From the President’s Desk: Addressing New Mexico’s Water Crisis by Adequately Funding the Prerequisites to Data-Driven Water Governance

The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (NMBGMR) is recognized nationally as a leading state geological and water science agency, and is responsible by law for multiple essential missions leading New Mexico’s historical and contemporary water science. The NMBGMR has consistently excelled despite constrained resources.

The 2019 Legislature directed the Bureau to spearhead implementation of the New Mexico Water Data Act. Overwhelming interest in the May 10, 2024, annual New Mexico Water Data Workshop, with a full day of events from 8 AM to 5 PM, featuring parallel tracks with a multitude of speakers in the afternoon is evidence of success. The workshop is at capacity. 

At this year’s workshop, I will address an ongoing issue during the morning plenary: the systematic underfunding of New Mexico’s water agencies by the Executive and Legislature. Despite the complete backing of the State’s Department of Higher Education for the NMBGMR’s budget expansion, which is vital to provide the foundation of science-based water management plans, the Governor’s Office and the 2024 Legislature approved exactly half of the Bureau’s request to do the essential work of providing data for water management and planning.

Chronic underfunding underscores a disregard by the Legislative Finance Committee and the House Appropriations and Finance Committee to fund water governance for the 21^st Century.  The legislature’s various finance committees and professional budget staff don’t work with the Legislature’s water committees, while the Governor’s office prioritized investments in badwater reclamation over managing and being stewards of our vital water resources. Such neglect demonstrates a profound lack of understanding, much less commitment, to the principles of effective water governance. Transformative change is essential for the health, safety, and welfare of living and future generations of New Mexicans.

The 2023 Water Security Planning Act explicitly links the implementation of the 2019 Water Data Act to regional water planning, yet both the Executive and the 2024 Legislature have failed to provide necessary funding, continuing a trend of ignoring the financial needs for implementing state water laws.

The 2019 Water Data Act mandates that all state-acquired water data be publicly available and managed properly. Unfortunately, this has not been a priority, with the Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department being the only one of four Water Data Act “Directing Agencies” to cite its obligations under the Act in its fiscal year 2025 budget request. 

The “Directing Agencies” collect, process, use, and own water data.  Their 2019 Water Data Act roles include making their data internally and publicly available so it can be used! I am not familiar with the NMED efforts to comply with the Act, if any.  The Office of the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission may be making progress with the resources departing State Engineer Mike Hamman has succeeded in getting, but they face major problems. Their staff doesn’t essential infrastructure like adequate computer hardware, which is currently limiting their productivity.  My guess is a finance person somewhere decided to prohibit the agencies from even requesting what they needed during the most recent budget cycle.

Office of the State Engineer (OSE) and the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) have these glaring opportunities to improve compliance with the Water Data Act but the hardworking professional staff don’t have the resources or management direction to accomplish them and are frustrated by the wholly inadequate resources requested by the Governor’s budget and appropriated by the 2024 Legislature.

1. The OSE is heavily investing in water metering and data collection in the Lower Rio Grande, which is crucial for a pending SCOTUS decree. However, the OSE does not make the resulting data accessible as mandated by the Water Data Act.
2. OSE public data is not dependable. The OSE maintains water data without adequate quality control. Due to public demand,  the OSE has made some of its data available on-line. Some of the on-line data are very poor quality but are made available without appropriate metadata and caveats. 
3. Water use data are critical to water planning.  The OSE still publishes its once-every five years “water use report” as it has done for decades.  The report that will poorly document water use from 2016 through 2020 is not yet available. Data users don’t find these reports very useful.  Staff responsible for these reports defend the outdated methodologies adopted in the last century used to prepare them in the absence of reliable hard data.  The reports consider consumptive and non-consumptive water uses together, which becomes the basis of misleading graphics and interpretations by others, including internal users who prepare public presentations.
4. OSE and ISC professional staff laborious assemble essential water data and maintain it in spreadsheets accessible only to themselves. Agency policies and managers do not encourage them to make their data available on-line where it would be accessible internally and outside the agencies. 
5. The ISC interstate stream compact data are essential for water management and planning.  This specific case is an example of #4.  The 2019 Water Data Act requires these and all other state-funded water data to be online and accessible through the New Mexico Water Data Catalogue.

Vital water data mismanagement due to lack of sufficient Directing Agencies’ executive support and Executive and Legislature negligence and disregard of true priorities will continue to hamper effective water governance planning and management long after adequate funding to really tackle this essential task is first and then annually thereafter made available..

New Mexico is at a crossroads. Without a significant shift towards a water governance framework that recognizes and integrates hydrologic and climate realities with actionable data informing and motivating real action, parts of the state risk becoming uninhabitable.

This shift requires a departure from the Legislature’s practice of passing laws without funding their implementation. It is imperative that the Governor’s Office and the Legislature fully commit to funding the necessary changes outlined in the 2019 Water Data Act and the 2023 Water Security Planning Act. Only through such transformative changes can New Mexico hope to secure a sustainable water future for all its regions and residents.