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The river, the future, and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
Local board candidates sound off on saving water, the future of the bosque
Also: Could the riverside drain be beautiful one day? And will renters ever get the franchise?
— PART ONE OF TWO —
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Karen Dunning and Colin Baugh are running for the MRGCD board seats.
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An election for a board seat on the Middle
Rio Grande Conservancy District is typically a low-key affair. They
happen on a different schedule than normal polls, so voters must make an
extra trip to participate. Those voters themselves are a rarefied
bunch: Only property owners living in the Rio Grande's historic
floodplain (more or less) are eligible.
Participation is thus scant. Four years ago, board reps Karen Dunning
and Joaquín Baca each won their seats with crushing majorities of about
1,500 votes. In 2023, Baca ran for City Council in a much smaller
district, got over 4,000 votes, and barely cleared 50 percent.
This year's board election (which began September 15 and ends next Tuesday)
features Dunning and Colin Baugh, who took over from Baca and is
running for his first full term. It promises to be a snooze: Both
candidates are unopposed, as are others standing for reelection in
Socorro and Sandoval County.
Yet at the same time, the MRGCD portfolio is perhaps more relevant than
ever. Originally created a century ago to stop the river from meandering
around at random and flooding places like the Downtown core, the
district evolved over the decades to add water delivery for farmers and
the facilitation of recreational opportunities enjoyed by many an
Albuquerque urbanite to its organizational to-do list.
These days, it finds itself in the business of water and farming in a
time of drought and climate change, which is expected to result in a long-term decline in river levels.
Having successfully confined the river to one channel and kept it
there, it also finds itself the proud owner of what that decision
created: a giant and much beloved garden called the bosque. While that
is widely considered to be a win, it comes with a downside: Fires
started in such urban-adjacent places can bring catastrophe, something
that events in California put on full display in January (DAN, 2/18/25).
And finally, thanks to the bosque and a vast network of ditches, the
district finds itself in the business of recreation in a time when outdoor pursuits are gaining in popularity.
At the center of it all is an unusual rural-urban political alliance: On
one side, there are farmers who, in the course of their work growing
things and using acequias, make the valley a greener and more attractive
place than it would be otherwise. Then there are the property owners of
Greater Downtown, who pay much of the operation's freight in the form
of taxes levied against relatively high-value parcels but who usually
also appreciate the greenery, the migratory birds, the recreational
opportunities, and the fact that the river is kept from carving a new
channel through - for example - Fourth Street.
How will this alliance, balanced on the platform that is the MRGCD,
navigate the glaring challenges in the years ahead, perhaps even finding
a few opportunities along the way? Baugh and Dunning have some thoughts
on the matter and sat down with DAN recently to discuss them.
Of water debts and climate change
The problems the conservancy district faces when it comes to taking
delivery of water have been years - or decades - in the making, but
nothing puts an exclamation point on things quite like a bone dry river
"running" through the state's largest population center - a sight that
featured prominently for most of the summer.
"The dry riverbed in Albuquerque right now has smacked everyone in the face with a two-by-four," Baugh said in late August.
But while less water entering the river basin certainly puts a kind of
general pressure on the system, it turns out that the reasons why there
might not be anything flowing through the highly controlled channel on
any given day are numerous and complex. Upstream shortage options,
particularly El Vado Dam, are a dicey prospect these days. Through the Rio Grande Compact, the state has also managed to rack up a water debt to Texas
equivalent to about three Cochiti Reservoirs, so water that might in
other years be in the river has long ago been delivered downstream or is
otherwise promised in that direction.
In our bleak modern reality, the fact that a dry river can partly be chalked up to human logistics almost counts as good news.
"It's not this pending doom of ecological despair," Baugh said. But, "until we can get out of debt and store, we will be a run-of-the-river system."
At the same time, there's no getting around the ravages of climate
change. Even seemingly minor temperature increases conspire to
effectively expand the summer, both lengthening the amount of time when
water and/or snow is subject to evaporation and promoting the growth of
more vegetation that drinks up what remains before it makes its way down
from the upper-basin mountains.
For an urbanite who enjoys a regular jog or dog-walking sortie by the
river, the resulting low or nonexistent flows may be weird or creepy. To
farmers, it can turn into an existential crisis.
"Maybe one year isn't catastrophic," Dunning said. "Can they survive
next year and the year after that? … At some point, it does become
catastrophic."
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Colin
Baugh compared this year's river drying episodes, including this one
from over the summer, to getting smacked in the face with a two-by-four.
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Mounting a defense
When it comes to dealing with water shortages, the first item on Baugh's
agenda is to learn to stretch the supplies we have further,
particularly with the use of technology. That might look like automating
the gates that divert water onto a particular field, using special
sensors to tell when fields have reached a saturation point, or even
low-tech strategies like ensuring that private ditch owners take care of
their invasive plants and patch up spots where too much water might be
sinking into the ground instead of being delivered to actual crops.
The overall goal in that scenario is to make sure that irrigation
involves only the precise amount of time that is necessary. Do that and
"we can shave hours off," Baugh said. "The guessing game is over. Every
drop is accounted for."
Yet while being more efficient will help, he doesn't think it will close the gap.
"We need new strategic pots of water to work on," he said.
That is a tricky but potentially not impossible problem to sort out.
Over the decades, water users across the western United States have
bought up rights from their counterparts - some of whom were fantastically far away
- and either directly imported the results or worked out some kind of
concurrent swap with third parties to make the math work. There is also
the possibility of creating "new" supplies by somehow cutting down on
evaporation. Across the country, experiments along those lines have
ranged from sinking more water into aquifers to shading canals with
solar panels to tossing truckloads of plastic balls into reservoirs.
To be sure, anything along those lines would be a massive long-term
project, but Baugh sees one potential first step: Make sure that at a
minimum, water rights don't transfer out of the valley, something he
said the district has become more assertive about advocating for.
More upstream storage would also help, Dunning believes, especially when
it comes to the erratic sorts of extreme storms that are expected to
become more common in the future.
"If there was some way we could capture that water … that would help us," she said.
Beyond that, Dunning believes the time has come for a broader
conversation about what sorts of things that water is used for. She is
particularly dubious about the practice of putting MRGCD water on lawns,
but she is not that much more enthusiastic about alfalfa, a hearty but
water-intensive crop used to feed cattle that is a mainstay up and down
the valley.
"If people could grow different crops, that might help," Dunning said. "But that's a really hard one."
In the long run, "I still think we're going to be able to grow food to
feed people," she added. "A lot of farmers are not growing food that
actual people eat."
Economics may also conspired to cut down on water use, albeit in what
many would consider the most painful way imaginable: Farms could simply
fold, one by one.
"I would hate to say it, but I think that may happen," Dunning said. "I think that farming is at a crisis point."
Another water-saving strategy lies within the bosque itself. The forest
is full of thick and often invasive vegetation that manages to suck up
extra water while intensifying the fire hazard. Thin that vegetation
out, Dunning reasons, and you could solve two problems at once.
The idea, however, faces serious challenges: The bosque is huge, and
thus so is the size of the task. That makes it labor intensive,
expensive, and ongoing. Many efforts along these lines also face
political friction: Plenty of people are under the false impression that
the bosque is some kind of pristine wilderness. Others are just wary
that things will get out of hand once crews break out the chainsaws.
For Baugh, the situation first calls for some plain educational talk.
"It's absolutely not natural. It is a man-made construct," he said. "We
are now looking at 80 years of neglect of a garden that we created." It
becomes a massive liability, he added, "with the flick of a cigarette
butt."
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