Yesterday, the Adjudication Court for the Lower Rio Grande Basin issued a decision increasing the water rights owned by New Mexico Copper Corporation. These rights are not directly related to the Hearing on NMCC’s application to transfer leased water rights which ended two days ago, but the case that this court decision finalizes caused NMCC to lease water rights in the first place.
Eight years ago, local residents associated with PAWA (Percha-Animas Watershed Association) — Charles P. Barrett, Melody K. Sears, R. Wm. and Nolan Winkler, Robin Tuttle, Robert Shipley, Jim Goton, John and Agnes McGarvie, John and Cindy Cornell, Stanley and Joyce Brodsky, Arlene Lynch, and the Hillsboro Mutual Domestic Water Consumers Association – challenged NMCC’s claim of owning rights to use more than 7,000 afy of water at Copper Flat Mine. The Adjudication Court decided that only some 900 afy of those claimed rights were valid. That decision was appealed by both sides. The Appeals Court rejected the Adjudication Court’s initial invalidation of rights in old mining wells at the Copper Flat Mine site, amounting to some 1,000 afy, and ordered the lower court to reconsider. That reconsideration has taken almost two years.
Avoiding the issue of court determined abandonment — even though these wells have not been used for 40 years or more — the Adjudication court granted NMCC rights to use an additional 184.2 afy of water for mining. Along with some additional livestock and domestic water rights, the mine’s water rights now total a bit over 1,100 afy. While this amount is not enough to mine, added to NMCC’s leased rights that it has applied to transfer (in the just concluded Hearing) it will equal what Quintana used to mine in 1982.
One of the PAWA litigants, Robin Tuttle, a retired lawyer, commented, “Disappointing.”