The March 24-Month study and the myth of a “Compact Call”

By Eric Kuhn

The Bureau of Reclamation released its March 24-Month study last Friday and just like last month, the forecast is for big trouble in the Colorado River Basin. Under the “Most Probable” scenario, the ten-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry will drop below 82.5 million acre-feet (the “tripwire”) by the end of Water Year 2027.  If this happens, the odds are high that the Lower Division states will trigger what they referred to in their February 13, 2025, letter to Secretary Burgum as a “compact call.”  The nuance, however, is that the Colorado River Compact has no specific provision for a compact call. Under the compact, a call is just another word for interstate litigation.

Although the letter is now over a month old, it just recently received attention from two of the region’s most respected water reporters, Ian James of the Los Angeles Times, and Tony Davis of the Tucson Daily Star.  In his piece, (link: Three states urge Trump administration to fix Colorado River dam – Los Angeles Times: ) James pointed out that in their letter, the Lower Division states used the term “compact call” 23 times.  The term “river call” is commonly used in prior appropriation states that actively administer water rights. For example, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Power Plant, located on the Colorado River a few miles upriver from Glenwood Springs, has a senior water right for 1250 cfs with a priority date of 1902.  When the flow at the plant’s diversion dam drops below 1250 cfs, its owner places a “call” on the river. Under Colorado law the Division Engineer, an employee of the Colorado State Engineer, then shuts off sufficient upstream junior uses to bring the flow back to 1250 cfs.  A “Shoshone call” is almost an annual occurrence.

The Colorado River Compact places two specific flow obligations on the Upper Division states at Lee Ferry. Article III (d) requires these states to not cause the ten-year cumulative flow to be depleted below seventy-five million acre-feet.  Additionally, under Article III (c), if there is not sufficient surplus water available, then each basin is responsible for one-half of the deficiency (the difference the annual treaty delivery and the available surplus water). Assuming there is no surplus water and the 1944 Treaty delivery to Mexico is 1.5 maf per year, the Upper Division states would have to deliver to Lee Ferry, an additional 750,000 af per year.

Thus, using the Shoshone analogy, the Lower Division states claim they have a 1922 Compact water right for up to 82.5 maf every ten years. Note, we say “up to” because in the last few years, pursuant to Minute 323, annual deliveries to Mexico have been slightly less than 1.5 maf.  For many reasons, the Upper Division states do not agree that their 1922 Compact obligation is 82.5 maf every ten years, see: “On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes,” (link: On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes – jfleck at inkstain: ).

If (or more likely when) the ten-year flow at Lee Ferry were to drop below ~ 82.5 maf, and there is no consensus agreement among the basin states in place, it is clear that the Lower Division will then attempt to place a compact call on the Upper Division states (and perhaps legally challenge the Secretary’s operation of Lake Powell) to increase deliveries at Lee Ferry.  Where the Shoshone Plant analogy breaks down is what happens once a call is placed. Colorado law directs the State Engineer/Division Engineer how to administer a Shoshone call, but intentionally, there is no equivalent of the Colorado State Engineer in the Colorado River Compact. The Colorado River Compact negotiators debated and rejected a compact commission with enforcement powers.  Arizona’s Winfield Norviel suggested such a commission, but led by Colorado’s Delph Carpenter, it was rejected. Carpenter abhorred the idea of creating what he referred to as a “super agency.”

Except for Article V which provides for the Directors of the Reclamation Service and USGS to cooperate, on an ex-officio basis, with the basin State Engineers to collect and publish data on Colorado River flows and uses, the 1922 Compact provides no role for the federal government.  The Secretary of the Interior is not even mentioned.  Instead, the compact negotiators provided two mechanisms for resolving disputes and enforcing the provisions of the compact.  Article VI is a dispute resolution provision which has never been used.  The somewhat cumbersome provision provides that when a dispute arises, upon the request of one governor, the resolution process can be triggered. If this happens, each state governor then appoints a commissioner to formally negotiate a resolution with the other states.  If the commissioners reach an agreement, it must be ratified by the affected state legislatures, most likely all seven.  If a resolution is reached under Article VI, the compact does not require it to be approved by Congress.

The second mechanism is litigation.  Article IX states: “Nothing in this compact shall be construed to limit or prevent any State from instituting or maintaining any action or proceeding, legal or equitable, for the protection of any right under this compact or the enforcement of any of its provisions.” Thus, if Lee Ferry ten-year flows drop below 82.5 maf, the compact vehicle to implement a “compact call” is for one or more of the Lower Division states to initiate litigation under Article IX and convince the U.S. Supreme Court, or its appointed Special Master, that the Upper Division states are not complying with the compact.

Assuming no agreement among the states to avoid compact litigation, a compact call scenario might occur as follows: The ten-year flow at Lee Ferry is forecast to drop below 82.5 maf tripwire (it might be a little less if corrected for actual deliveries to Mexico).  The Lower Division then states demand that the Secretary increase releases from Lake Powell or, alternatively, the UCRC implement a curtailment to bring the flow up to 82.5 maf by the end of the water year.  Via the UCRC, the Upper Division states respond that they are in full compliance with the 1922 Compact and insist that the Secretary not increase releases from Lake Powell. Lacking a consensus agreement among the states, the Secretary makes no change to the prescribed annual release forcing the Lower Division states to initiate litigation. Assuming the Supreme Court accepts the case, it would now be up to the court or its Special Master to decide if the Upper Division states are in compliance with the compact. If they are not, a remedy could be the imposition of a compact call by ordering the UCRC to implement a curtailment pursuant to the 1948 Upper Basin Compact. How long might litigation take? It could be decades, or the Lower Division states might succeed with a request for immediate relief. No one knows.

While the 1922 Compact does not give the Secretary of the Interior any special power or authority, under subsequent federal legislation and the 1963 decision in Arizona v. California the Secretary has considerable power and authority. For example, under Section 602 of the 1968 Colorado River Basin Project Act, Congress directed the Secretary to promulgate criteria for the coordinated long-range operation of the federal reservoirs. It also set priorities for the annual release of water from Lake Powell. The first priority is “releases to supply one-half the deficiency described in Article III (c) of the Colorado River Compact, if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division.”

The legislation, however, is silent on who or what entity decides if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division. According to Tony Davis (link:  Arizona water officials, others blast feds for not protecting dam – Our Community Now), a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Water Resources suggested that the Secretary has this responsibility. But even if the Secretary does ultimately decide how much water must be released from Lake Powell to satisfy the obligation of the Upper Division states to Mexico under the 1922 Compact, if the Lower Division states believe the Upper Division states are violating the 1922 Compact, it could result in litigation.  In fact, a decision by the Secretary to interpret the compact could be the trigger for litigation.  After the Secretary signed the 1970 Long-range Operating Criteria which set a minimum objective release of 8.23 maf per year from Glen Canyon Dam, the Upper Division states seriously considered litigation. They decided against it because they concluded they could not show any actual injury. The impact of climate change on the flow of the river has now fundamentally changed that dynamic.

The Lower Division State’s letter was directed to Secretary Burgum, but it is a message to the entire basin. The March 24-Month study confirms what we already know. The basin has two basic choices: litigation or a basin-wide agreement implementing fundamental change. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

Space Ghost

Bicycle leaning against rusted steel structure that looks like a giant version of a child’s jacks, with dirt trail and trees.

The Space Ghost, going where none of Fleck’s bicycles have gone before.

It is an accident that my new bicycle is named after a 1960s cartoon superhero who fought supervillains in outer space with a sidekick named Blip. Blip was a monkey.

I was on my own Saturday, no help from Blip, when my Space Ghost led me up a “trail” on the west side of the Rio Grande upstream from the Route 66 bridge. I’ve made several stabs at this stretch of riverside woods on other bikes, but none were up to the task.

It’s a weird place. The trail follows the path of the abandoned Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Atrisco Heading, which for a time diverted water from the Rio Grande for farmers in Albuquerque’s south valley. The District and the Bureau of Reclamation abandoned the heading in the 1950s (it kept clogging with silt), replacing it with a siphon from the river’s east side.

The trail, such as it is, peters out into a thicket of riverside woods pinned between a bluff and the river that is not, in human terms, well travelled.

The new bike is sorta an All-City Space Horse, but All-City is sorta going out of business, making my bike sorta one of the last of the Space Horses. I think it was Blip the Space Monkey who sorta named it the Space Ghost.

I’d been eyeing the Space Horse for a while. It’s a style the kidz today call a “gravel” bike, with slightly smaller wheels and umpty wider tires – disc brakes leave a lot of room for wider tires. Which is good, I guess, for riding on gravel? Or, more importantly, Rio Grande levees, bosque trails, and valley ditchbanks. And it has all the mounts you could dream of for water bottle cages and racks.

Bike, leaning against wrecked speedboats, with reservoir in the background.

The Surly at Lake Mead.

It’s a replacement for my beloved Surly, which is what the kidz used to call a “cyclocross” bike – also suited for dirt, but with a road bike feel. Its name was “The Surly” to friends, and “The Black Bike” to family. It began its life as a Cross Check, and was one of my two daily drivers – commuting (it has racks) and any rides that included dirt – for a long time. My Strava data, which is not super reliable for tracking which bike I ride but is prolly in the ballpark, says I put 7,000 miles on the Surly. I changed it up a bunch of times – different handlebars, I rode it as a single speed for my commutes for a long time, then back to gears.

It had wide handlebars and gears when I used it for my epic ride along the shorelines of a dwindling Lake Mead back in 2022.

As Matt Philips wrote in Bicycling magazine, the Cross Check was super versatile: “I’ve seen a lot of Cross Checks in the wild, and no two are ever the same.”

At least one, and possibly two of my students rode Cross Checks.

When I first got “The Black Bike” 15 years ago, I described it thus:

One of the new bike’s main purposes, in fact, is to get me down to the river. It’s a hybrid road-dirt machine, so I can ride the five miles of street I need to get to the river, then ride the levees and dirt trails…. I’ve kitted it out with saddle bags to hold binoculars for bird-watching and enough food and water to get lost in my thoughts without incurring significant danger. (emphasis added)

I’ve been riding it that way ever since, but the lure of wider tires finally got me over the decision threshold – that and the MRGCD’s new e-bike rules.

N+1

There’s a bike nerd joke:

Q: What’s the correct number of bikes to own?

A: N+1

A couple of years ago I added an e-bike to the shed. The precipitating incident involved a crash on the Surly on my 63rd birthday ride.

I’ve long celebrated my birthdays by riding my age in miles, or at least trying to. There are gaps in the record, years when I wasn’t riding enough to be in shape enough to pull it off. But I’ve done it many years since I was in my early 40s.

I was perhaps 40 miles into the 63 birthday ride, just up the hill from the Rio Grande Oxbow on Albuquerque’s west side, when my wheel caught in a pavement crack and I went down. I was going slow, so there wasn’t much road rash, but I slammed down hard on my ribs.

Cartoon monkey wearing a superhero costume and a mask.

Blip the Space Monkey

A nice person in a car stopped to make sure I was OK (This always happens, people are awesome!), and my sidekick Blip the Space Monkey and I sat on the curb for a bit and weighed our options. I could have called home for a ride, or limped to the Route 66 bus line, which wasn’t far. I don’t crash a lot, but I’ve gone down enough times to to know the pattern: You pop up to make sure nothing’s broken, hurt for a couple of minutes, and then feel great. Adrenaline?

And then you say – well I say, anyway – “Fuck it, it’s a bike ride, let’s go!” On my 63rd birthday ride, that meant lunch with Blip at our favorite barbacoa taco truck out on West Central.

I regretted this decision.

While the number of miles I need to ride in this game goes up each year, the inexorability of aging means my ability to recover from those miles goes down in roughly the same proportion, if not greater. Between the crash and the miles (the birthday ride is always the longest ride of the year for me), it took at least a month to recover. Within two-and-a-half months, there was a new pedal-assist e-bike in the shed.

It’s a beast, and I’ve never entirely gotten used to its size and weight. People who study brain stuff have some language for my physical experience with the bike: “tool incorporation” or “extended cognition.” It’s the idea that as we become deeply familiar with a tool, our brain incorporates it as part of our body schema. Think carpenter<->hammer. I’m that way with my daily drivers – my road bike (“the Red-White-and-Blue bike”) and “the Black Bike.” When I’m on them, they are part of me. This is not poetry, or metaphor. It’s brain stuff.

I’ve never quite acquired tool incorporation with the e-bike. I love the range it gives me, and what we call “dog mode.” (As a “pedal assist,” the bike requires me to pedal, like a regular bike, with the motor adding “oomph” – more oomph when you run across one of those clever south valley dogs.) I love the e-bike’s big fat tires, the better to ride on Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District irrigation system access roads. Or so it seemed until, after an impassioned couple of board meetings (the pageant of democracy was especially delightful, no sarcasm, it was a wonderful debate), the places where I could ride the e-beast were restricted.

Full confession. I sometimes ride my bike in places I’m not supposed to. I draw the line at trespassing on Tribal/Pueblo land, but other than that my approach is, umm, flexible. I am fascinated by the notion of “right to roam,” common for example in Nordic countries. But the new MRGCD rules posed a dilemma for me. I’ve just finished writing a book that is in significant part about the District, and in doing that work I’ve become fond of the District and its people. They’re great about acknowledging my “right to roam” on their ditches, a legal thing but more importantly a cultural norm. They just don’t want me to do it on my e-bike!

The Surly was OK for this, but I needed wider tires. N+1.

The Last Space Horse

Map showing Rio Grande, freeway, and red line for bike ride.

Space Ghost goes exploring.

All-City, nominally out of Minneapolis but owned by “big bike,” ended with the 2024 model year, but the Wizards at Two Wheel Drive were able to grab one of the last Space Horses for me in January and trick it up with the swag I wanted. I’ve already got more than 300 miles on it since I picked it up Feb. 1. I’ve taken it on a couple of Rail Runner train rides (take the train up the river a ways and ride back home) and dumped it once (“Ride fast and take chances” is not normally my motto, but it’s so snappy!). I keep snagging the pedals on curbs and tree roots, they’re lower to the ground than my other bikes. I don’t quite have the “tool incorporation” brain-body-bike mapping nailed down yet, but it’s close enough to the Surly and the Red White and Blue bike that it was mostly there from the start other than the pedal thing.

It wants to go down the dirt alleys in my neighborhood, like a dog tugging the leash. It loves the ditchbanks and the levee roads.

Here’s the thing about my foray into that thickly wooded bosque Saturday. I could have done that on the old Surly. With the skinny tires, it would have been less pedaling and more walk-a-bike, through places too sandy or littered with downed branches or clogged with doghair thickets to ride. But even with the Space Ghost’s fat tires, there was a ton of walk-a-bike.

It was the spirit of the thing. The Space Ghost really wanted to go.

Sauntering

A friend who delights in wandering introduced me recently to the Situationists, a group of avant garde Europeans in the 1950s and ’60s who sorta just wandered around looking at stuff. Abandoning regular routes and routines allowed them to see their spaces and the cultures that made those spaces in a new way. Embracing that notion, my friend and I went on a walk a couple of weeks ago that repeatedly detoured down alleys and through a construction site in search of graffiti.

The Situationists’ “dérive” (from the French for “drift”) feels a bit like Henry David Thoreau’s walks:

Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

I do love to walk, but the bicycle adds a layer of playful joy to my sauntering, rooted in that first great bicycle adventure of my childhood, when my friends and I packed lunches and rode out to the end of 23rd street, into the orange groves. We snuck into an old grove barn – trespassing! – to eat.

I have been thus wandering since childhood.

In my late teens, transplanted to college dorm life in a strange new town, friends and I climbed down into the concrete channel into which the creek that flowed through our new home had been confined. Deciding on a downstream direction, we walked until the creek became encased in a tunnel beneath downtown Walla Walla, Washington. We walked slowly and carefully in the dark, keeping our left hands touching the concrete channel’s wall, passing the single place where light from above penetrated before emerging on the far side of downtown, the channel issuing us out into the first of the farm fields that ringed the town.

Cows, standing in a small field, stared at us, their heads tracking us downstream as we disappeared around a bend, then tracking us back upstream as we returned.

Thoreau and I quickly part ways. He found the stuff people build to be an affront to the proper ways of things – “Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape.” For me the whole point of wandering is to see places and spaces as the social constructs that I think they are. But the joys of wandering – Thoreau through his “nature,” me through my urban landscapes – are fundamentally the same.

Space Ghost and the Freeway Bridge

At the upstream end of the segment Space Ghost and I rode Saturday is the Interstate 40 bridge across the Rio Grande.

The bridge is one of Albuquerque’s great graffiti spaces. I first found it five years ago when a friend and I were trying to find a way down to that stretch of the river on foot. There’s an old access road down the hill that used to be open, then was gated but unlocked, now the gate’s locked. I’m not sure how the artists are getting in now, with all their paint cans. Maybe there’s a way along the edge of the freeway. Or maybe they’re just humping it up through the woods like I did.

Graffiti on bridge abutments with river in background.

Public art.

The art covers all the reasonably reachable bits of freeway concrete, a flood control channel, and the bridge pilings. On the other side of the river, The Man recently painted out a bunch of bridge piling art, including a great old Irot bird. But the stuff on the west side of the river remains untouched. Too hard for The Man to get to, I guess.

This is at the core of the way I ride now. As a little kid, exploring was the thing, and bikes were a massive range extender. As an adult, my riding shifted for a time toward speed and fitness – my unfortunate “Lance Armstrong era,” as I think of it. But I’m back to the “dérive,” which is what little kid John was doing sneaking lunch in an old grove barn.

Contra Thoreau, the freeway bridge across the Rio Grande, this incursion of the sweep of humanity into the natural flow of a river, delights me. There is no question that it has changed the form of the landscape, but is Thoreau’s “deform” the right word here? In particular, the way bridges and their abutments and pilings constrict the Rio Grande, the sediment piling up behind in what eventually become vegetated islands, is at root a change in the river’s form. But the connotation of a Thoreau’s linguistic choice, the sense in which “deform” embeds the value of a worsening, I challenge. Bridges across rivers bind community. Artists have humped their backpacks of spray cans and made art, that in the process has made this bridge and this urban river their own.

This is the point of the Space Ghost.

This is why I ride.

Wrecking ball report, snow survey edition

Those Rio Grande runoff forecasts we use to make critical water management decisions on New Mexico’s Rio Grande? NRCS….

From the Western States Water Council:

The mass layoff of federal workers, including U.S. Department of Agriculture layoffs, has led to the loss of seven positions at the National Water and Climate Center (NWCC), cutting nearly 40% of the federal workforce responsible for the Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecasting (SSWSF) program under USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The layoffs leave the program in critical condition even as the data and analysis NWCC provides is increasingly important in the face of drought, water supply shortages and increasing water demands across the West. The result will be substantially greater uncertainty for federal, state and local water agencies that depend on reliable snow pack data and information for critical agricultural, environmental, industrial and municipal water management short and long-term decisions.

Taking another crack at Tribal water in Arizona

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

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

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?”

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

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

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.”

“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.