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Thursday, February 8, 2007

Estancia Basin Water Debates Closely Watched

By Beth Hahn
Mountain View Telegraph
    Local water experts are watching the potential regional water delivery systems in the Estancia Basin as well as the continued fight to keep the basin's water in the area with much interest.
    John Jones is the chief executive officer of Entranosa Water and Waste Water, and Liz Taylor is an Albuquerque attorney who specializes in water issues.
    Both have extensive experience in New Mexico with water-related issues and both say area communities are doing well with long-range plans.
    Long-range water plans, Taylor said, came about as a result of a 1985 plan by the city of El Paso to drill several water wells along the Texas-New Mexico state line.
    Taylor said the wells would have "sucked (Anthony, N.M.) dry," if the state had not stepped in and required 40-year water plans.
    Anthony's plan, Taylor said, then gave the city the ability to rebuff El Paso's drilling plan.
    A 40-year water plan allows an entity to protect surrounding water rights for about 40 years. The law allows municipal and university governments to sidestep a law that requires water rights holders to put the water to use within four years or lose their permit.
    "It allows municipalities to gain access to water rights and not use them right away without forfeiting the water rights," Taylor said.
    All water in New Mexico is owned by the state but used by the general public. Taylor said a water right is the right to use the water, not the ownership of the water itself.
    Because the laws governing water and water rights remain largely unchanged from their original 1907 form, Taylor said several gray areas in New Mexico water law have emerged— such as transferring water from one basin to another and how to address regional water pipelines as well as defining the "greater good" in who gets to use water.
    New Mexico does not have a hierarchy of uses in water law, Taylor said. That is to say state law does not favor making computer chips over growing alfalfa, or vice versa, she said.
    State law is absolute on impairment, though.
    Impairment means that someone cannot impair another's water rights— meaning a new well or use cannot adversely affect an existing well.
    Transferring water from one basin to another, though, is something Taylor said will result in a few conflicts— and has already led to more than one conflict in the Estancia Basin.
    "Water rights are property rights," she said. "There is an ... idea that you should be able to sell water rights to anyone you want to and the government shouldn't tell you who you can or cannot sell it to."
    This problem was exemplified in late 2004, when a group of area farmers decided to explore selling their water rights to the city of Santa Fe.
    Under the plan, Santa Fe would have constructed a 60-plus-mile pipeline and a desalination plant somewhere along the way to transport and treat water from wells near Estancia to the City Different.
    In the two years since the plan was developed and eventually set aside by the Santa Fe City Council, two companies have offered to construct regional water delivery systems to help protect the Estancia Basin's water.
    The companies are WaterTexas (also known as Great Basin Water), an Austin firm that specializes in helping municipalities and utilities plan for long-range water needs, and EMW Gas, a Torrance County natural gas company.
    In either situation, both Jones and Taylor said the state Legislature is beginning to examine regional water systems, their development and regulations.
    Taylor said either company would have to go through a series of public hearings to determine if the plan would impair existing use.
    Both groups also need to conduct studies to see if such a regional system is financially feasible, according to Rik Thompson, chairman of the Estancia Basin Water Planning Committee.
    Both WaterTexas and EMW propose to build a regional pipeline that could transport water from the Estancia area to Edgewood, Moriarty or other customers. WaterTexas proposes to build a desalination plant near Estancia and then wholesale the water to existing utilities.
    EMW, however, proposes to sell water to individual customers much the same as it provides natural gas now. It would also sell water to municipalities in case of emergencies.
    Thompson said the committee, a government-sanctioned group working on water planning for the Estancia Basin, does not officially support WaterTexas or EMW.
    "We support their efforts to do a feasibility study and we think that's great," he said Wednesday. "We also support looking at using the salt water lakes (east of Estancia) ... because nobody really knows what's going on with the mixing of salt water and fresh water."
    Thompson said committee members also support the idea of a regional water pipeline, because it would spur economic development and enable agricultural use to continue at the same time.