On the road this summer, I didn’t find a town or city that could hold a candle to Albuquerque. Granted, I’m partisan, but everywhere we went, from Texas and Georgia to Oklahoma and Tennessee, cities were confusing, overcrowded, rundown places. Not that Albuquerque doesn’t have its miseries, but the city as a whole is comfortingly legible. You always know where you are; it’s hard to get lost. The Middle Rio Grande Valley is a kind of Eden. The mountains are magnificent, the wild river and its forest have a beauty that can’t be surpassed and the West
Mesa volcanos are still pristine as ever, reminding some of us of the days in Albuquerque when our leaders cared about such things as urban ecology, local agriculture, open space and human scale — and talked about them in public.
Albuquerque is an inherently appealing place. Its cultural diversity and deep-seated civility make doing business locally a pure pleasure when compared to dealing with big box stores and their distracting corporate cultures. We are so appealing, in fact, that there’s a chance with climate change-caused drought and heatwaves threatening the water supply, hydroelectric power and general livability of many cities around the southwest — including Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and towns throughout West Texas — Albuquerque could find itself over the next decade trying to cope with an influx of new residents. It may come only in spasmodic trickles at first, mirroring the variability of the weather. But a general diaspora from neighboring cities could pick up steam if this 21-year dry spell we’re having turns into the new norm with no change in sight.
Opportunities abound. We might even find a market for a revival of serious fruit and vegetable farming here if ongoing agricultural water shortages diminish the productivity of California’s Imperial and Central Valleys, both crucial to the nation’s winter food supply.
It all depends on how much water we really have and how drinkable it really is. A quality water supply is so important to a city’s development that we used to fib about ours, spinning a tale about a mythical body of water the size of Lake Superior under the city. We learned differently when the U.S Geological Survey studied our aquifer in the 1990s under an invitation from then mayor Louis Saavedra. It found that our aquifer not only was not a lake, but that it was rapidly shrinking. That insight prompted the creation of the city’s successful long-range conservation strategy still in place today.
Yes, a steady flow of new people into our city also depends to some extent on Albuquerque somehow expunging its “Breaking Bad” reputation as a city characterized chiefly by ugly development, violence, drugs, rogue cops and a perfect storm of crime and poverty. Albuquerque Economic Development’s (AED) five-year strategic growth plan, published last week, is on the mark when it comes to admonishing us to restructure the city’s “brand,” with the goal of us becoming “known and recognized for having the highest quality of life and the most diverse, sustainable economy in the region,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. All of us who love this place know that the first part of that goal, at least, is uncontestably true.
But these are dicey times. Many days in a row of 102-degree heat in early June here does not portend well. Not being able to use our portion of the Colorado River to augment our drinking water this summer for the second year in a row has ominous implications for Albuquerque’s long-range water conservation strategies.
And all around us, heat and drought are causing serious problems that we are not immune to ourselves. The specter of Southern California losing a high percentage of its hydroelectric power from a severely diminished Lake Powell, causing rush-hour brownouts, makes us wonder about our own power sources in a time of high use and technological change. The prospect of heat waves, with blackouts and no refrigerated air in the hottest parts of the day haunt most Southwestern cities this summer, not to mention potential wildfires at the urban-wildland interface racing through unprepared suburbs.
But here sits mile-high Albuquerque in one of the most beautiful natural settings in the nation, with its fine university, great museums, major scientific institutions, recent history of good water management and coherent urban form, waiting, if not quite ready, to become a desirable destination in difficult times. But will we choose wholesome growth guided by goals and planning or go for an indiscriminate flooding of people who don’t care where they are, and incentivize hordes of out-of-state franchises that push out local businesses?
It could be a great time for us or a disaster.
The best way for us to turn these troubling times to our advantage is to stimulate realistic public discourse about not only our goals but also about major issues facing us in the future. This should be the job of mayoral campaigns this summer and fall. I want to see mayoral candidates actually grapple with the most important issue facing any Southwestern city in the 21st century — not crime, not weed, not even jobs — but water, drinkable water.
Albuquerque would do well to familiarize itself with water woes in Tucson, a comparable sized city, more than two thousand feet closer to sea level than we are. Both Tucson and Albuquerque have done commendable jobs since the l990s in reducing water use, stimulating water conservation, educating school children and the public in the fine points of conservation and reuse for parks and golf courses, and in helping to recharge their aquifers. Albuquerque has even reduced its per capita per day usage over the last 30 years from 252 gallons to a 127, a major feat in anyone’s book. And we still need to use less.
But both cities also tend to talk about the future water supply as if they have it under control, as if climate change wasn’t a wild card with terrifying possibilities, as if old conservation patterns were going to extend themselves into the future without requiring severe new constraints, and as if their aquifers were clean with no pollution and no worries.
Both cities dismiss decades of groundwater pollution with a kind of deeply troubling happy talk that might be superficially “good for business” but undermines the urgency of work that still needs to be done to ensure useful and healthy growth down the road. A city can’t grow for long on dirty water.
Here’s part of the trouble: The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson’s paper, ran a piece this March extensively quoting a former city water manager who was optimistic that the “worst plausible scenario” of the city losing 50% of its Colorado River allocation to drought could be survived without much trouble into the “foreseeable future.”
A 50% loss seems, on the face of it, an absurd underestimation in an era of protracted, climate change drought, with Lake Mead, which supplies Tucson through the Central Arizona Project canal, at its lowest level since it was completed in the 1930s — nearing 33% capacity. And the former water manager never mentioned, as Albuquerque’s never do, pollution of the groundwater.
Pollution from military bases is so bad in and around Tucson that a plant to clean up polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) contamination found in many commercial products, and in large quantities in fire-fighting chemicals, in groundwater under airports and military bases, had to be closed down last month. There was so much of the contaminate the plant couldn’t process it all and produce drinkable water.
We could well be worse off than Tucson when it comes to our polluted aquifer. We don’t know for sure. But before we launch a new re-branding campaign, we better find out. We know this, though, that every city in the Southwest has major groundwater pollution under its military bases and around its manufacturing zones, which are often within poor neighborhoods. Albuquerque cannot be the exception. And we know it’s not.
But we need the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA), overseen by city and county elected leaders, to produce a detailed public inventory of all the metro area’s groundwater pollution sites, including, of course, the nation’s largest jet fuel contamination at Kirtland Air Force Base, the GE plume in South Valley and other groundwater contamination there, Sandia National Laboratory toxic landfills, septic tank and gasoline storage tank leaks and the plutonium residue in Cochiti Lake, downwater from the Los Alamos National Laboratories; the water we get from the Colorado River passes through that reservoir before it is treated by the city.
We can’t depend on the EPA right now to watchdog our water. It’s been fiscally and scientifically compromised by the Trump Administration and earlier Republican reigns. We have to do it ourselves. And we may have to tax ourselves to get it done. How terrible it would be to wake up one day and find ourselves coping with all the mixed blessings of rapid new growth, but under the cloud of a drought-shrunken and compromised water supply. We just can’t let that happen.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you for this cogent and timely piece. You put the facts together in a readable, effective, interesting and intelligible way that has real impact.
Hope for a “great time”, prepare for a “disaster”.
V.B., another great column. Thank you!
Thank you, thank you, VP. I’m a relative newcomer to ABQ and do not know much city history, nor even that much about the present. An essay like this is illuminating to both the newbies and to long-time residents, who need to be reminded and perhaps awakened. Bless you!
Our Water Authority Board should be made up of geologists and hydrologists instead of politicians purchased by developers. It’s far past due to get real about our dilemma. The State Statute that authorized Water Authorities should be amended to add professional requirements to board members.