WildEarth Guardians

Thursday, March 29, 2007
Living River Fund A Hopeful Sign

WildEarth Guardians working to reclaim the Rio Grande's rights to its own waters
Contact: John Horning WildEarth Guardians

Most everyone accepts the simple truth that a river needs water to be a river.

And yet as you read this today, the mythical Rio Grande has no rights to its own waters.

With the aim of righting that oversight, environmental groups, in partnership with the City of Albuquerque and the Albuquerque/Bernalillo Water Utility Authority, announced the creation of the Living River Fund in late February.

The purpose of the Living River Fund is to ensure that future generations can enjoy a living Rio Grande and its central role as the ecological, cultural and economic backbone of our state, just as past generations have.

To meet our goal of restoring healthy flows for the Rio Grande, the Living River Fund seeks to lease water from willing farmers who would, in exchange for financial compensation, not divert water from the Rio Grande to irrigate their crops.

Instead, the farmers' water would allow it to flow in the Rio Grande or it would be stored in upstream reservoirs and released at a time when the river-and the more than 500 species of fish and wildlife that depend on the Rio Grande-needs it most. It is our hope that this pilot agricultural water-leasing program attracts the interest and support of many farmers in the Middle Rio Grande.

However, the fragile consensus that exists today that leasing water from willing farmers is a win-win approach to saving the Rio Grande has not always existed. For nearly a decade, environmental groups have fought an at-times contentious and controversial battle to require all water users to do their part to save the Rio Grande.

The high profile environmental litigation originally brought in 1999 by a coalition of national and regional environmental groups-including WildEarth Guardians- that fueled the water conflict over the last decade on the Middle Rio Grande, also has been the catalyst for changes in water management and innovative solutions that can better provide for the river.

After more than a year of on-again, off-again negotiations between the City of Albuquerque and the environmental groups, the two put aside their significant differences, and in February 2005 reached a legal settlement, a key provision of which called for the creation of the Living River Fund.

That legal agreement, in addition to requiring a Living River check-off be added to monthly water bills in Albuquerque (watch for this coming soon in Albuquerque and Santa Fe) and that 30,000 acre-feet of storage space in Abiquiu Reservoir be set aside for environmental water, required the city and the environmental groups to put $225,000 and $25,000, respectively, towards a pilot agricultural water leasing program.

While the creation of the fund and the allocation of the $250,000 into an escrow account are significant steps forward, much additional work still needs to be done to make this Living River Fund a success.

First, the fund needs significant additional financial capital. It's our hope that our recent announcement inspires the rest of the state's leaders, including Governor Richardson and Senators Bingaman and Domenici, to match these funds with state and federal dollars. Our goal is to increase the fund to $1.5 million by the end of this year.

We also need state and federal water managers to expeditiously approve the provision of our agreement that allocates 30,000 acre-feet or storage space for environmental water. Without storage, we cannot rest assured that water leased or even acquired for the Rio Grande will actually benefit the river.

And finally, we need the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District to play a supportive role-not an adversarial one-in implementing this common-sense solution. Agricultural users in the Middle Rio Grande, which divert up to 80% of the Rio Grande's flow, would benefit tremendously from having the option of leasing water to the river.

Over the last decade, at least three studies have shown that leasing water from farmers is hydrologically feasible. What have been lacking are the political will, the financial capital and the mechanism. Now, the delicate foundation for all three exists.

When we began this campaign more than decade ago, we did so knowing that popular support for a Living Rio Grande is widespread. We've simply needed to create new mechanisms that allow for creative solutions, like this one, to manifest the public's desire for a healthy Rio Grande.

The Rio Grande is the lifeblood of this city and many other cities, towns and communities throughout New Mexico and the entire Rio Grande watershed. The Living River Fund assures that at the same time we ask the river to sustain us, we are also taking steps to sustain the Rio Grande.

John Horning is the Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians where he has been working for more than a decade to reclaim the Rio Grande's rights to its own waters.