When you sell less water, you make less money selling water. It’s the modern water agency dilemma:

Albuquerque’s municipal water agency may need another rate increase to dig out of a growing financial hole left by the community’s water conservation success, agency officials acknowledged in a report this week to their board.

I wrote a story in this morning’s newspaper about New Mexico’s efforts to revive its moribund state water planning process:

Ten years after New Mexico officials last took a stab at developing a state water plan, they are reviving their effort to calculate the gaps between New Mexico’s finite water supplies and the needs of a growing population. The goal, officials say, is a tool to help prioritize state projects and policies to deal with the gaps.

But criticisms have plagued the project from the outset, including the charge that the state’s top-down approach is bypassing the voices of local water users. Critics also claim a failure to consider the effects of climate change on the state’s water supplies will undercut the validity of the results.

Unsurprisingly, the part about climate change has been click bait. But that’s a subset of a more subtle question that I explored in a bloggy takeout this morning – the loading dock problem. Is the state’s process of formulating the numbers to be used in water planning cutting out communities’ expression of their own needs – simply dumping the numbers on the loading dock?

Reed Benson, a University of New Mexico law professor whose patient explanations and deep writing have been extraordinarily helpful to my understand of things like the doctrine of prior appropriation and the Endangered Species Act, has joined the blogoworld:

It has come to my attention … that a lot of people do not read law review articles. This shocked me, of course, because who wouldn’t like reading an in-depth, 60-page analysis of water law, fortified by about 300 footnotes? I am told, however, that there are millions of otherwise decent and reasonable people who forego that pleasure.

His rationale for the choice of the blog’s name – Wester River Law – is instructive:

So why call the blog westernriverlaw, not something more familiar like westernwaterlaw? Partly because traditional “western water law” has an old-school connotation, emphasizing property rights and maximum extractive development of water resources, and this blog will take a broader view of water in the West….

I also chose to call it westernriverlaw because rivers matter for their own sake, not simply as conduits for water supplies. In the West, flowing rivers are important ecologically, economically, and recreationally. Those values have always gotten short shrift in western water law, but today they can no longer be ignored or neglected. The name westernriverlaw suggests that any discussion of water policy needs to have a focus on what it means for the river.

Worth adding to your RSS feed reader.