Taking another crack at Tribal water in Arizona

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The three Native American tribes in northeast Arizona – Diné, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute – are taking another run this year at a water rights settlement that would finally bring water to communities that lack it.

An attempt last year failed in the final days of the last administration after Upper Colorado River Basin states blocked it in the most glaring example of basin governance dysfunction.

Here’s Shondin Silversmith’s rundown:

The agreement will end the three tribes’ claims to the main stem of the Colorado River, the Little Colorado River and relevant groundwater sources in Arizona. The settlement would guarantee the tribes’ access to over 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, with specific groundwater rights and protections.

Additionally, the agreement requires the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe to leave 17,050 acre-feet per year of Arizona Upper Basin water in Lake Powell for the first 20 years.

It will also allow the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe to lease a portion of their water rights, providing the tribes a chance to create economic opportunities until local demand is met through new infrastructure.

This is a crucial agreement, I hope it can escape the new administration’s wrecking ball.

 

2025 Rio Grande Watch

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Has Albuquerque’s Rio Grande already peaked?

Early March is usually when I emerge from my wintry water nerd slumber and begin tracking the rise in my beloved hometown river, Albuquerque’s Rio Grande.

Yesterday morning the core family unit packed sandwiches and went down to the Rio Bravo Bridge, on Albuquerque’s south side. It’s a favorite spot because of the graffiti – the engineers built a lot of canvas for the artists to work with.

Concrete bridge leading into the distance, with trees and a blue sky.

Bridge, with art.

The county crews had recently painted over the graffiti on the bridge abutments, which always means a fun new canvas and a bunch of new art.

The river’s low – at around the 10th percentile on the dry side at the Central Avenue gage, the nearest measurement point upstream of here. I dashed off Tuesday’s post in a hurry because news, but what’s about to happen deserves more attention.

One of the deep/fierce discussion underway I’m having with some smart colleagues is the question of how much our community values a flowing river. One of the reasons we’re arguing, umm, I mean discussing, is that evidence about public attitudes is thin.

We’re about to have a Rio Grande through Albuquerque substantially drier than we’ve seen since the early 1980s. Before that time, summer drying was common because of community water management choices: larger supplies were diverted into irrigation ditches, leaving the Rio Grande to go dry. The river essentially dried through Albuquerque in eight out of ten years during the 1970s. That began shifting in the 1980s because of wetter climate, but more importantly because of water management choices that reflected a shift in community values.

Beginning in the 1990s, the federal Endangered Species Act became the water policy driver, keeping water in the river’s main channel to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive. “This little fish, that human efforts keep alive,” my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara has written, “is a powerhouse for dictating river flows in the Middle Rio Grande.”

Silver Linings

The quote above is from a terrific new paper of Rin’s exploring the history, and legal and policy framework around the silvery minnow and the Endangered Species Act. (Discloure: Rin and I share an office at Utton, which has enabled an ongoing stream of conversation that has immeasurably enriched my thinking about these issues. We should prolly get some microphones and make a podcast.)

For those who care about the Rio Grande (you wouldn’t have read this far if that didn’t include you), the whole paper is worth a read. It is the first time anyone has pulled together in a single narrative the history of the role of the silvery minnow in the last three decades of water management on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Rin’s legal scholarship also sheds new light on the way the Endangered Species act functions in practice in a situation like ours – an effort to keep a species alive in a river far removed from the ecosystem in which the species evolved. This disconnect is at the heart of the challenge posted by the ESA in the third decade of the 21st century. As I said, terrific new paper.

Given the current context – a river at risk of drying in 2025 – the challenge to community values around the Rio Grande is something I’ll be watching closely. Here’s Rin (“2028 BiOp” is a new minnow management plan now in development – read the whole paper, Rin explains):

The space between the minimum actions necessary for the minnow and the maximum actions encouraged by the ESA is an area in which there is room to manage the ecosystem with broader values in mind; this space brackets the possibility for a zone of consensus. The Middle Rio Grande will never be a home for the minnow as it was before the construction of dams, but it is a home for myriad human and nonhuman communities as it is now. The 2028 BiOp is an opportunity to reframe minnow protections as one component of a larger Middle Rio Grande management plan.

The question of what those broader values might look like is where the action is, one of those “we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have” moments.

Big Dog

River in the foreground, with bluffs in the distance. Plants still have the browns of winter.

Rio Grande, March 12, 2025

I rode back out to the river for this morning’s bike ride.(I am trying to ride and picnic more and work less, with mixed results.) The ride took me through downtown and across what used to be swampland to the Rio Grande. What we think of today as “the river,” the narrow channel snaking through the valley between levees, is a tiny fraction of what the Rio Grande used to be before we decided to build a city here. Even as I acknowledge the loss of the expansive wetlands that used to spread across the valley floor, I also love my city. Both of those things can be true, as is often the case with the most interesting moral tensions.

I stopped at one of my favorite river views to snap a picture for a friend I’d been texting with who loves the Rio Grande, but has moved to a city on a different (also beloved!) river.

It’s just above Central Avenue/Route 66. There’s a bike trail bridge over the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Central Avenue Wasteway, and when there’s water you feel like you’re out in the river. The wasteway delivers water from the irrigation system back to the main river channel, and when I was riding by this morning it was flowing at ~40 cubic feet per second. It’s a popular fishing spot, for both humans and cormorants, though I saw neither this morning taking advantage of the flows.

The journalist in me can’t resist small talk in a place like that. A woman was walking by with a big, beefy, happy dog. I asked if it was OK to pet, and did, though she had to restrain the friendly animal from jumping up on me with his wet, muddy paws. They’d walked down from their neighborhood just up the valley, so the pooch could play in the river. One of the weird things about low flow is that it actually makes the river more accessible for picnics and dog play. As it drops, you’ll see people out on the sandbars.

Until, of course, there’s no water left for frolicking. I assume there were silvery minnows out there in the channel. They cannot know what is coming, nor, frankly, can we.

 

 

Latest forecast suggests Rio Grande drying through Albuquerque is possible by early June

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USBR March 2025 Rio Grande runoff forecast

This week’s newest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande runoff model runs have triggered a string of “wait, what?” conversations this afternoon at the Utton Center.

  • possible drying through Albuquerque as early as June, with a good chance of drying even earlier
  • we may already have passed the spring runoff peak
  • irrigation supplies, already short for Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District farmers, will be even shorter

The early March simulations, which are based on the latest snowpack and runoff forecasts, are ratcheting up the anxiety among water managers as they scramble to manage conditions unprecedented in modern Rio Grande management. Looking at the graph above, you can see what a typical year looks like, with flows rising through late may. That black-to-purple line is the most likely flow this year

Even before the new model runs, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District was warning valley irrigators that, with little water in storage to supplement dwindling river flows, irrigation supplies would be unreliable by summer. Based on my analysis of the new numbers (danger, Fleck doing math!) that could come a lot sooner. According to Reclamation’s median forecast, we have already seen the runoff peak on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. (Our 2025 peak so far technically was around 1,000 cfs Jan. 1, but that’s just moving last year’s water, rhetoric rather than hydrology.)

We could still have some monsoon rains that temporarily push the river up past the March 8 spring runoff peak of 600 cubic feet per second. But monsoon bursts aren’t enough, in terms of volume of water, to make up for the pitiful snowpack, made more pitiful by the hot dry spring winds that have been eating it away.

The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority had already been projecting that it would need to shift away from surface water, using groundwater pumps to meet municipal needs, sometime this summer. The Inkstain News Gloom Team will keep an eye on that for y’all.

 

Reclamation wrecking ball report: “Oh, did you need that thing we just knocked down?”

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Via Annie Snyder (maybe behind a paywall?), the new crew in Washington has apparently realized we need those people at Reclamation who know how to operate dams and stuff:

The Trump administration is pulling back on staff firings at the federal agency that runs California’s sprawling water system after the cuts threatened undercut President Donald Trump’s order to maximize water deliveries to farms, according to three agency staffers.

Richard Parker

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Picture of a 1994 newspaper with story by Richard Parker and John Fleck

Tag team.

There was a playful glee, like he knew he was getting away with something, something frowned upon yet worth doing, with Richard Parker’s “development days.”

Richard and I were youngsters, 30-something kids who had been handed the keys to a metaphorical roadster, and we wanted to see how fast it would go. I looked up to him as an experienced elder, though I realize in reading his obituary this morning that he was four years younger than I.

He was in D.C., the Albuquerque Journal’s Washington correspondent, when I was learning the craft of journalism three decades ago on the Albuquerque side of what amounted to a shared beat covering the cauldron of federal defense policy. New Mexico is a military-industrial colony, and the flow of federal funding to design and maintain nuclear weapons, to fly jets and sometimes drop bombs, to clean up Cold War environmental messes, was a fiercely challenging journalistic training ground.

When I would visit D.C. (those were the days of newsroom travel budgets), Richard would take me to bars with ridiculously expensive cocktails. I don’t drink.

The metaphorical roadster was the big printing presses in the back, and a distribution system that involved people staying up all night printing up whatever we had to say and then driving around town throwing it on a hundred thousand driveways. A hundred thousand driveways! Senators and their staffers read every word we wrote. Senators!

The mentoring – did it work that way, was Richard mentoring me? – involved the impish confidence with which Richard would seize a story. I watched and modeled, learned that our job was to decide what the story was and let our editors know, not wait for them. We needed to drive the roadster, but (and here the metaphor breaks down) make our bosses think that they were at the wheel.

I loved federal budget release day with Richard, the rush of a pile of new documents with tables of data and an obligation to our community to help make sense of it all – “disconcerting jolts that shook the Air Force have stopped for now,” “a shift in spending away from dam construction at the Department of the Interior.” It was a dance, a lovely dance.

“Development days” were Richard’s way of blowing it all off to think about stuff. Or maybe he was just going to the National Gallery to see the Matisse cutouts, I dunno. He was half a continent away, it was the time before mobile phones, it was hard to keep track of him, which he used to full advantage.

The Crossing

Gray haired, gray bearded man standing before a bookstore shelf holding a book entitled "The Crossing."

Richard Parker

Richard had long since left D.C. and returned to his beloved borderlands. We’ve stayed in sporadic touch in the decades since, but we didn’t remain close. I’m lousy at that.

Last fall Richard sent me the pdf of the page proofs of his new book The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story, but a pdf is no way to read an old friend’s book, so I’ve been waiting for my copy of the book.

The El Paso Matters obituary (thanks, Diego) makes clear Richard knew he was dying, but he made it to Literarity, an El Paso bookstore, to sign copies of the book.

I look forward to reading it.

Record low March 1 snowpack in some New Mexico watersheds

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The preliminary March 1 runoff forecast from Karl Wetlaufer, the federal government employee at the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service who provides vital information to help us make informed water management decisions, is yikes:

February brought another month of well below median precipitation across the entire Rio Grande basin. As one would anticipate this generally led to lowered forecast volumes over a month ago. It is worth noting that similar to last month there remains a broad gap between current percent of median snowpack and water year precipitation. This is a result of a wet October and early November followed by several months of dry conditions. These persistent dry conditions have led to record lowest or otherwise very low rankings of snowpack compared to the period of record for March 1st.

As Wetlaufer noted in the email discussion he distributes each month to New Mexico water managers, it’s a bit tricky this year, because early precipitation last fall fell as rain, not snow. That helps the runoff by wetting soils in the high watersheds, but doesn’t show up in the snowpack numbers. So yes it’s bad, but not quite as bad as it appears if you only look at the snowpack.

The midpoint flow estimate for Otowi on the Rio Grande is 205,000 acre feet, 36 percent of the long term average. It could be higher or lower, depending on what happens in the next few months. But as Friend of Inkstain Rolf Schmidt-Petersen pointed out in the comments last month:

The median assumes near average conditions going forward but that sure hasn’t been the case for several months and no one I know is predicting a turnaround to wet this Spring.

With that in mind, I give you the four-week Evaporative Drought Demand Index, which federal scientists at NOAA and the National Integrated Drought Information System provide to help us make good decisions about water management:

Map of western United States with large areas of the Rocky Mountains in reds and oranges, suggesting dry weather for the next month.

Thanks, federal workforce!

“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”

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“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”

– Hanif Abdurraqib

I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words.

Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which eerily presaged this year’s L.A. fires, and the deep reality of owning our fates:

It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid: What do I have that someone else may need? Butler’s work is outlining a future where posing that question is a requirement. “Sower” isn’t just about a time and a fire and a place; it’s about people deciding what kind of apocalypse they are going to have, and then deciding how to live in its aftermath.

I used the quote as a repeated riff in a talk I gave a few weeks ago in Las Cruces about how people have to engage in the small-d democratic work to decide, together, what we want our communities to look like as we adapt to climate change. I meant to just use the quote once, but the scrap of paper on which I’d written it poked up above the rest of my notes, and I kept returning to it, a preacher’s call.

We’ve long ago moved past the option of not having to adapt to climate change, of not facing a village, town, city, farm, or river that has less water than we would prefer. It’s on us now to make good choices, or less bad choices, and doing that requires finding ways to come together in community to wrestle our way through the competing and conflicting values.

This is hard.

This is at the heart of water management even without climate change, and we can do it well or poorly, in ways that respect shared values or trample them. The book Bob Berrens and I are writing (have written? book time is weird) about Albuquerque’ relationship with the Rio Grande is really an attempt to untangle the history of precisely this, a century of messy community conversations about how we want our river and our community to look, to interact with one another. Before we had to wrestle with apocalypse we had to wrestle with what kind of community we wanted to have. The results were messy, but in the process we built the sort of institutional framework we must now call on to help us with the next step.

By “institutional framework” I am not talking about government agencies, or not only talking about government agencies. I’m talking about a way of being in the world.

I’ve had reason of late to return to some intellectual roots, John Dewey’s 1927 The Public and Its Problems. I read Dewey as a youngster, assimilated the basic pragmatist framework, and charged out in the world to use it. Philosophy! Now I’m back 45 years later to reflect on how that went.

Dewey’s 1927 book lays out an argument that I find appealing in this fraught moment: that what we mean by “democracy” is not a structure of government, with voting and stuff, but rather a way of being in community:

Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.

A decade later, in a talk entitled “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” Dewey said this:

[T]o get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.

This seems like pretty weighty stuff when I just want better regulations around domestic groundwater wells, or the simplification of the regulatory hurdles faced by water agencies that want to do aquifer storage and recovery, or a way to meet our Rio Grande Compact obligations to those folks down in Las Cruces I was talking to last month. But Dewey’s point is that we can’t just hand off the governing thing to a handful of elected officials in Santa Fe or Washington, D.C., and expect them to manage the apocalypse for us.

It’s on us to engage in the big, messy conversations about what we want that apocalypse to look like.

Going back to look at Abdurraqib’s essay as I put together a talk for this week’s Land and Water Summit in Albuquerque, I realized that the version I’d been using for my glossy pull quote elides something really important.

I’m the optimist, right! It’s why y’all bought that book (and thanks for reading!). I love the Land and Water Summit crowd, people with the sort of care for engagement with their community in search of a better future, the kind of action Dewey was talking about.

But here’s the full quote, with emphasis added:

Like Butler’s characters, we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have, and you can’t drag everyone to a better place. Not everyone can get there.

Wrecking Ball Report: At Reclamation, a view from the inside

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Elevated from the comments, observations from former Reclamation manager Doug Blatchford:

WHEN I joined the Reclamation team in 2005 as the River Operation Manager on the Colorado River, part of my duties was to prepare a business plan to direct future business decisions based on the operations budget and services required (like delivering water to 20 million people). Part of the business plan was succession planning; I estimated it took at least 5 years to hire a replacement for say, the oracle data base manager, and that hire would shadow the retiree to affect a smooth transition. Just letting experienced (20, 30, 40 yr employees…) retire without planning was difficult enough inside the Federal system, let alone just taking a wrecking ball and eliminating 40 percent of the work force.

So what could happen? What kept me up at night was mostly public safety, meaning what could go wrong that would threaten life and limb because of faulty operations, much like managing an air traffic control system, except less dynamic. Imagine :

–an overworked field crew in 120 degree heat installs the a gage shaft encoder that reads the lake going up, instead of going down as it should

–screwing up the distribution of flows at Imperial Dam to Arizona, California, and/or excess flow to Mexico

–not having the modeling staff to provide the 5-yr probabilistic forecast

–reduced skill level in the forecast from CBRFC

–foregoing special requests to raise or lower Havasu water surface elevations, such as the parade of lights

–not being able to respond quickly enough to dynamic operations during a monsoon or hurricane event, and accidentally releasing more water /and or not retaining the water behind the dams, or worse, an atomospheric river that hits a higher water surface elevation at Havasu that pulses the lake over the top of the dam

and on and on and on …not to mention staff moral, which is a from a dedication based on service, less on monetary incentive

Wrecking ball report, California water edition

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We’re starting to see dimly the outlines of what it means for the federal government to no longer be a reliable partner in western water management. Here’s Annie Snider and Camille Von Kaenel on what’s happening in California’s Reclamation operations:

DOGE’s cuts are already hurting Reclamation’s ability to move water through a sprawling system of pumps, canals and reservoirs to roughly a third of the state’s farmland — and impeding the agency’s ability to ratchet up deliveries in line with Trump’s demand, the people said.

And this, which should make the rest of us across the west extremely nervous:

The firing of probationary employees hit Reclamation’s California office particularly hard because it had staffed up over the past year to fill what had been a 30 percent vacancy rate. Now, Reclamation as a whole is drawing up plans for a 40 percent reduction in staffing on orders from DOGE, the three people said.

The federal government does stuff in water management and so many other places that we’ve optimized entire human and infrastructural systems around. What happens when the federal government steps away, is no longer the reliable partner on whom we’ve come to depend?

Again, this is not “They shouldn’t do that!” rhetoric. This is a call to my water management community: how can we prepare to blunt the worst impact of this shitshow on our ability get water to our headgates and taps?