The New Mexico Water Dialogue
15th Annual Statewide Meeting
January 15, 2009
Bringing Accountability to Water Planning: Does It Take A Crisis?
Panel 3: Making Up the Deficit
Concerns for Senior Surface Rights with Status Quo of Water Rights Transfers
in Middle Rio Grande:“Making Up the Deficit”
Jim McCord PhD, PE
Senior Hydrologist / Water Resource Engineer
AMEC – Hydrosphere
Thanks Lucy, and thanks Paula and Norm. Those are both nice presentations that help tee up my talk. I got a call yesterday morning from Conci about 8:30, or maybe 9:00 by the time she finally tracked me down, asking me to fill in for Dutch Salmon, who couldn’t be here today. I decided sure, I could do it, but I’m going to talk about something that I work on a lot, because I didn’t have time to think about the issues. I am trying to tie it into ‘Making Up the Deficit.’Norm talked a lot about accountability, and Paula talked about the transfer process, so I’m going to talk about the transfer process and what I see as some accountability measures that the state is making progress on, but we need to make more progress to help make up the deficit. This is just one little part of making up the deficit.
I work on this issue for the Pueblo of Isleta, but I’m just speaking in general, not about Indian water rights or senior rights or pre-1907s, I’m just talking about existing water rights in the middle valley. I would like to put forward a modest proposal to make up the deficit, one important step is for water managers to administer water use in real time, including daily or weekly accounting. Everybody’s favorite punching bag on this issue—water managers—people like to talk about the OSE, but I specifically did not put the OSE. The OSE is one of the water managers in this state, but there are other entities, (the irrigation districts, the MRGCD,) that, for instance, when the water leaves the river, and the State Engineer has more limited authority than they do with river diversions, maybe the other entities, water diversion entities, irrigation districts, need to take the baton there and be accountable to the system.
There’s a lot of issues related to water transfers, and based on the work that I’ve done, we feel like there is impairment to existing rights as the transfers occur. There are out-of-priority diversions that occur. What that means is that junior water right holders are getting their water when the seniors are getting shorted. There’s increasing net depletions. I think most of us in this room know about people transferring their pre-1907 water and then the MRGCD coming in right behind and providing ‘water bank’ water. And there are carriage water issues that haven’t been highlighted, that we’re trying to highlight as part of the transfer process. Isleta Pueblo is very involved with numerous transfers—opposing transfers—that take water from south of them to north of them.
And then there’s a public welfare issue, which is, again, in the state statute that we need to address. Public welfare must be addressed before the transfer can be approved, the State Engineer needs to address it, and I think this relates to—this has been a tough nut to crack, that Conci and all kinds of people have worked on, trying to define what is the public welfare? It’s still very nebulous, but I think one can make an argument that fish flows and supplemental water requirements for endangered species, there might be a nexus there of public welfare.
And we’ve come up with terms and conditions that we would like to see implemented. We’re not saying, ‘Thou must stop all transfers because they just can’t work.’ That’s not the paradigm. The paradigm is water can be transferred, but there are ways that it can be done that can make up for shortages when they occur. For instance, curtailing junior, out-of-priority diversions, or prohibition of re-irrigation with deed restrictions—for every surface transfer that’s approved, one of the conditions is, ‘Thou shalt not re-irrigate.’ The MRGCD doesn’t pay any attention to that, and the people who are acquiring the water rights, the City of Santa Fe or the county, don’t go back and say, ‘Hey, we need to enforce the terms of this condition in the permit.’ So there needs to be some sort of enforceable—including preventing administration of water bank water. If they do it in a certain priority, then maybe in wet years let’s use it, but in dry years, water bank people should be cut off. Those who’vesold andtransferred their pre-1907 rights get afinancial windfall.Andwhen the neighbor next door says, ‘I want to keep farming, I’m not going to transfer my pre-1907 rights,’butseesthe guy who sold his water rightscome back and re-irrigate his land,and the guy who didn’t sell his water right has to wait in linefor the guy who has a junior priority, something is wrong! And then the last bullet here ties into what Norm was saying, and I totally agree: unless full metering is in place, and appropriate analytic methods are developed on the river system, carriage water should also be somehow accounted for, and we
believe that we should continue sending it downstream to keep the system whole.
Let me explain what I mean about out-of-priority diversion. These charts show the Belen Division and the Socorro Division [of the MRGCD]. The pink line is measured diversions at the MRGCD, Isleta Diversion Dam for Belen, and San Acacia Diversion Dam for Socorro. The dark blue line is demand, the crop demand, and you can calculate it using modified Blaney-Criddle, or Penmen-Monteith—there are many methods out there to calculate it. John Longworth does it all, and there are many kinds of pitfalls and things you need to be aware of in doing those calculations, but this is just an example.
I want to calculate the demand based on acreage and modified Blaney-Criddle, and compare it to the historical diversions, and you see there are time periods where the dark blue line goes above the magenta line. Well that, by definition, is a shortage. So whenever the move-from farm surface right is not receiving a full supply from the prior appropriation doctrine, it means the move-to location should also be shorted, should not enjoy a full diversion. But what we do—the process—is to move the water to a well, and they can keep pumping and they’re never curtailed.
I want to make a point that shortages don’t occur all the time. Some times are really wet, and there’s plenty water to go aroundand thetransferred rights should enjoy a full diversion.
Related to the seniority of the moved right, what you hear is, “Well, we’re moving pre-1907s, so we don’t need to worry about that because that’s a senior right,” but the statute doesn’t say ‘Senior rights shouldn’t be hurt.’ The statutes say ‘Existing rights shouldn’t be hurt.’ When you move it, it doesn’t matter if it’s a pre-1907 right, you can’t run wild with your pre-1907 rights and change the pattern of the hydrologic system in the valley—take more waterthan available surface supplies.
There are concerns, discussions going on related to the Middle Rio Grande Administrative Area (MRGAA) Guidelines that the State Engineer uses to evaluate transfers in the middle valley. One thing they do for their surface water offsets is they go to the end of the year, December, and they compare the calculated river losses, and they look at the metered diversions by the cities and the metered return flows, and they say, “Hey, you know what? Your diversions were this much, your hit on the system was this much, so you need to release that surface water to make up the offset. Well, that doesn’t work very well for existing surface rights on the intervening reach, to release the surface water to make up the offset if you release it in November or December to send it down to Elephant Butte. That’s what we need to do to keep the compact whole, but the surface water users who were running short in June, before the monsoon kicked in, that water that’s coming down the river in November and December doesn’t help them at all. So we would like to see real time administration. So the end of year accounting, again, cannot address the impairment to existing rights that occur in the intervening reach.
When I’m talking about the ‘intervening reach,’ when you move water from, say, Socorro up to Santa Fe, they’ll only allow transfer of the 2.1 consumptive per acre, but that 2.1 consumptive per acre is no longer flowing down the river. I think we all agree, it’s getting depleted up there. So all the people who lie between the move-to location and the move-from location potentially are getting a little bit less water.For each small transfer, the impact is immeasurable at a river gage, but that argument doesn’t matter much ; it's a red herring.When you accumulate it over thousands of acres of transfers, it’s tens of cfs on the river, and when the river is running short, tens of cfs can be very important in terms of supplies to the surface water users. And so the total effect is that a farm delivery requirement that used to go to Socorro doesn’t necessarily have to come down the river anymore, it’s not going to Socorro anymore; then the upstream diversion that is now occurring in Santa Fe that didn’t used to before, that’s an impact on the river and the carriage water.
Carriage Water
Water required to efficiently deliver FDR to move-from farm headgate
Carriage = River Losses + System Losses
And the carriage water is basically the water that’s lost from the system in the river as you move from south to north. If you look at this chart here, the tall bar is total river flow at some point in the river, let’s say below Cochiti. The blue bar is the river losses that occur between that point and the move-from farm in Socorro. The purple bar is the losses that occur to the MRGCD ditch system at the San Acacia Diversion, to get to the farm. And that little green bar, that’s the water that the farmer uses, that’s the farm delivery requirement. So you see, to get that little bit of water down to the farm, a bunch of other water needed to be flowing down the river. Looking at this chart here, I tried to schematically show how, as you move down the river, these various components of the total flow of the river are depleted, ‘till you get to the farm headgate and the only amount of water that’s left, theoretically, is the little green farm delivery requirement.
The question that comes up is, well, I’ve done some calculations and to me, the three acre feet per acre farm delivery requirement required flow past Cochiti, and the total potential impact due to MRGCD transfers to locations above Cochiti—if you’re moving water from south to north, depending on the river losses—you’re looking at, in the Socorro Division, anywhere from twelve to fifteen acre-feet per acre total water has to flow past Cochiti to get that three acre-feet down to Socorro.
The question is, what happens to that carriage water, that difference between the three-acre-foot-per-acre farm delivery requirement, and that large amount of water? We don’t know! We don’t measure! Norm talked about the importance of measurement. So pre-transfer, we know it’s recharging the alluvial aquifer, perhaps going to the bosque—being evapotranspired by the bosque and recharging the aquifer. We know that occurs; we don’t know how muchgoes to each component, but we know it occurs.But post-transfer? We don’t know! Maybe theDistrict’s storing it; maybe they’re giving it to the pecan farmers down in Belen. We don’t know what happens to that water. It’s not metered. So we would like to see every transfer have some accountability with the carriage water as well. People will tell you that the district isn’t operated that tightly and that the carriage water will continue to be sent. I hear that, and then I also read the MRGCD Decision Support System report by researchers from CSU and the ISC that says they’ve invested a lot in this computer system, and that they’re tightening up the management of the system and they calculate how much water they need to deliver based on the demand. You can’t have it both ways! Either that carriage water is being accounted for, or it’s not.
MRGCD has a policy of shortage sharing, so if there’s a shortage anywhere in the system, theoretically that gets spread to everyone. So again, each little individual farmer might not get much of a hit, but accumulated over many transfers, it’s something of a hit, and in a transfer, existing rights should not be impaired, so any little hit, there’s no such thing as a de minimus hit.
Now related to fish flows, and this relates to public welfare, I think: the 2003 Biological Opinion proscribes certain flows at certain times and certain locations in the Rio Grande. One of the locations is Central Avenue. Generally, it hasn’t been too difficult to meet the 100 cfs flows at Central Avenue when they’re required. But down at Isleta Diversion Dam and below San Acacia Diversion Dam, it’s much more of a challenge to meet those flow targets.
This is a chart that shows that as you transfer more and more water from the south, as irrigated agriculture declines over time—the horizontal axis is time—then the flow required to meet irrigation demand goes down.This relates to the argument that I’ve been making so far.But the ESA target flow right here, this horizontal blue line, the flow target doesn’t go down for the fish, but there’s less water coming down for the farmers so the federal agency, Bureau of Reclamation, is on the hook to acquire more and more water during periods of low flow, when really, you know what, if they were administering carriage water and the system appropriately, and curtailing the junior diversions when the shortage occurs down south, curtail Santa Fe, maybe that water would be flowing down incidentally to meet, to go to the irrigators, ‘cause the fish flows are non-consumptive uses, you just want to have the water in the river, going down. Slow motion train wreck. People have been talking about dedications, and that’s a BIG issue because this is going to happen. To meet these dedications, the transfers are going to keep on occurring.
Cumulative Effect
- Applicants assert “can’t measure the effect” of a small transfer
- Let’s look at cumulative effects: Potential total effect is 3 to 5-times CIR
- Taking care of each small transfer will take care of cumulative effect
This is just a calculation of 2.1 consumptive use times the number of acres transferred to the City of Albuquerque from Valencia and SocorroCounties. You look at it and it’s over 4,000 consumptive acre-feet. If you factor in these considerations related to carriage water that I’ve been talking about, see, sure, that’s only 10cfs on the river, and that’s not much. But when you think about the accountability related to carriage water, it’s actually 60cfs. That’s 60% of the fish flow target, that if they are administering that water, and again, I don’t want to put the finger on the State Engineer because we’re having discussions with them, we’re trying to work our way through these issues and they are improving the system, but once it leaves the river, again, the district should be dealing with this I think.
We’d like to see enforceable prohibition of re-irrigation. If you put water bank water back in, only let them irrigate in wet years. Don’t let them irrigate if it’s dry. Carriage water, what are we going to do with it? One thought that we’ve had is just continue to deliver, go right to the farm headgate and you divert .9 or .5 acre-feet per acre of water after the transfer and you put it in a recharge well because that’s historically what was happening with that difference between the farm delivery requirement and the consumptive use. That keeps the hydrologic system whole and forces them to send more carriage water down to get that on-farm loss delivered.
This is one year in Socorro, and you see here, this is 1989 I believe, there’s a [?] in the middle of the season when there’s a big shortage. Many years in Socorro there aren’t shortages, but—I’m not saying you can’t move the water, the cities can’t get the water all the time, there’s just certain times when the cities would need to curtail. Now, Buckman Well Field, they say, “That’s a futile call, we can’t do anything, you can’t turn off the wells, that’s not going to help the river.” Well, you could do like we’ve done on the Pecos, or they do all over Colorado, and just have a manifold at the wellhead. One pipe goes to the river and one pipe goes to the system, and when you’re out of priority water, that water that you’re pumping goes back to the river to offset your out-of-priority depletions, or losses to the river. And if you’re a surface water diverter, you just curtail, just cut back on your diversion. I feel that municipalities and other move-to entities should recognize this as just part of the cost of getting water.