River Currents Issue #7, February 2009
AWSA Stakeholders Provide Input on “Desired Future Conditions”
What is your vision of a water future for Southwestern New Mexico? About 30 stakeholders from the area spent a beautiful Saturday morning at a recent workshop designed to solicit input on this important question. The meeting was held as part of the Arizona Water Settlements Act (AWSA) water planning process that was established to find consensus on how to utilize the AWSA in a cost-effective manner to balance historical and future water demands against uncertain supply while protecting the environment. The AWSA provides New Mexico consumptive use of an additional 14,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Gila and San Francisco Rivers and a federal subsidy of $66 million to meet water supply needs regardless of whether additional water is developed in the Upper Gila Basin.
Definition of Desired Future Conditions (DFC) is the first step in outlining planning objectives, strategies and alternatives for the AWSA water planning process. For instance, if one’s vision is for a dependable supply of water to meet the needs of the various interests in the region, what are the strategies that might be used to meet this objective? They might be water reuse strategies, water conservation, groundwater management, etc.
Stakeholders representing municipal and state governments, irrigators, conservation community, business sector and general public were given 5 minutes each to present their DFC statement and supporting information. Not surprisingly, there was common ground among most stakeholders around the theme of sustainable balance of our water resources, with many mentioning the need to do this in a cost-effective manner. Water conservation in the municipal, agricultural and industrial sectors was also highlighted as a critical need. Read more
Note: The AWSA Planning Process maintains a webpage that contains meeting agendas, minutes, and presentations from all of the Stakeholder Group meetings at www.awsaplanning.com
Gila River Festival Songwriting Competition Winner “Banks of the Gila” Now Available for Download
“The song isn’t factual, and it takes liberties, but it’s based on my real experiences at the Gila River,” said singer-songwriter Wally Lawder. The 4th annual Gila River Festival featured a songwriting competition, and there were two winners: Wally Lawder and Jeff Goin, both local songwriters.
The two winning songs debuted at the Dance for the Rio Gila during the Gila River Festival in September. Lawder’s song, Banks of the Gila, was written over the span of two months, as it evolved from “a commercial jingle into a real song.” And not just “real,” but lovely, too!
Two local recording studios donated professional recording sessions as prizes for the winning songs. We owe big thanks to the studios for their contribution to the Gila River Festival and to the local music scene. Wally recorded his song at Mountain Air Productions. Jeff Goin’s song, Roll On, Gila River, will be recorded at Barefoot Studio by the Silver City String Beans. Watch for it on our website soon. Both songs will be featured on KSIL, a Silver City radio station featuring folk, alt-country, bluegrass, roots rock, and more fine music. To listen to Banks of the Gila, click here.
A Water Grab on the San Augustine Plains could alter the Gila
By Guest Contributor, Mary Katherine Ray
The Plains of San Augustine in south central New Mexico are a long way from the Gila River across the Continental Divide. Looking across the vast concave landscape ringed by mountains it seems like an enormous bowl of grass and not much else.
The plains are the remnant of what once was a huge lake which dried up about 10,000 years ago. All the rain that falls on the mountains ringing the Plains drains into them. But for a lake to persist, the amount of rainfall has to exceed the amount of water that is lost from evaporation and percolation. 10,000 years ago, the climate changed and the amount of rainfall decreased, so that now more water evaporates or percolates to groundwater thus drying up this ancient lake. It turns out the basin is a leaky one and this water doesn’t just go underground and stay there. A 1973 New Mexico Tech hydrology report concluded that the water seeping into the plains leaks out from under them to supply the headwaters of the Gila River.
A water well application has been submitted to the New Mexico State Engineer’s office by Augustin Ranch LLC, a private corporation owning land near Datil at the north end of the plains. The plan calls for drilling 37 wells with 20-inch well casings to a depth of 3,000 feet in order pump out 54,000 acre feet of water a year from under the San Augustine Plains. That is over 17 billion gallons that will be removed annually. The application states that the intent for the water is to pipe it over to the Rio Grande to make up for shortfalls caused by over-consumption upstream. This amount could supply water to an entire city over twice the size of Las Cruces and could deplete the aquifer in only a few decades. Not only would neighboring landowners discover their wells running dry, surface springs would disappear and water that makes its way to the Gila River would wind up in the Rio Grande instead. The entire region would be placed at risk of catastrophic loss.
John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”, and never was that more true than with the San Augustine Plains water grab. The list of protests received by the State Engineer’s Office, approximately 500, reveals how far reaching the water grab actually is. Ranchers, concerned citizens, Indian tribes, acequias and government agencies at the local, state and federal level all submitted protests. So did the Gila Conservation Coalition (Click here for more inof on GCC’s protest). You can still be involved even though the time for official protest has passed. If you’d like to help, contact Carol Pittman who lives right next door to the proposed pumping sites at pittray@gilanet.com to get updates and find out how.
The author is also a protestant who lives on the south side of the Plains.
5th Annual Gila River Festival to Begin Planning
Autumn Turkey Creek Dennis Okeefe.jpgPlease join us for the kick-off planning meeting for the 5th annual Gila River Festival, scheduled for September 17 – 20, 2009. Next year’s festival theme will highlight the centennial of Aldo Leopold’s conservation legacy in the southwest.
Come with your energy and ideas to make next year’s festival another successful event!
We’ll meet on Tuesday, December 9 at 10 am in the GRIP office at 305A North Cooper St. in Silver City.
Ongoing Improvements to GCC Website
We’d like to let you know about a few new features we’ve added to our website:
1) Internal search engine.
You can now enter keywords to do a quick and easy search of all content in our site, including PDF’s.
2) Plogger Photo Gallery.
Our new online gallery is growing, with over 150 pictures from this year’s Gila River Festival, plus an expanding cache of images from other GCC events, like Gila River Day and workshop photos. Check out our collection of fine art photos portraying the awesome beauty of the Gila River in its free-flowing state. Double click on any thumbnail to view a larger version of each picture. You can even post comments online!
If you have photos from previous festivals or GCC events that you’d like to share, please email them to us or get instructions for uploading many images, so that everyone else can enjoy them too!
3) We Want Your Feedback on GCC articles.
Through GoogleDocs, we have now set up a place for you to share comments and ideas at the end of many of our online articles. Your thoughts are valuable to us in our work to preserve the Gila, New Mexico’s last free-flowing river.