The Corrales Siphon project, replacing a 93-year-old failed wooden conduit that carried water beneath the Rio Grande to irrigate land along the river’s west side just north of Albuquerque, passed a major milestone last month. Here’s Rodd Cayton in the Corrales Comment:

The difficult part of the Corrales siphon replacement project is done, Jason Casuga told village councilors at their Sept. 22 meeting. Casuga, CEO and chief engineer for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD), said the specialized drilling equipment required for running pipes below the riverbed will be going away, and crews will finish with more traditional construction. He said the project should be done by Dec. 31.

Casuga said a major milestone was getting the 1,200 feet of pipeline under the riverbed. “What’s interesting is they pulled this whole pipe in one day,” he said. Casuga said crews were prepared to spend 12 hours on the job, which involved dragging the pipe pretty much continuously, stopping only long enough to fuse the next segment of conduit together. “They actually got it done in about seven hours.”

I’ve been living the temporal whiplash of the rollout of our new book Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque, where by “temporal whiplash” I mean returning to a topic Bob and I wrote about really intensely three years ago, then again two years ago in a major editing pass and again last year in a final editing pass. Making the rounds talking about Ribbons of Green has been fun, I really like what we did, but I’m anxious to get back to writing, and the siphon is a tidy little framework for thinking through questions Bob and I want to explore for what we’ve taken to calling “the next book in our trilogy.” (Bob and I are both old, and tired, so take “trilogy” with a grain of salt, but writing books is fun! So why not?)

Obligations

The Corrales Siphon is a fascinating case study in the sort of obligations we take on when we take on the forever task of “managing” a river, or managing our collective relationship(s) with a river. A century ago we consolidated the irrigation infrastructure in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, replacing the old presa that diverted water at the north end of Corrales to irrigate a thousand (???) acres (Further Research Needed – FRN – I need to nail down the acreage history of that stretch of the valley – the number we typically use is “a thousand”).

The notion carried along by the word obligation has a few characteristics that we’re trying to think through. First, it implies a person or entity that holds the obligation, that is “obliged” to act in a certain way, along with the person or thing to whom that obligation is owed. Second, obligation’s 700 years of travel through the English language have embodied two overlapping but distinct senses – a formal legal one (laws, contracts, rules that make an obligation explicit) and a moral one (stuff we are obliged to do because it’s morally right, whatever we choose to mean by “morally right” – “Man is the measure of all things,” as the moral relativist Protagoras said).

I’m not trying to be a linguistic prescriptivist here, to try to force the book down a particular path based on some a priori sense of the meaning of the word, but rather to look at the way the idea of obligation has worked in practice. Hence the case studies.

Money and Mud

The current idea for the structure of the book is a collection of case studies – “chapters” I believe is the term of art in book publishing? – that explore the notion of obligations that surround the management of a river. My original idea for the chapters was to make each one place-based – Corrales and the lands around the siphon are one example, the old Zimmer farmlands in San Acacia another, San Marcial and the tangled Elephant Butte delta a third, we have a long list at this point. But it’s clear as we work through the issues that some topics (Bob’s work on the silvery minnow is one clear example, the obligation to birds is another) don’t quite fit into the place-based narrative structure I’d originally envisioned. This is my favorite part of writing a book – wandering an information landscape, trying to see what the pieces look like and how they might fit together. Structure. (Yes, I’m rereading McPhee.)

A big part of the book’s framework involves the ongoing management of sediment, a very practical set of obligations that we’ve taken on that changes constantly and requires a lot of money. In some places, the problem is too much sediment (the clogging of the Rio Puerco/San Acacia – Elephant Butte reach), while in other places the problem is too little (the river eating away the riverbed, exposing the Corrales Siphon in the process). Both versions of the problem are expensive. Who pays? (“Obligation” alert – the federal government maybe has some legal obligations under the Flood Control Acts of 1948 and 1950, so “other people’s money” (OPM)? But is “the federal government” some exogenous entity, or is it just us, a collective action tool we’ve built to pool resources and act on our behalf to do stuff like this?)

Obligations and the siphon

The Corrales Siphon is a perfect case study for examining what we’re calling a “web of obligations” (WOO!). The root lies in the language of the 1923 Conservancy Act, the founding text of river management along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. The 1923 Act’s language on this is worth quoting in full:

Upon the condemnation of an irrigation ditch, community ditch or acequia or other works used for applying water to beneficial use the district shall make adequate provision by means of ditches or works constructed by the district at its expense for supplying such water to such water users to the full extent that the same was being lawfully obtained and used through such condemned ditches or works.

The 1927 version, which still sits in statute today, creates largely the same obligational framework, but makes some subtle changes worth exploring (FRN):

In case the construction provided by the official plan interferes with an irrigation ditch, community ditch or acequia or other works used for applying water to beneficial use the district shall make equivalent provision by means of ditches or works constructed by the district at its expense for supplying such water to such water users to the extent that the same was being lawfully obtained and used through such ditches or works.

I am not a lawyer, so I’m only in the FRN stage at this point. Does that statutory language suggest a temporally contingent obligation – a requirement to replace the old Corrales headings with an alternative (the siphon) when the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District works were first built in the early 1930s? Is it a forever legal obligation, to replace the siphon when it finally fails? If it’s the second, what does that imply about an increasingly decayed MRGCD irrigation infrastructure as irrigated acreage declines, and shifts toward non-commercial, lifestyle agriculture? Regardless of the legal argument, as a practical matter we’re treating it as an obligation. MRGCD is spending $12.5 million (FRN, I’m confused by the total cost, $12.5m is one of several numbers floating around and I don’t understand the differences yet) to replace it.

The question of who is the beneficiary of this obligation is one of the key pieces of the puzzle for the next book. In this case, the siphon primarily serves an affluent peri-urban suburb with lovely green horse pastures, a few small orchards and vineyards, and when the siphon is down, a lot of fallowed yards. Much of the $12.5m is coming not from the beneficiaries but from the coffers of the state of New Mexico as a whole, with the bulk of the share being paid from MRGCD’s own budget coming from property taxes paid by non-irrigators. The opportunity cost is real.

I haven’t worked out what to make of the normative argument here. Corrales is lovely, the people who live there made good-faith choices about the kind of life they wanted to create for themselves and their families given the water management framework handed down to us by those who went before. These are maybe people who sorted into the community with the water supply provision attributes and accompanying greenspace that they preferred (FRN)? They have a fun growers’ market in the summer, and cool ditchbanks to walk and ride their horses. (And for me to ride my bike!)