BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

Deb Haaland is running ads—pure obfuscation—that show she’s counting on the ignorance (thanks to failed Albuquerque “news” media) of New Mexicans on the topic of water. Lest I be accused of “just” being partisan, I consider Gregg Hull to be an equally failed candidate for governor, with him, too, likely unable to lead on New Mexico’s ongoing drought crisis.

Haaland surely knows—as she touts getting funding for water infrastructure—that the problem among the Colorado River Basin states, of which New Mexico is one, isn’t a lack of infrastructure, it’s a lack of water to put into existing infrastructure (reservoirs, diversion projects and distribution systems), sitting nearly empty due to ongoing drought.

Before anyone rushes to vote for Haaland based on her depicted “leadership” on water, remember that, as head of Interior, she provided NO leadership to insist that the 7 Colorado River Basin states forge a drought management plan for the Colorado since the river, in drought, lacks water to meet its commitments on the “law of the river,” the Colorado River Compact.  Instead, states have bickered, accused other states of being to blame for water shortages, and continued to pretend that if we humans want water, well, it will just have to be there, or we’ll pout.

As a result of this failure by the states, the U.S. Bureau  of Reclamation—hopefully soon—will step in and dictate just how much water each state will get and that will be a brutal wakeup call.

She and Biden also appointed a head to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages much of the Colorado River system, who could barely speak English and was so ignorant about water, I don’t think she could have recognized the Colorado River if she, a Las Vegas resident, had been standing on Hoover Dam looking down onto it.

Ms. Haaland, your “infrastructure” will do nothing to help Albuquerque, which, at least on paper, gets 70 percent of its water from New Mexico’s allocation of the Colorado River, nor Santa Fe, which gets 50 percent of its water from the Colorado River.

At Navajo Dam, near Farmington, on the west side of the San Juan Mountains, there is a huge intake where water from the Colorado River drainage area, before drought hit in 1995, flowed into an underground tunnel that took 110,000 acre-feet of water a year under the San Juan Mountains and into the upper drainage of the Chama River on the Rio Grande drainage. Before drought, a great torrent gushed out, so powerful and noisy that, to have a conversation, one had to stand well back from the diversion channel.

Now, Ms. Haaland, a drought reality check.  In recent years, including this one, water at Navajo has been so low that it cannot flow into the diversion and that place northwest of Chama is not a gushing torrent, but a silent, dust and fly-plagued trickle of stagnant water.

As a result, downstream El Vado, Heron, Abiquiu and Cochiti reservoirs—thankfully there to be a water savings account for Santa Fe and Albuquerque, who wrongly decided to grow based on San Juan-Chama water—have shrunk like raisins in the sun. Those with hydro capability have mostly not produced power in recent years because water levels are too low to feed into the hydro systems.  Sadly, while a strong El Nino might, if not save our bacon, at least somewhat, briefly, recharge the water “savings account” in those reservoirs.

So, Ms. Haaland, please tell us what you will do to lead New Mexico on Colorado River water as—like all Colorado River Basin states—we are dependent on a river that is in such crisis its low flows have badly damaged Glen Canyon Dam (infrastructure) at Lake Powell, to the extent that some are saying, with Lake Powell nearly empty, the dam should just be removed.

Again, water infrastructure requires water and, lacking that, we need that which has been lacking in the Southwest:  leaders leading to adapt our region to a new water reality, not pretend that infrastructure matters.