In a recent article, I suggested the city has about 1,000 acre feet a year it could lease to developers, and, since the Hot Springs Basin is closed, that gave the city a lot of control over development locally.
Max Yeh, my compatriot in the Citizen publication, pointed out that the Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado case decided New Mexico owes more water than it has or is delivering downstream and it is still being worked out how the state is going to meet that obligation.
Yeh also pointed out that how the debt is paid will probably be determined by two state water laws.
The first law is ‘use it or lose it,’ with cities getting 40 years to use water rights before the Office of the State Engineer can consider reclaiming those unused water rights.
I would bet my bottom dollar that T or C has never used its full water right in the last 40 years. In 2007 or so, when Hot Springs Land Development was negotiating with the city for water and sewer services, I think the city was producing less than 1,300 acre feet a year, compared to the 1,650 acre feet in fiscal year 2026.
The second law is ‘priority’ that will likely determine how the OSE will pay the state’s past water debt and future water payments. Yeh points out the city’s water right dates back to 1939, which is way junior to surface or river water rights.
Yeh has studied water law and participated in water-right adjudications locally and in California for more than 20 years and I defer to his expertise.
So, I take it back. The City of T or C has much less control over development in the area than I surmised. I hope the feasibility study the city commission has agreed to have done on development at the airport and surrounding land takes the court case and water law into consideration. Without going to court, the OSE is probably not going to give the city a definitive answer on how much water right it has, and it probably isn’t wise for the city to bring its unused water rights to OSE attention until the law suit is settled.
And the OSE, when and if it evaluates whether to reclaim the city’s unused water, will probably have a jaundiced opinion of the city’s massive water waste, due to neglect of its infrastructure.
A recent documents request reveals that despite the last seven years of intensive water-pipe and system repairs, the city leaked/wasted between 43 percent to over 45 percent of the water it pumped and treated in calendar year 2025. In the first six months of calendar year 2026 the average water loss is between nearly 40 percent to 47 percent.
The city should probably not consider any commercial development until the lawsuit is settled and until it has fixed its water-waste problem. The average water loss for U.S. cities is a shocking 16 percent, according to Google AI, since neglect of water and sewer infrastructure is a common failing among many cities. But most cities and states are not facing the consequences of losing a lawsuit resulting in a big water debt, past and future, and most cities are not in the desert.
The county commission placed an 18-month moratorium on data centers in the county due to high electric and water use, among other factors that may come to light with closer examination of possible impacts of such developments locally.
But there has been little to no push back concerning the Copper Flat Mine’s pending mining permit, and it too will use massive amounts of water and electricity.
The county commission was faced with 60 or so articulate and determined constituents a few days ago at its regular meeting that forced them to go further than their original resolution that was little more than a strongly worded letter.
T or C constituents, about four years ago, showed up in force at a city commission meeting to protest the city’s proposal to build a bridge carrying vehicles and water and sewer lines across the river to allow the Brown family to put in a residential development. The city commissioners ignored them and that bridge is still among its capital projects on its (ICIP) submitted yearly to the state.
The airport development plan was added to T or C’s ICIP for this year’s submission about a month ago.
T or C commissioners about five months ago expressed interest in partnering with Elephant Butte to provide the Turtleback Mountain Resort’s proposed 500 homes with water, wastewater and solid waste services, as discussed during Elephant Butte’s request to deannex its wastewater treatment plant from T or C’s city boundary and to annex it into Elephant Butte’s.
I was the only naysayer at the deannexation/annexation public hearing.
T or C annexed the Brown property into the city limits in the early-to-mid 1990s without thought or consideration of delivering water and sewer services. The same lack of thought went into the seven-square-miles annexed into the city around 2006 or so of Hot Springs Land Development’s property, despite public protest.
T or C’s current city commission shows a similar lack of thought and planning and gung-ho attitude toward development. As a result, the city may find it has promised more water than it can deliver, just as the state did, costing its people many millions of dollars and litigation, with many millions more in expense coming up to settle past and future water debt.
The water shortage in the Rio Grande Valley continues to be a catastrophic problem. Everyone should be concerned. Yesterday Elephant Butte Reservoir was at 1.35% of capacity. This was calculated using the Bureau of Reclamation current water level of 29804 acre feet divided by their listed capacity for Elephant Butte of 2210298 acre feet. And despite the lack of water in the Rio Grande, developers want to add 500 more homes to the area to use up more of the little water left in the system.
It will be interesting to see if the Office of the State Engineer will allow Truth or Consequences to just start using up the approximately 1000 acre feet of water rights that have sat unused for many decades. Perhaps the City leaders will argue that they have been using the water since the water system was not maintained and millions of gallons of water was used to supply the leakage in the municipal water system comprising almost half of all the water that has been pumped from underground. Leakage is just part of the normal everyday operations. The failure to maintain infrastructure of all kinds has gotten to be the norm in New Mexico.
For example, the Interstate Highway system and the rural State road system seem to be perpetually in a state of deterioration. Municipal roadways don’t seem to be much better, especially when the pavement is constantly being dug up to repair underground system failures and the riding surface becomes a series of potholes from all of the repairs.
There is an online effort with a petition that proposes to stop water transfers in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. It seems that the goal is to halt transfers from agriculture to other peripheral uses – like data centers and industrial uses.
I find it interesting that in mid-2023, a company called FANME (based in Taiwan) transferred about 38 acre feet of water rights from the Isleta Diversion to a property located in Champagne Hills. FANME is apparently a subsidiary of Virgin Galactic and the transferred water rights were intended to be used for the Virgin Galactic Campus that was promised to be built in Sierra County almost 4 years ago. This was to provide for the training center and hotel accomodations for tourist astronauts and their guests who would fly to the edge of space from Spaceport America. Will the Office of the State Engineer just look the other way when the owner of the 38 acre feet of water rights finally decides after more than four years to finally start to withdraw water from Elephant Butte Reservoir system? I had hoped FANME and Virgin Galactic would build this training facility and that Sierra County would actually see some new jobs! I have my doubts at this point.
I fear that the new training facility promised by Virgin Galactic seems to be yet one more failed promise adding to a long string of promises going back 20 years when former Governor Bill Richardson and Economic Development Director Rich Homan started making promises to the residents of of Sierra County about economic prosperity just around the corner. (Incidentally, another Bill Richardson project, the $4 million Camino Real Visitor Center, just got demolished after that epic failure.). For the last couple of years, nothing has gone to space or even close to it at the Spaceport. Virgin Galactic now promises to start flying again by Christmas — we will see. You too can take a ride — it is now only about $750,000 a ticket!
I can hardly wait for the tremendous economic boost which will be just around the corner. Perhaps Prereal will start building those 500 new homes as people, including all of the Spaceport high-tech workers, flock to Sierra County.