Dire Times With a Novice in the Roundhouse?

With temperatures rising and water running out all over the Southwest, why would New Mexicans vote for a climate change denying, Trump-loving political novice with absolutely no governing experience to become governor of the state? There can be only one reason — partisan zealotry that’s morphed into a cultlike frenzy.

Even though the Albuquerque Journal astounded much of its readership by endorsing TV weatherman Mark Ronchetti for the state’s top job, implying he was some kind of miracle-working super crime fighter and child advocate, social media has pegged the neophyte pol as an opportunistic Trumpian carpetbagger from Vermont who claims that climate change isn’t an underlying cause of the monster wildfires in our state and across the West. The Santa Fe New Mexican didn’t fall for Republican hype. It endorsed Governor Lujan Grisham, praising her farsighted coolness under fire, flood, drought and COVID, among the other crises she handled with discipline, knowledge and aplomb.

Maybe the time has finally come to reject the Journal’s lack of good judgment and start subscribing to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

I can’t think of a worse moment to have a rookie in the Roundhouse. Water issues alone demand a depth of expertise you just can’t learn on the job. We are in the middle of a megadrought — the worst in 1,200 years — like it or not. And we just can’t afford costly mistakes in judgment based on inexperience and ideological blind spots. A suit Texas has brought in the Supreme Court against New Mexico over the Rio Grande Compact demands the competence of water experts and diplomats, if New Mexico’s farming industry and the communities it supports are not to wither. Who holds the office of State Engineer is of prime importance in a water crisis. We don’t need some political hack making deals for his cronies and blustering us all into a dust bowl. The Department of Interior may be on the verge of demanding significant reductions in the use of the Colorado River water that feeds 40 million Southwesterners, including people all over our state. Political acumen and experience in water law and history is essential to New Mexico getting its fair share of that precious water. Compensating for federal rollbacks on decontaminating interstate wetlands and small waterways calls for subtle expertise as well. Acequia Associations will need more and more politically sophisticated support to retain their water rights and traditional culture. As New Mexico cities become so-called “zoomtowns,” swamped by remote workers, conserving water will demand experience-based wisdom. And there are bound to be calls for massive expenditures in desalination projects, and even calls for New Mexico to join a push to import water from the Mississippi and points east, that will need to be examined with open-minded clarity and healthy skepticism to avoid falling prey to water con jobs.

It seems unlikely that New Mexico and Texas negotiators will come to a workable arrangement by early January 2023 and keep themselves out of what promises to be very long Supreme Court struggle over the Texas claim that New Mexico mines so much groundwater that it owes Texas roughly 127,000 acre feet, or 41 billion gallons, under the Rio Grande Compact. Should New Mexico lose that struggle by putting in second stringers and freshmen, so to speak, southern New Mexico farmers could lose everything and New Mexico could cease having a competitive and lucrative agricultural industry. And the heavy water-using oil and gas industry might suffer, too.

In everything having to do with water, the State Engineer plays a decisive role. He is, in effect, the water czar of the state and is appointed by the governor. The office of the State Engineer has “authority over the supervision, measurement, appropriation, and distribution of all surface and groundwater in New Mexico, including streams and rivers that cross state boundaries.” The Engineer also serves as the Secretary of the Interstate Stream Commission, which “has broad powers to investigate, protect, conserve, and develop New Mexico’s waters, including both interstate and intrastate systems.” The Commissions members are also appointed by the governor. New Mexico’s current State Engineer, Mike Hamman, was appointed by Governor Lujan Grisham in February. As she said earlier this year, “Mike Hamman is a consummate expert in his field and a homegrown New Mexico professional widely respected across the state.” It’s essential to long-range water planning, and to ongoing successful trouble shooting that the State Engineer is protected from the vagaries of the election cycle. Unhappily, though, as water lawyer John Draper pointed out in a guest editorial in the Journal in 2019, “Ever since (Libertarian Governor) Gary Johnson broke with long-standing tradition and replaced the state engineer at the beginning of his term … new governors have installed a new state engineer at the beginning of their terms.” This includes the sorry episode of Republican Gov. Susanna Martinez replacing the state engineer “in the midst of her term … ousting the state engineer she herself had earlier appointed.” We don’t want to risk such foolishness with a Ronchetti administration.

The State Engineer, along with the rest of us, is likely to come face-to-face next year with the beast of water rationing in the seven Western states that make up the Colorado River Compact of 1922. With historic drought drastically shrinking the major reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the federal government already announced in August that drastic water cuts would be required in Nevada and Arizona next year. The Biden administration also called for the other compact states to create what amounts to a voluntary water rationing plan to avoid one being imposed upon them by the feds. They have been unable to do so, as of this writing.

About ten percent of the water used in New Mexico comes from the Colorado River. That’s about 7.5 million acre feet, or 11.25 percent the total annual water allocation from the Colorado River. That may not sound like a lot, but Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and other localities, depend on that river water to augment their supply of drinking water which allows them to slow pump and replenish their aquifers. Almost all water used in New Mexico, some 90%, comes from pumping groundwater.

As desperation mounts over water supplies, New Mexico water managers and politicians will have to analyze what may seem like harebrained proposals to import water or to desalinate what is thought to be the massive amounts of brackish and saline groundwater below the state’s freshwater aquifers contained in its dozen or so major basins. This water is deep underground and would have to be pumped up and desalinated using expensive processes including reverse osmosis like that used to desalinate sea water in the Middle East. The major trouble with inland desalinization is the perplexing geological and political issue of where to store the brackish residue so it won’t contaminate fresh water closer to the surface. We’ll also probably be forced to consider what might prove to be Rube Goldbergian schemes to import water from the Mississippi and points east in lieu of self-imposed, realistic, on-going, water conservation.

The water world is just too complicated, too important and too fraught with conflict to trust to an amateur who aligns himself with a climate change denier like Donald Trump and could be open to pie in the sky ideas that make a lot of money for some and wreck the future for the rest of us. Any mature person with a decent ego tempered by pragmatism and humility would never put himself into a position where his ignorance might result in terrible mistakes that ruin the livelihoods of whole communities, and threaten the economic viability of the people who run the more than 25,000 farms and ranches on 41 million acres of land in New Mexico and who enrich the state by some $3 billion a year.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image of NM seal by Scotwriter21)