025 and 2026 will be 7.48 million acre-feet per year (maf). If this happens, the ten-year total flow at Lee Ferry for the 2017-2026 period will drop to about 83.0 maf, only about 500,000 acre-feet above 82.5 million acre-feet, the first 1922 Compact hydrology “tripwire.”

That line – 82.5 maf feet of Lee Ferry deliveries over a ten year period – has become a dividing line between two contending interpretations of the most important unresolved question in the century-old Colorado River Compact: How much water must the Upper Basin deliver to the Lower Basin? What happens if it doesn’t?

The consequences of triggering the tripwire, which might happen in 2027, are significant. In the worst case scenario, it could plunge the basin into Supreme Court litigation over the interpretation of the 1922 Compact, which could result in a forced curtailment of post-compact water uses in the Upper Basin. Or, alternately, if the Basin States are willing to settle their long-term disputed issues or implement basic changes to the Law of the River via the renegotiations of the post-2026 operating rules, it could be a “non-event.”  This is one of the fundamental issues facing the states as they meet to develop their basin-state alternative.

The 82.5 maf tripwire is based on the 1922 Compact’s two flow-related requirements at Lee Ferry; Article III(d) requires the four Upper Division States to not cause the progressive ten-year flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted below 75 maf. Additionally, Article III(c) provides that if there is not sufficient surplus water to meet the annual water delivery requirements of the 1944 Mexican Treaty, normally 1.5 maf, then each basin must provide half of the deficiency (the required annual delivery minus the available surplus). The Upper Division States must deliver their share of the deficiency at Lee Ferry in addition to their obligations under Article III(d).

The Upper Division and Lower Division States have never agreed on the meaning and interpretation of Article III(c). There have been numerous papers on the disputed issues by both compact scholars and practitioners and Article III(c) has never been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that the Lower Division States believe that the Upper Division States must deliver at Lee Ferry a total of 82.5 maf every ten years (75 maf + 10 x 750,000), but the Upper Division States believe that they currently have no obligation to Mexico, so the number is at most 75 million. There are of course, nuances. The Lower Division States have suggested that the Upper Division States might also need to cover transit losses between Lee Ferry and Mexico and the Upper Division States have most recently suggested that if climate change, not Upper Basin depletions, is causing the ten-year flow to fall below 75 million, then their article III(d) non-depletion obligation must be appropriately adjusted. Further, if pursuant to either the extraordinary drought provision or a treaty minute, the required annual delivery to Mexico is less than 1.5 maf, then, even with no surplus, the Upper Division’s 50% share would be less than 750,000 acre-feet.

One should recognize that the annual releases from the Glen Canyon Dam and the annual flow at Lee Ferry (the compact point) are not the same.  Between the dam and Lee Ferry, the river gains flow from groundwater accretions (in part due to leakage around the dam) and from the Paria River. These gains can vary from about 30,000 acre-feet to over 300,000 acre-feet annually.  The ten-year Lee Ferry flow for 2014-2023 was approximately 86.1 maf.

That amount – 86.1 maf – might seem like a safe cushion. But because it is a ten-year moving total, we are about to drop out years with big releases (9 million acre feet) and replace them with years with just 7.48 maf. At the end of 2024, because both 2014 (the year that drops out) and 2024 (the year that is added in) are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will stay about the same.  The way the ten-year flow calculation works is next year, 2015 will drop out and 2025 will be added in, and so on, but here is the problem; From 2015 through 2019, the 2007 Interim Guidelines dictated an annual release of 9 maf per year. With accretions, flows at Lee Ferry averaged about 9.18 maf per year (source: UCRC 74th Annual Report). Thus, if 2025 and 2026 are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will lose about 1.5 maf/year making the total about 83 maf for the 2017-2026 period. Because the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire, we don’t know what the annual release will be in 2027, but if it’s less than about 8.5 maf, because 2017 was a 9 maf year, the ten-year Lee Ferry flow could drop below the tripwire – 82.5 maf (with two more 9 maf years, 2018 and 2019, in the pipeline).

We recognize that the 24-month studies don’t predict the future. They are a planning and management tool. It’s plausible that by 2027, a series of wet years could result in a ten-year flow that is much higher than 82.5 maf, something that is, in our view, unlikely. But as we sit here in January 2024, the 24-month study is the only planning tool we’ve got. It would behoove us to pay attention to what it is telling us.

If a future 24-month study projects that ten-year flows will fall below 82.5 maf, it will be a big deal for the basin. What provision of the Law of the River will control annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam – the post-2026 Operating Guidelines, the Lower Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (82.5 maf), or the Upper Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (75 maf or less)?  If the Lower Division States agree to a ten-year flow target of less than 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Upper Division States? If the Upper Division States agree to a flow target of 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Lower Division States? If the Upper Basin states agree to either 82.5 maf or some smaller compromise delivery target and the hydrology remains bad, how will Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah – our states – approach the required water use reductions? What if there is not enough water in storage in Lake Powell (and the other CRSP reservoirs) to release sufficient water to bring the ten-year flows to 82.5 maf? Will the Lower Division insist that that the UCRC implement a curtailment of post-compact uses in the Upper Basin. If the UCRC refuses to do so, will that plunge the Basin into litigation?

At the recent 2023 CRWUA meeting, representatives of the Lower Division States stepped up and made it clear they own the “structural deficit,” and the conference was buzzing with talk of the innovative system approach the Lower Division has put on the table. This is great news, but as Colorado’s Royce Tipton concluded sixty years ago, the “structural deficit” is not a single number. It’s a range that depends on the interpretation of the Lee Ferry obligations of the Upper Division States under the 1922 Compact. If the average annual flow requirement is 8.25 maf/year, (which Tipton referred to as “fictional”) he calculated the deficit to be about 1.2 maf/year. Today we believe it’s about 1.4 -1.5 maf/year (Tipton’s assumptions about system losses were probably too low and perhaps his Lee Ferry to Lake Mead inflow assumptions too high). If, however, the average annual flow requirement is 7.5 maf/year, he calculated the deficit to be about 2 maf/year, today maybe 2.2 maf/year. This difference is huge, especially for the Central Arizona Project, the junior user on the Lower basin mainstem.

In the past decades, water managers in the Colorado River Basin have made accomplishments that even two decades ago were considered out of reach: The 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, the shortage sharing agreements with Mexico, the increased recognition of the rights of the Basin’s Native American communities are just a few. The Lower Division’s recent pronouncement that they own the structural deficit is another major step forward, but it has a fundamental flaw. Representatives of all seven Basin states continue to stubbornly insist that the Law of the River, and specifically, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, will serve as the “foundation” of the post-2026 operating guidelines. The flaw is that is that we don’t know if this foundation is based on a ten-year Lee Ferry flow of 82.5 maf, or 75 maf, or something different.

Put simply, the states agree that the Law of the River has to be the basis of what we do, but don’t agree on what the Law of the River actually says. Without an agreement on this fundamental issue, calling the 1922 Compact a foundation is nothing more than self-delusional wishful thinking. Now that the Lower Division States have agreed to own the structural deficit, is the next step for all seven states and the federal government to openly acknowledge that given the impacts of climate change on the river, the 1922 Compact’s overallocation of water and its disputed Lee Ferry flow provisions are core problems for the basin, not the foundation? Finding a sustainable future, without litigation, will require accepting and acknowledging the basic problems we face, not avoiding them.

 

Somos Atrisco: Anchoring greater Albuquerque’s heritage

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The Atrisco Acequia Madra, with bonus tumbleweeds. December 2020, by John Fleck

Work is moving forward on a new park sort of thing to mark an important piece of Albuquerque’s historical geography: the old Atrisco ditch heading.

Carolyn Carlson reports in the new City Desk ABQ (yay non-profit journalism!) that the Bernalillo County Commission adopted the “Atrisco Acequia Madre Master Plan” at its Jan. 9 meeting. It’ll give us a new two acre park-information setting near the point where a cluster of old irrigation ditches dating to the 1700s diverted water from the Rio Grande to what we today call “Albuquerque’s South Valley.”

Wheat paste sign reading "Nosomos Atrisco, Est. 1692" on the base of a light pole

Est. 1692 – Atrisco stakes claim to primacy

There was a time when Atrisco was the economic and population center of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, something some South Valley residents subtly but cheekily commemorated with these signs. The “Est. 1692” is a claim to primacy here. The old village of “Alburquerque” (the old spelling) claims a 1706 date. It’s a colonial primacy – the indigenous Pueblos we simply note as dating to “time immemorial.” But we have our pecking orders, and New Mexicans are acutely attentive to such chronologies.

Life on a flood plain

Before the work done a century ago to build levees, confining the Rio Grande to a narrow channel, the villages of the South Valley – Atrisco, Pajarito, Los Padillas – were clustered on slightly higher ground, differences imperceptible today but readily apparent when early residents watched a rising river each spring.

From the June 17, 1874 Santa Fe New Mexican, one of many accounts of flooding we documented in our research for our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green:

Monday of this week we received the startling news that the river had burst its barriers at Atrisco and threatened to inundate all this lower country as far as the Pueblo of Isleta. The people turned out and worked all day Tuesday to stop the break but without success. That night another break occurred near the
first, and the water rushed through in torrents.

In the book, we describe how the South Valley – Atrisco – was the dominant population center for the valley’s sheepherding economy before the arrival of the railroad upended the old order in the 1880s, shifting the power center east across the river to Albuquerque.

But life on the valley floor was a constant struggle with a river. Scholars have traced the name, “Atrisco,” to the Aztec word “Atlixto” – “on the surface of the water.” Irrigation as crucial for subsistence in the time before the railroad enabled food importation at scale, but it was always a sketchy proposition because of the river’s “menace.”

The Atrisco Acequia Madre Plan

The new park will include a place for visitors we drive to store their automobiles (“parking,” in the weird lingo), interpretive signs, and the like. The site, which you can see in the photo at the top of the post, is a little chunk of land owned by various government agencies across Central Avenue – old Route 66 – from the Monte Carlo liquor store and steak house. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District is the primary landowner.

It’s at a fascinating spot in our modern urban geography. Across the river to the east lies our botanical gardens and “Tingley Beach”, a conspicuously gardened landscape, precious. On the west side, it’s – how to say this with grace? – less manicured, and more real.

I know I say this about a lot of places, but the west side of the crossing, the unmanicured one, is one of my favorite Albuquerque urban river spots. I’m delighted about the project.

Preliminary: New Mexico’s Rio Grande Compact debt rose ~25,000 acre feet in 2023

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Elephant Butte Reservoir in the early 20th century, courtesy USBR via Library of Congress

New Mexico once again fell short in 2023 of the requirement set out in the Rio Grande Compact to deliver water to Elephant Butte Reservoir for use in Southern New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, delivering ~25,000 acre feet less than the Compact requires, according to preliminary estimates presented at Monday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

These numbers are preliminary. The final, official numbers will be sorted out at this spring’s meeting of the Rio Grande Compact Commission. But if they hold, that would put New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt at ~125,000 acre feet.

Really bad things don’t start happening until New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt rises above 200,00 acre feet, but less bad things are already happening now as a result of the debt. Under Article VI of the Compact:

Within the physical limitations of storage capacity in such reservoirs, New Mexico shall
retain water in storage at all times to the extent of its accrued debit.

Translated, that means any runoff we could actually store in upstream reservoirs in 2024 we can’t use, but rather have to hang onto to run down to Elephant Butte after the end of the irrigation season.

Run-of-the river again for Middle Valley irrigators, and for the fish

There’s a complex interaction here between physical storage* and rules. But the bottom line is that once again this summer, water users in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, the stretch of the river between Cochiti Pueblo and Elephant Butte Dam, will be entirely dependent on natural runoff available after the farmers in the San Luis Valley of Colorado take their share of the river.

I would predict, as a result, that:

  1. People who irrigate in the Middle Valley should expect a high risk of significant stretches with no ditch water in the summer,
  2. Water available for instream flows for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow will once again be extremely tight, with a high likelihood of drying in the Isleta and San Acacia reaches this summer, and
  3. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority is likely to shut down river diversions for its drinking water plant at some point in the summer and switch over to groundwater pumping so I can keep taking showers.

* Physical storage

El Vado Dam, built by the federal government and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in the 1930s to store water during the spring runoff peak for irrigators to use in the late summer is under repair, a project taking way longer than expected. It’s likely that the necessary paperwork to store some water in Abiquiu Reservoir will be in place by runoff season, but the Compact Article VI debt means that water cannot be used for irrigation in 2024.

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Colorado River Basin Reservoir Storage at the End of 2023 – Holding On to What We Have

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By Jack Schmidt | January 9, 2024

There was not much loss in reservoir storage in the Colorado River basin in December 2023. Total storage in the basin’s reservoirs only declined by 17,000 acre feet during the month, and the combined contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell increased by 68,000 acre feet. At year’s end, the basin’s water users have only consumed 21% of the gain in storage caused by the large snowmelt of 2023.

Here are a few graphs depicting where we stand at the start of the new year.

1. The amount of water stored in the basin’s reservoirs remains at an unprecedented low condition. On 31 December 2023, total basin storage was 28.0 million acre feet (af), of which 17.5 million af was in Lake Mead and Lake Powell (Fig. 1). The total amount of water stored in the basin is the same as it was in early May 2021. At that time, storage was less than at any other time in the 21st century, but we drained the reservoirs much more in the summer and fall of 2021 and 2022. The recovery of storage caused by the large runoff in 2023 provided some relief to the ongoing water-supply crisis, but water storage remains critically low.

This winter’s snowfall has been meager so far, and Reclamation’s January 1 prediction of unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is only 66% of average. Water managers are beginning to anticipate another summer of water-use restrictions. No one should think that last year’s runoff eliminated the ongoing crisis.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Graph showing active water storage in 42 reservoirs in different parts of the Colorado River basin. Conditions at the end of December 2023 are comparable to conditions in early May 2021, indicated by the black arrows. Data downloaded at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html.

2. Most of the basin’s water storage is in Lake Mead and Lake Powell (Fig. 2). Releases from Lake Powell and reductions in Lower Basin water use were sufficiently large that there was significant recovery of storage in Lake Mead. At the end of December, storage in Lake Mead (9.05 million acre feet) exceeded storage in Lake Powell (8.44 million acre feet) by approximately 600,000 acre feet. The difference in storage between the two reservoirs is much less than during the previous two years when more water was stored in Lake Mead.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Graph showing water storage since January 2021. Note that storage in Lake Mead was significantly greater than in Lake Powell in 2021 and 2022. Large spring runoff in 2023 was captured in Lake Powell, and some of that accumulated inflow was subsequently released to Lake Mead. The rate of reduction in storage in reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell significantly slowed after mid-fall 2023. The category “other Upper Basin reservoirs” includes Strawberry, Granby, McPhee, Dillon, Starvation, Nighthorse, and smaller reservoirs. Water storage in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu remains nearly constant. Note that the vertical axis is an arithmetic scale that has a break. Data downloaded at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html.

3. The rate of loss in reservoir storage this year remains low relative to the rate of loss in previous years (Fig. 3), especially the rate of decline of the combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. (Fig. 4) The basin’s water managers are doing a good job of reducing use and conserving water in reservoirs. Reclamation’s estimate of probable consumptive water use in the Lower Basin in 2023, issued 31 December 2023, is 5.78 million acre feet, nearly 900,000 acre feet less than Lower Basin consumptive use in 2022. Will that degree of water conservation be enough? That depends on how much snowmelt occurs this spring.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Graph showing the rate of reduction in basin-wide reservoir storage in each of the past ten years. The reduction in storage has been at a much slower rate than in other years. Each year that plots lower than 2023 on this graph reflects a higher rate of loss in storage than this year.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Graph showing the rate of reduction in the combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell in each of the past ten years. The reduction in storage has been slower than in any other recent year. Each year plotting lower than 2023 on this graph reflects a higher rate of loss in storage than in this year.

Acknowledgement: Eric Kuhn and John Fleck provided helpful suggestions that improved this posting.