July 16, 2007
Good Monday water folks:
On a practical matter, the New Mexico Xeriscape Conference is gearing up Feb. 21-22. www.xeriscapenm.com Looks like they have a bang-up crowd of speakers coming, including Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute, High Country Garden’s David Salman, Natural Capitalism’s Hunter Lovins and hopefully Terry Tempest Williams as keynote speaker.
In the xeriscape mode, check out this website from a St. Louis-based, family-owned business that turns old tires into mulch and playground equipment. Pretty cool website – check it out at http://www.internationalmulch.com/
Don’t know what kind of enviro concerns there might be with rubber as mulch, but it’s a better idea overall then pitching the tires in the landfill.
In legal matters, 7th Judicial District Judge Matthew Reynolds recently refused to reconsider his dismissal of a case filed by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board member Bill Turner. Reynolds said the case belonogs in conservancy court in the Second Judicial District in Bernalillo.
MRGCD filed the lawsuit, one of two it filed against Turner last summer. Turner is a water broker and a man who loves to ruffle feathers in New Mexico’s water world. He narrowly won election to the MRGCD board last year and has tangled with them ever since.
Turner for a couple of years has questioned the MRGCD’s water bank. So has the state engineer. The district has encouraged people who sell off their agriculture water rights to lease water from the district’s water bank and continue farming. Turner says that’s “double dipping.” District administrators say they are doing nothing wrong.
Turner claimed the board was using the recent lawsuits to help determine the legality of the district’s waterbank. MRGCD manages water for thousands of water rights holders in the middle Rio Grande. Even Reynolds acknowledges in his recent decision “there seems to be a growing conflict between the State Engineer and the MRGCD concerning the water leases sought to be confirmed as legal in this lawsuit.”
It will be interesting to see where all this heads. Remember the MRGCD’s members will get the second largest amount of San Juan Chama water after Albuquerque. The Middle Rio Grande is still not adjudicated, and may not get done until last in the state given the complexities. It behooves MRGCD to keep as much land in cultivation as possible because “beneficial use” and “first use” determine seniority of water rights. When it comes to adjucidation, the district will need to show it still has a lot of land using water “beneficially.”
Meanwhile, though, it is interesting to note that a law firm helping transfer agriculture water rights out of the Middle Rio Grande to developments like Rancho Viejo near Santa Fe, is owned by the district’s long-time counsel and water expert Chuck Dumars
Newly elected this year to the board is Janet Jarrett, a dairy farmer and political activist firebrand in her own right. The MRGCD meetings - already known for fireworks and fist fights - are sure to only get more interesting. Too bad I live too far away for my editors to want to foot my gas down there.
On July 25, a case involving the Duke City’s Rio Grande direct diversion project goes to the New Mexico Court of Appeals. Indeed, there are still several groups appealing the project; their case was thrown out by a district court, but they’ve appealed the decision.
One of their main points, in my limited understanding, is that the San Juan Chama water Albuq. Will eventually divert from the Rio Grande has been flowing down the river for decades. Even though on paper it was meant for the Duke City, the water has been a part of the river’s ecological system for. Once the city starts taking it out, the appellates think it will impact the river system more negatively than water project supporters want to acknowledge.
Hasta,
