This week, Rin and John talk about flows on the Rio Grande, planning for a new federal river management project south of Socorro, groundwater contamination questions, and the future of federal clean water regulation.

Rio Grande

With the irrigation season over and the Rio Grande’s riparian vegetation shutting down for the winter, river flows are up through Albuquerque. But the biggest reason for the high flows is the annual Rio Grande Compact accounting exercise, as water stored in Abiquiu reservoir for the six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos, but not needed, is moved down to Elephant Butte Reservoir.

To track the flows, the USGS measurement gage at Central Avenue is Rin and John’s go-to information source: Rio Grande at Albuquerque, NM - USGS-08330000

And to get the best report on current river conditions, we recommend Anne Marken’s monthly presentations to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board of Directors. The audio recordings, including Anne’s slides, are here, and once the meeting minutes are posted, you’ll get a great written summary.

Lower San Acacia Reach

Reclamations draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Lower San Acacia Reach Improvements project is here. There will be two public meetings on the draft:

• January 7, 2026 from 5 to 7 p.m. MT at the Erna Fergusson Public Library,  3700 San Mateo Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM, 87110.
• January 8, 2026 from 5 to 7 p.m. MT at the Socorro Public Library, 401 Park St, Socorro, NM, 87801.

Groundwater

• SourceNM reporting on Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon water contamination
•  Geologist Kate Zeigler’s report on water contamination
• Water Protection Advisory Board reports on Kirtland fuel spill

Waters of the United States (WOTUS!)

• WOTUS comment link
•  WOTUS definition update

Guest: John Fleck

A decade ago, the Utton Center's Writer in Residence John Fleck published his book Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West, an exploration of water governance in the Colorado River Basin. Amid an often pessimistic literature, led by iconic titles that Fleck read as a young journalist - Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desertand Philip Fradkin's A River No More, among others - Water is For Fighting Over offered an optimistic narrative, stories of a governance structure adapting to scarcity and change, alongside communities thriving as they adapted to a future with less water.

The Utton Center's Rin Tara read Water is For Fighting Over as a college student, and it influenced the direction of their life, pursuing a law degree studying water law and policy and now working with Fleck at the Utton Center on the challenges of the Colorado River's future.

For this special episode of Water Matters, recorded at a time of deep uncertainty, conflict, and what some characterize as crisis on the Colorado River, Tara and Fleck look back at the book - what it said, what it got right, and what it got wrong - as they discuss the past, present, and future of the Colorado River.

Guest:  Diane Agnew of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority

With one of the worst winter snowpacks on record, New Mexico’s water supply forecasts for 2025 look grim. Can we avoid the apocalypse? The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck talk to Diane Agnew of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority about adapting to the realities of a changing climate.

At a time in early spring when the Rio Grande should be rising, swollen with snowmelt, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is shrinking instead. In a good year river water imported across the Continental Divide from Colorado can meet the majority of Albuquerque’s drinking water needs. But not this year. By May, Albuquerque will likely have to turn off its river water diversions, falling back to the use of water pumped from the aquifer beneath the city, explains Agnew, Albuquerque’s water rights manager.

While the news is stark, the taps will keep flowing. And there are hopeful signs about the collaboration needed for the community to get through a water short future, including collaboration with the valley’s agricultural water users, served by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, to help stretch this year’s short supplies. It’s a demonstration that, in the face of challenges, we still have choices as a community about the kind of water future we want to have.

Resources:

• Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority Water 2120 long-range plan
• The San Juan-Chama Project
• Tracking the flow of the Rio Grande: real time US Geological Survey gage at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge

The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Water Matters! podcast looks at water and natural resources issues in New Mexico and beyond. Housed at the University of New Mexico School of Law, the Utton Transboundary Resources Center believes in the pursuit of well informed, collaborative solutions to our natural resource challenges. The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Sairis Perez-Gomez designed the podcast logo and wrote and performed our theme music and Student Research Assistant Francesca Glaspell produced this episode.

Rin Tara is a staff attorney specializing in water policy and governance at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center. They are primarily interested in questions of water management in the face of climate change. They have done work in riparian restoration, river connectivity, tribal water sovereignty, climate change adaptation, and water rights. They have authored several papers on topics related to the future of western water management.

John Fleck is Writer in Residence at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico School of Law; and Professor of Practice in Water Policy and Governance in the University of New Mexico Department of Economics. The former director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, he is the author of four books on water in the west, including the forthcoming history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande – Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City. 

Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of November 10.

Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of October 27.

A full interview episode will be available later this month.

Guest: Don Bustos, Santa Cruz Farms

Irrigated from the Acequia del Llano running across the upper end of his four acres outside Española, New Mexico, Don Bustos' Santa Cruz Farms feels as if it has been there as long as the land itself. A rambling walk through the farm follows ditches carrying the water past patches of asparagus and the last of the blackberries, down one side past some new herbs Bustos is experimenting with - a path the water has traveled for the 400 years this land has been watered in the same traditional way.

But farming in the same way his ancestors have for four centuries means that Santa Cruz Farms must be both traditional and a thoroughly modern institution - rooted in the acequia culture and small-scale organic growing, but also embodying the sort of ever-present adaptations that have always been at the heart of maintaining the institution of agriculture in a changing world. As Bustos explains, new crops, new markets, and new irrigation technologies have helped Santa Cruz Farms thrive.

Guest: Enrique Romero, head of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo division of the New Mexico Department of Justice

Acequias are a traditional irrigation practice with roots across the world. The inhabitants of New Mexico have used ditch irrigation since time immemorial, though the acequias used today took their present form about 400 years ago.

Enrique Romero, head of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo division of the New Mexico Department of Justice, explains the history and governance of New Mexican acequias and discusses the theme of querencia. 

Guest: Craig Allen

Formed in a series of volcanic eruptions between 1 and 2 million years ago, the Jemez Mountains dominate the cultural and environmental history of central New Mexico. 

For more than four decades, forest ecologist Craig Allen has studied them, engaging in what has come to be known as “place-based ecology,” with deep roots in what the Nuevo Mexicanos would call “querencia” – a deep love and sense of place. 

The resulting of Craig’s passion is a vast body of scientific work that shed light on the impact of climate change on a forest landscape. The results also reflect a deeply personal journey for Allen, as aridity and fire change a place he loves.

New Mexico’s summer monsoon is upon us. The rainy season began the last week of June, bringing moist air north from the Gulf of California – pumping up flows in drying rivers, wetting forested landscapes and in the process reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires, and perhaps most importantly bringing the visceral joy that of rain. 

Streaming up through the mountains of central Mexico, the moisture from what scientists call the “North American Monsoon” brings 50 percent or more of the annual precipitation to many areas of the southwest, from Tucson and Phoenix up through Albuquerque. 

New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande responds, with monsoon rains temporarily lifting up flows in an otherwise drying river. 

Winter snows falling on the mountain watersheds upstream of us provide the bulk of the water supply for people and ecosystems, concentrated into river valleys as they flow downstream. But monsoon rains add a critical piece of the weather and climate puzzle as communities of the West work to adapt to climate change. 

Guest: Paul Tashjian, Director of Freshwater Conservation for Audubon Southwest

The Middle Rio Grande is home to not only a myriad of species, but also to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD). At first blush, environmental water uses, and agricultural water uses may appear to be in conflict, but the truth is more complicated. 

This month Water Matters hosts Paul Tashjian, Director of Freshwater Conservation for Audubon Southwest, to discuss the agroecosystem of the Middle Rio Grande.

Tashjian talks about the interconnected water uses throughout the MRGCD benefitted area and explains how closely intertwined the human and nonhuman communities in this region are. He also invites listeners to reach out to local nonprofits that may benefit from volunteer support, including Audubon Southwest, New Mexico Wild, The Nature Conservancy, and Bosque Ecological Monitoring Program. 

Our podcast is produced through the Utton Transboundary Resources Center, scripted by Rin Tara and John Fleck, and edited by Francesca Glaspell. Our music is written and performed by Sairis Perez-Gomez.

Established by treaty in 1868, the modern boundaries of the Navajo Nation span 27,000 square miles across the deserts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. While its water rights were guaranteed on paper in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1908 Winters decision, getting actual “wet water” to meet the needs of the nation’s 175,000 residents remains a challenge. 

This month the Utton Center’s Water Matters speaks with attorney Bidtah Becker, a University of New Mexico School of Law graduate who has been serving the Navajo Nation for two decades. 

Becker talks about the challenges of making good on the Supreme Court’s 1908 promise of Native American water rights in a legal landscape fractured by state borders that require the Navajo Nation to negotiate a legal and political landscape to deal with Congress and representatives of the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states. 

Becker talks about the progress being made in building a water pipeline through the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation – the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project. 

She also talks about the challenges facing the Navajo Nation’s efforts to settle its water rights in Arizona, and bring water to communities in the western Navajo Nation, through the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2025. 

Water Matters! is written by Rin Tara and John Fleck of the Utton Transboundary Resource Center, with production and editorial assistance from Francesca Glaspell. Our logo and music were created by Sairis Perez-Gomez. 

When Irving Berlin penned “White Christmas” more than six decades ago, he did not have Albuquerque in mind. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of actually seeing falling flakes here on Christmas are about one in thirty. But that does not stop Rin Tara and John Fleck from hoping, scanning the long range weather forecasts as they write those last holiday cards and record their last podcast of 2025.

Guest: Stephanie Russo Baca

The old Western cliché that whiskey’s for drinking while water is for fighting over has always been problematic. Frequently attributed to Mark Twain, it seems that Twain never said it. And research by the Utton Center’s Stephanie Russo Baca shows that sharing water – ensuring that no one goes dry when the water runs low – is a viable approach to New Mexico water management.

In practice, New Mexico’s water law has always had an uneasy relationship with the “doctrine of prior appropriation,” the legal principle that newcomers should have their water cut off in times of shortage to ensure that those who came first can get a full supply. Russo Baca’s work shows how formalizing water shortage-sharing agreements can serve as a viable alternative, keeping irrigation ditches flowing that might otherwise go dry.

In this episode of Water Matters, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk with Russo Baca about how shortage sharing agreements can work, about their cultural heritage in New Mexico’s deep history of water sharing, and about how the state’s laws are adapting in the 21st century to make these new arrangements possible.

Guest: Stacy Timmons, Associate Director for Hydrology Programs at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources 

When the New Mexico legislature approved the Water Data Act in 2019, the state turned to Stacy Timmons to turn an idea into useful data tools to help communities around New Mexico manage a future with less water. Operating out of a third-floor office of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology building on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro, Timmons oversees the bureau’s efforts to figure out what sort of data communities need, and to help them get it - or get access to the myriad different kinds of data already being collected, turning it into useful tools.

The program’s latest project is using aerial surveys to measure water beneath the ground in places where there are not enough measurement wells to give communities the data they need to manage their aquifers. On this edition of Water Matters, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk with Timmons about groundwater measurement, aerial surveys, the importance of good data to support good decisions, and the joys of running along ditchbanks think about the water around us.

The snowpack and runoff forecasts for New Mexico’s rivers have begun conjuring up stories about the epically dry 2002. On this week’s episode, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the forecast, and the comparison.

On the Rio Grande, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is forecasting just 35 percent of median runoff at Otowi, in north-central New Mexico, with very little water at all making it down past San Marcial downstream from Socorro.

One big difference between 2002 and this year: in 2002, New Mexicans had a lot of water banked in upstream storage to keep the Rio Grande flowing during the dry summer months. “Only thing that allowed us to manage thru the year was releases of water stored in previous years. If this dryness continues, with no storage to speak of, 2026 will be a very difficult year of water management/flows and, unfortunately, possibly fires,” Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, retired New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission chief, wrote in the comments on John’s blog.

John posted a graph on his blog showing the comparison between 2002 storage and today.

Also on the latest episode:

•  Rin talks with us about their conversation with Alex Hager at KJZZ in Pheonix about the possibility of a short-term agreement on Colorado River management as a federal deadline looms.]
• A pitch to join Utton and the broader New Mexico water community for a screening of Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico, a film by the Utton Center. March 2, 2026, 5-6:30 p.m. Room 2401, UNM School of Law, 1117 Stanford NE, Albuquerque.

With Albuquerque’s first big snow storm of 2026 in the rearview mirror, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at how the mountains holding the critical snowpack for New Mexico’s Rivers fared.

They also share the latest on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s challenges in keeping Lake Powell’s water levels high enough to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s outlet works, and the implications that will have for Colorado River management in 2026.

For more on the snowpack, check out the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s west-wide maps to see how the winter is progressing in the watersheds you care about. 

Other links for this week’s edition:

·      Interstate Stream Commission meeting information

·      Reclamation’s Post-2026 Colorado River Management Environmental Impact Statement process

Guest: Dr. Ladona Clayton

As the New Mexico legislature begins a budget-focused 30-day session, the New Mexico Water Ambassadors have laid out their top legislative goals, critical steps needed to move the state toward a more sustainable water future. Dr. Ladona Clayton, Executive Director of the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy, joins Rin Tara and John Fleck on this edition of Water Matters! to talk about the opportunities and challenge in the state’s water future, and the steps state government can take to help. A 32-year veteran educator and political leader in Eastern New Mexico drawn to water work by the groundwater challenges faced by the Clovis-Portales area, Clayton was one of the leaders of the 2022 New Mexico Water Policy and Infrastructure Task Force, which met for much of 2022 to craft a broad set of goals for the state’s water management future. The Ambassadors grew out of the Task Force’s work, to move the group’s work beyond a report sitting on a shelf.

The snowpack in the headwaters basins of northern New Mexico and Colorado points to another low-runoff year on New Mexico’s major rivers. The January federal forecast projects flows of less than half the most recent 30-year average on the Rio Grande at Otowi, the key measurement point for central New Mexico, and just 17 percent at San Marcial, just above Elephant Butte Reservoir. With three months of snow-accumulation season left, those numbers will go up or down depending on weather between now and when snowmelt begins in April. But water managers urge caution, saying the runoff is more likely to go down from the initial forecast than up.

The bad news for 2026 also includes extremely low reservoir levels, with little water left over from last year to make up for shortfalls in this year’s runoff.

Other topics on this week’s pod:

·      The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River management Draft Environmental Impact Statement

Proposed budgets from the New Mexico Legislature and Governor 

There is no way to sugar coat the bad water news pill as 2026 enters what should be the rising limb of the runoff season, as Rin Tara and John Fleck report in this week's water update.

Consider: 

• Flow at Embudo, on the Rio Grande upstream from Española, is at its second lowest level for this point in the year in a record that, with a few gaps in the record in the early 20th century, goes back to the late 1800s. 
• Flow at the the USGS Albuquerque gage is the lowest it has been at this point in the year in half a century. 
• With the snowpack in the Rio Grande headwaters nearly melted out, the Rio Grande flowing out of the mountains at Del Norte in Colorado may already have peaked. It doesn't usually peak until June. 
• Flow on the Gila in Southern New Mexico is the lowest it has been at this point in the year since record keeping began in 1928.

And yet... Rin went hiking over the weekend in the Gila and saw Painted Redstarts and a whole lot more, and John rode his bike down to Albuquerque bosque (a map to Albuquerque's delightful "Glass Garden here), where the cottonwoods are greening up. Both rivers - the Gila and the Rio Grande - were low but still lovely.

Guest: Tucker Davidson

It seemed unfair – asking Tucker Davidson to name his favorite bird. A senior water associate at Audubon Southwest, Davidson is a hopeless bird nerd – pulling out his binoculars as he drives Rio Grande levee roads and walks through Albuquerque’s bosque.

Davidson joins Rin Tara and John Fleck to talk about the birds he loves, the places he loves, and how you can turn to birds to bring hope as drought and climate change dry New Mexico’s rivers.

And you, too, can visit some of his favorite places in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley:

-        The Rio Grande Nature Center

-        Albuquerque’s Open Space Visitor’s Center (especially the pond out by the parking lot, which Tucker and his Audubon colleagues help supply with water)

-        The ponds in the bosque near Tingley Beach

-        For the dirt-road adventurous, the “River Mile 60” area near Fort Craig

-        Any farm road around the valley, especially after irrigation. The birds love it.

Tucker’s birding bottom line: look for places where the water slows down.

Water Update: a shrinking Colorado River forecast

A declining runoff forecast for the Colorado River Basin means a tough year for water users as the Bureau of Reclamation juggles competing needs. Expect low releases in 2026 from Glen Canyon Dam, which means lower levels at Lake Mead this year, and efforts to move water downstream from Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Utah-Wyoming Border to prop up reservoir levels at Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam.

On the Rio Grande, flows remain low, the snowpack is almost completely melted, irrigators can expect another dry year with reduced supplies for locally grown crops, and we should expect the Rio Grande to dry again this year through Albuquerque.

Guest: Phil King

With a final agreement in sight that would settle Texas's 13-year-old lawsuit against New Mexico over water use on the Rio Grande, Rin Tara and John Fleck and joined by Phil King, retired New Mexico State University professor and one of the experts who has been helping sort out the complex details of the agreement.

In the lawsuit, Texas charged that New Mexico's groundwater pumping was depriving Texas communities of water to which it was entitled under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, an agreement dividing the Rio Grande's water among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

King explains how the proposed settlement would create a new way of measuring the flow of the Rio Grande from New Mexico to Texas, and require the retirement of agricultural land in Southern New Mexico as part of an effort to bring water use in line with available supply.

The proposed settlement has won preliminary approval from the "special master" who has been advising the Supreme Court of the United States on the case, with final action on the agreement possible later this year

With irrigation water flowing through the irrigation ditches of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at the latest snowpack numbers, river flows, and the remarkable temperatures Albuquerque has seen over the fall and winter of 2025-26.

Links:

• USGS Albuquerque gage (Why do they spell it “gage” instead of “gauge”?) 
• Snowpack reports
• Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (SCORP!)
• Utton’s Rio Grande Basin Documentary
• The European Space Agency’s Copernicus Browser, for the latest satellite data
• Albuquerque temperature data from xmACIS

The latest round of storms helped the snowpack in New Mexico’s headwaters rivers a little, but we’re so far behind that we still should expect to see a dry Rio Grande through central New Mexico this summer.

In this week’s Water Update, the Utton Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck take a look at the snowpack, the runoff forecasts, and the latest reservoir storage numbers. Spoiler alert: they’re not good.

But despite the bad news, both Tara and Fleck managed to get out to the river and find joy in what we’ve got.

Correction: Aldo Leopold was the Secretary of the ABQ Chamber of Commerce from 1917-1919, not a member of City Council.

Show notes links:

·       Colorado River Post-2026 management Environmental Impact Statement process

·       Snowpack maps

·       Streamflow at Albuquerque