Strip The San Augustin Plains Of Its Water

On December 9th, the Albuquerque Journal ran an alarming story on its front page (to read it on-line, try trial premium pass) regarding an effort to strip the San Augustin Plains of New Mexico of the recoverable water in its aquifer and pump it to the Rio Grande Valley. Such a massive effort would likely annihilate towns like Datil, and seriously-cripple the ranching economy of Catron County, by depriving the area of its well water. Yet, because the San Augustin Plains is more-or-less a closed basin, natural water flows into the Gila and Rio Grande would likely be unaffected. The devastation would be more-or-less local, and more-or-less unnoticed by laws governing the apportionment of water flows in the Southwest. Like the early-20th-Century farmers of the Owens Valley in their unequal battle against the thirsty City of Los Angeles, the ranchers of western New Mexico can count on little help from what passes as justice. Remedies have to be political in nature.

Here is some commentary on this subject regarding the law and the need to show 'particular injury' in order to object to the project.

Here are some excerpts from the Albuquerque Journal article:

[A] sizable chunk of the region's sparse population— about 300 people— packed the Datil Elementary School gym on Tuesday night because of an application to drill deep for a stunning amount of water and possibly pipe it 60 miles ... to the Rio Grande.

''We're all just horrified by this,'' Datil resident Cheryl Hastings said before the meeting, word of which was spread through an old-fashioned phone tree. ''We are doing everything we can to mobilize.''

The cause of the anxiety is the application by the owner of the 18,000-acre Augustin Plains Ranch for a state permit to appropriate 54,000 acre-feet of water per year in Catron County.

The water would be obtained by drilling 37 wells on the ranch, each as deep as 2,000 feet, with the proposed diversion amounting to about about 17.6 billion gallons per year— more than half the annual consumption by the city of Albuquerque.

Augustin Plains Ranch is owned by Italian businessman Bruno Modena, who ranch representative Everett Shaw said is principal of a New York-based firm called S Management. The company's New York City address is the same as that of a general contracting outfit called PM Contracting.

...The ranch company proposes a variety of standard uses for the water, such as for livestock, irrigation, real estate development and municipal needs. But another proposed use— again only broadly referred to— was really what caught local attention: providing water to the state to help New Mexico meet its delivery obligations to Texas under the Rio Grande Compact.

If the state needed to find more water to meet its compact obligations, ''We'd be able to explore the market for other large users," Shaw said.

As any longtime New Mexican knows, the mere mention of water and Texas in the same sentence is enough to make the ground shake— let alone an application for water rights sufficient to supply a small city.

The major concern, voiced by a number of residents, is that such a huge appropriation will dry up other wells in the area, lower groundwater levels and dash the local economy.

...The big water rights application is likely to take several years to resolve, said D'Antonio, whose office is in charge of state water permits.

"Obviously, there are a whole lot of protesters who will want assurances that it's not affecting their water supply," he said. ''What comes into question is the feasibility of the plan itself and if it's do-able— is the water there?

''I can't stop anyone from filing an application," D'Antonio said. "We'll see how this plays out.''

...Augustin Plains Ranch LLC is proposing to access the water by drilling the 37 wells north and south of U.S. 60 between the Catron-Socorro county line to the east and Datil on the west.

With water rights in the Middle Rio Grande area selling for between $15,000 and $25,000 per acre-foot, the proposed appropriation would be worth about $1 billion, said Suzanne Smith, a Socorro-based water rights consultant.

''It's huge money, just based on that,'' Smith said.

The cost of building 60 miles of pipeline to get the water downslope to the Rio Grande could also carry a price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars, said Socorro Rep. Don Tripp, who based his estimate on similar projects.

''The only market for this water would be the state of New Mexico,'' Tripp said, ''and I'm not sure we have that much (money).''

...The project's developers must show that the diversion of 54,000 acre-feet of water per year will not have any effect on underground water flowing west as part of the Gila-San Francisco watershed, a fully-appropriated basin.

The application to the state Engineer Office says that, based on initial modeling, hydrologists have concluded the Augustin Plains basin ''contains an extraordinary amount of potable groundwater in storage that could sustain diversions of 54,000 acre-feet per annum for a period of 300 years.''

The application says the ranch ''believes that the State Engineer could impose conditions on the use of water under a permit to avoid impairment to all other existing users.''

The Augustin Plains Ranch has retained the engineering firm of Bohannon-Houston Inc. to evaluate the cost of a pipeline from Datil to the Rio Grande.

...[State Engineer] D'Antonio said the Augustin Plains basin is not a closed basin, meaning applications for new water diversions still can be made.

''But the question is the connectivity between it and the Rio Grande or the Gila Basin, and that's not well understood,'' D'Antonio said.

Catron County manager Bill Aymar called the application a ''ridiculous request'' and said the County Commission would file a protest.

Tripp said the scale of the request, and how long it would take to put the water to beneficial use, made him ''a little dubious about what they are trying to do.''

Bob Myers, a 66-year-old Datil electrician, said he was upset enough by the application to call the FBI and file a report.

''This is a new form of terrorism,'' Myers said. ''I've got a 100-foot well. Mine will be the first to go dry.''