Dick,
Thank you for the history you provide here. Your final point on whose overall call it is is true. The MRGCD gives us living here a local look and what is happening and some of us have a vote in this locally. The Bureau of Reclamation is now looking for local input into a Water Basin plan they will be advancing in the future for our water. More on this in another issue.

A point or two worth mentioning.

NM has always been ahead of our neighbors in tying together our internal water management. For a long time, some states ran one set of books on surface water and another set of books on groundwater, but didn’t tie the two together. Steve Reynolds, the State Engineer (which in NM means water) from I-don-know-when until the 80s was akin J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI. He decided what needed doing, no governor could trump him, and he decided fairly comprehensively and impartially.

Conflicts with other states, however, turn on legal points more than hydrology. Today’s challenges largely exist because, as the article suggests, the attorneys didn’t understand the hydrology when they set the compacts in stone. Don’t blame global climate change (though it may play a part); the original data was simply too sparse.

I represented NM on a compact that at the time was 30 years in settlement. We engineers representing all players could probably have worked out something reasonable in a year or two if we’d been able to expel the attorneys. But. alas, they ran the show.

As for mention of the MRGCD, they’re just one of the irrigation districts. How to pay NM’s water debt isn’t their call. The heavyweights are likely the State Engineer, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers, the latter two operating the reservoirs under a myriad of purposes.