Initiatives
The Santa Fe River was designated “the most endangered river in America” in 2007, by American Rivers , a national environmental organization (www.americanrivers.org). The flow of the Santa Fe River is completely impounded in twin water supply reservoirs just upstream of the City of Santa Fe, and the river that flowed historically, and is the reason the City was established there, is now a dry ditch in the middle of town.
A community that chooses a dry ditch over a flowing river is a good place to investigate cultural values. What are they thinking? How did this happen? Is it “necessary” to dam up the entire flow of the river so the City can have enough water? On what basis do Santa Fe residents determine what’s necessary? How can we unravel what’s cultural vs. what’s fundamentally physical in Santa Fe’s opting to sacrifice the river that runs through town? What are they sacrificing the river for? What is the calculation of competing values that is going on in the collective Santa Fe mind?
The Context
The Santa Fe River emerges from the 12,000 foot high Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the East of Santa Fe City and flows 46 miles in a generally southwesterly direction, to join the Rio Grande across from Cochiti Pueblo, just downstream from Cochiti Dam. The uppermost stretch of river starts on the backside of the Santa Fe Ski slopes and winds through the mountains and is captured by back-to back reservoirs. These two reservoirs provide water for the City of Santa Fe, amounting to about half the water the city uses each year. The other half of the water comes from deep wells in and near the city.
The second section of river extends from the lower dam through the city of Santa Fe, to the wastewater treatment plant where effluent is discharged into the river. This 10-mile stretch of river is normally dry, because the upstream dams are operated to impound the full flow of the river.
The lowermost section of the river starts at the wastewater treatment plant and extends through beautiful canyons before emerging onto the Rio Grande Valley on Cochiti tribal lands. This section of river is normally flowing, thanks to the combination of treated effluent and natural springs further downstream, but the water never actually gets to the Rio Grande. About 2 miles from its mouth, there is another dam on the Santa Fe River, this one serving as an emergency spillway should Cochiti Reservoir (just upstream on the Rio Grande) ever fill up. The spillway dam was constructed without a gate so there is no longer a surface connection between the Rio Grande and its former tributary, the Santa Fe River. The only hydrologic connection now is through seepage of the Santa Fe River water that ponds up behind the dam.
Santa Fe’s Water System and Policies
The upstream dams that block the flow of the Santa Fe River provide 45% of the City’s water supply in normal years. The water is treated in a modern facility near the dams, and distributed from there to the city’s 38,000 water customers. The remaining 55% of the city’s water comes from groundwater wells along the Santa Fe River (20%) or from wells just north of town and piped into the city. Nearly the entire flow of the river is owned by the City, and stored in the reservoirs. That water is the City’s preferred source of supply, as compared to groundwater, because it is high quality and inexpensive to treat (since it is clean) and to deliver (by gravity).
Santa Fe’s water policies are based on Western US water law (hereafter “Western water law”) and is summarized in the phrase, “First in time, first in right.” Earlier claims to water trump later claims, other things being equal. The most important of these other things is putting the water to “beneficial use,” which has a legal definition but generally means an economically productive purpose. The intention was to ensure that water was put to productive purpose, as defined in the late 19th Century. Omitted from the law was any consideration of the water resource itself. Neither the rights of nature in general or the rights of a river in particular, were accorded a seat at the legal table. Also omitted from consideration were the rights of future generations. Both these issues, the rights of Nature and intergenerational equity, have become big topics in environmental discourse, but have yet to be incorporated into the policies governing how water is actually used in New Mexico, and most particularly, along the Santa Fe River.
The water supply system we see today, the dams and pipes and treatment plants, and the water policies in force today, are relatively thin overlays on a very deep history and even deeper prehistory of water use in the Santa Fe Basin. How is it that we have arrived at the present situation, where both the water in the river, and even the river channel itself, can be claimed as private property on which the public at large has no valid claim?
History of River Values
The story begins with the irrigated fields of the ancestral Puebloan peoples, presumably Tewa-speaking, who first harnessed the normally gentle flow of the Santa Fe River. With the Spanish conquest and the establishment of Santa Fe as the capital of El Norte in (or around) 1610, the agricultural use of water intensified. The Santa Fe River was tapped, as the first activity of settlement, by a growing network of canals (acequias) which provided the food for the growing capitol. More that 30 acequias were established, irrigating around 2,000 acres of farmland, and diverting so much water that even in the 18th and 19th centuries, stretches of the river were dry during the summer months.
We know quite a bit about the values underlying contemporary acequia agriculture (Rodriguez 2007) and by extrapolation it seems safe to suggest that the Spanish viewed the river primarily as the lifeline for the colony’s food supply. The rights of nature were implicitly assumed: “The tacit, underlying premise is that all living creatures have a right to water” (Rodriguez, p. 115). Another cultural core belief related to water as that its use should be shared: “The principle of water sharing belongs to a larger moral economy that promotes cooperative economic behavior through inculcating the core value of respecto and gendered norms of personal comportment” (p. 116).
The 19th Century saw major changes in the cultural orientation towards the river. The emergence of the East-West connection known as the Santa Fe Trail, opened up new cultural influences culminating in American conquest of Santa Fe in 1846 and the formal annexation of New Mexico in 1848.
Some 30 years later, three events happened in quick succession that would forever change the relationship of local residents to agriculture in general and water in particular. The advent of the railroad in 1880 brought access to food staples from outside markets. That same year, the privatization of water began with the incorporated of the Santa Fe Water Company, and the first dam was built, about 2.5 miles upstream from plaza. Henceforth, water would be held as private property, or it would be quickly lost to others who did hold those concepts. Old Stone Dam could store only 25 acre feet of water, less that 1% of the current capacity of the city’s reservoirs, but a new era had clearly begun.
Just over a decade later, in 1893, work started on the much larger “Two Mile” Dam just downstream from the first dam, with a storage capacity of 387 acre feet. When the Old Stone Dam was filled in by flood sediment in 1904, the small loss in system capacity made little difference. Between 1904 and 1926, the Water Company stored and delivered about 400 acre-feet of water each year to its water customers, for both household and irrigation uses. As the population quadrupled from 5,072 in 1910 to over 20,000 by the end of the 1930s, more residents connected to the water system. As water demand increased more and more, it flowed into acequias less and less. (Plewa 2007)
Agriculture remained the dominant water user up to World Water II. A survey in 1919 found 1200 acres irrigated by 38 ditches, but water competition was growing. In 1928 a new dam was completed five miles upstream, more than doubling the total storage capacity, and in 1943, a third dam was completed in between the other two. When Santa Fe soldiers returned home from WW-II they found most of their acequias dry and their water rights lost on legal technicalities. In spite of howels of protest at the time, and legal appeals that are still in process, the reality on the ground was that the era of agriculture was over. The American approach, in the words of Sylvia Rodgrigues (p. 116), “…replace(d) the ethic of sharing on the basis of equity and need with a zero-sum system of allocation based on prior appropriation.” From now on, the river’s water would be viewed as a means for continued urban expansion, rather than agricultural production.
In the post-WW-II years, the water claims of the acequia farmers became moot as the river channel eroded below the level of the old canals. The erosion of the river bed is a stark feature of the contemporary river, a result of the artificial on-off water regime and downcutting from unchecked stormwater flowing from the ever expanding urban hardscape. In the 1970s the City adopted a deliberate policy of encouraging the downcutting that was in any case already happening, as an inexpensive solution to flood control through the downtown. In places the river has eroded 20 feet, lowering the entire water table out of reach of even the oldest cottonwood trees (many of which died as a result).
In 1994 the oldest, smallest, and furthest downstream of the three reservoirs, Two Mile, was decommissioned due to fears that the dam had become unsafe. Faced with costly complications, the entire water system along with the two upstream reservoirs, was sold by the private water company (which at the time was PNM) to the City of Santa Fe. The water system that had been wrested from local control a hundred years earlier, was now back under public management. The Santa Fe River was once again controlled by the people, and not by a private company.
The fact that the water management policies did not undergo any change with this change in ownership testifies to the persistence of the cultural values underpinning those policies. Whether the owner of the water is private or public, the best use of the water was not questioned; the water would continue to be used to support municipal development.
The Current Situation
The City’s “River Corridor Master Plan” adopted by Council resolution in 1995 called for releasing water for year-round flows, but the policy was never enacted. Five years later when the city initiated its first substantial water conservation program based on replacing conventional toilets with water-saving models, the sole purpose was to create a new source of water to support development. Freeing up water so the river could flow was, according to numerous informants, not even an issue of discussion. Recently (Fall 2009) a new water conservation program was established which will create new water credits to support additional development, but not to replace the river’s lost water.
Yet along with the “business as usual” approach to water policies, there are new values being reflected in future development plans. The City’s long range water supply plan, adopted by City Council resolution in 2008, echoes the 1995 Master Plan in calling for year-round river flows during normal years. The new plan shows how river flow could be accommodated using new sources of water (piped in from the Rio Grande) that would relieve the reliance on the Santa Fe reservoirs and groundwater. Santa Fe’s mayor, elected in 2006, included the restoration of a “living river” as part of his political platform, and established a “Santa Fe River Commission” to advise the City on how to achieve this goal.
The river values of Santa Fe exhibit inconsistencies between support for restoring the river, along with reluctance to allocate water specifically for that purpose. The river provides a lesson in the realities of water ethics in the American West. Healthy rivers are considered highly desirable, and restoring them is seen as the right thing to do, but at what cost? Thus far, it appears that citizens are willing to reduce their water use in response to appeals for water conservation, but those appeals have not been linked specifically to restoring flow in the river. All water savings through conservation have been allocated to support additional development. Do the citizens of Santa Fe have a river ethic, or merely a water ethic?
For more about the Santa Fe River, visit the website of the Santa Fe Watershed Association: www.santafewatershed.org.
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Other Resources for the Santa Fe River:
Sustaining the Santa Fe River (article in Southwest Hydrology, Jan/Feb 2010, by C. Borchert, B. Drypolcher, and A. Lewis)
A Quick and Easy Recipe for Restoring the Santa Fe River (article in Sustainable Santa Fe 2009 by David Groenfeldt).
Local Traditions of Acequia Agriculture and Water Resource Use (article in Sustainable Santa Fe 2009, by Tara Plewa