Cocoposts

Spoiling Junior

At the Audubon Water, Birds and Conservation Summit on June 15th, participants heard about the Western Rivers Action Network and their efforts to address river health. Insightful presentations by panelists got people thinking. There will be a similar workshop in Las Cruces on June 29th.

It sure got me thinking. Junior water users - primarily municipalities and industries - are not supposed to have priority over senior water users - mostly tribes and farmers.  But no one wants to tell a city 'no.'  State water administrators bend over backwards to avoid it and appear to have assigned them a nearly unquestioned primacy over others. The agencies, engineers, hydrologists, lawyers, lobbyists and consultants who represent the 'juniors' are in the pilot's seat of the ship and no court adjudication is on the horizon.

Take Rio Rancho and Intel for example. They don't have all the water rights for the water they're using, but no one is telling them no, or slow. Take the oil and gas industry that consumes and permanently pollutes an un-tracked amount of fresh groundwater. No one is telling them no, or slow, or to collect data (or even follow the law.)  Just the farmers. They are hearing 'no' quite a bit these days.

Water data also seems framed to benefit junior users. The huge place in pie charts for agriculture often counts  flows in the river and riverside drains, ditches and acequias of the inner valley that support flora, wildlife habitat and, significantly, aquifer recharge from those waterways and farms. All that water is "agriculture." Naturally, the eye is drawn to that magnificently fat pie slice when the need to conserve comes up.

Data presenters also frequently make a distinction between "Economic Development" and "Agriculture." Like farmers are doing it for fun.  Industry and the land speculation arts real estate are considered real economic development that must have adequate water supplies.  To some, farming is a quaint relic of the 19th century. Like sunbonnets.

Where does birdwatching and New Mexico's huge outdoor economy fit in?  Well, if it can't join the Chamber it isn't economic development.

 

Boat Ramps and Prairie Chickens

The New Mexico legislature's interim Water and Natural Resources Committee met in Santa Fe recently. The key presentations of dire drought news and water administration "hot spots" were by the State Engineer and the Interstate Stream Commission Chair.

State Engineer Scott Verhines presented an interesting list of legislative "You Wants" that presumably sum-up the direction of water policy for the State.  At the top of his list: "You want to aggressively protect our water from other states."

As during the regular session, staff presented a huge pile of sobering information at the meeting that no one had time to digest. Questions were not substantive, no actual work plan was established beyond meeting dates and the Committee Chairman Senator Phil Griego diverted a great deal of the committee's time to listening to lamentations about the Lesser Prairie Chicken and dry boat ramps on Conchas Lake - both of which seemed out of context and far less important than basic water policy. One might almost suspect that committee attention was purposefully diverted to avoid the giant, tough, ugly questions. 

Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino wrote about the meeting and suggested some of those hard questions.

 Is it wise to rely on unproven technology to bail us out? Does desalinization of brackish water from deep aquifers offer anything more than a temporary fix? Can we build a pipeline from the Mississippi Valley to move millions of acre feet uphill—and does that make economic, environmental or social sense? Would systems for water recycling and reuse change the situation enough to justify the capital investments required? Is cloud seeding anything more than a pipe dream?

Great questions. But don't expect to hear anything about them at the next interim Water and Natural Resources Committee meeting.

 

 

More Old Adobe Walls

Pueblo ruins and public works don't go together.


A Tiwa* Pueblo, one of at least a dozen that existed when Coronado arrived in 1540, sat where Alameda Elementary School is today. The County trenched sewer lines throughout the valley without letting archaeology get in the way. This included cutting through the school site and the site of the old church further west. Crews only slowed down for history when they turned up churchyard bones.

In other valley locations the County has plopped big deep drainage ponds within yards of known pueblo ruins and other archaeological sites. They broke no laws, sadly. Without use of federal funding clearance surveys aren't required. There are no restrictions on private land at all. A developer may have to note a site with a subdivision action but the only time it slows anything down is when human bones are found. Some requirements are triggered then but that's mostly about respect for the dead. It's not the same thing as respect for history.

Oh well. An engineer I worked for once said, "What does an old adobe wall have to tell me?" I actually tried to answer but it was rhetorical and he waved me away.

According to church history and resident Barbara Santillanes Tapia, there were 7000 Tiguex Indians and a Spanish Mission at Alameda in 1620. Six years later the Indian population had dropped to 2000 and by the time of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 there were only 300 Indians at Alameda. Along with Sandia Pueblo residents, they actively participated in the 1680 revolt and an earlier uprising in 1650. 

Lively place once, this valley.

 

*Tiwa is the same as Tiguex. I'm not consistent in usage. Sue me. 

Dragging Boulders Down Old Alameda Road

Father Troy borrowed some chains from my uncle, my mother's brother, to go get rocks for the foundation of the church, rocks from a place they called La Piedra del Rayo, beyond Edith. He dug those rocks with a team of horses.

(From Shining River Precious Land, An Oral History of Albuquerque's North Valley, Kathryn Sergeant and Mary Davis, 1986.)

The old road to Juan Tabo Canyon from this valley isn't a road anymore. But you can still see it on the aerial from 1963 and google maps, a road scar running east-northeast from the valley through the old Coronado airport, also gone now. Like a lot of old features in the landscape of growing cities, the road became obsolete, largely forgotten and is nearly or completely lost.

It was the direct route between places barely known to us today and used for purposes now deemed unnecessary - like hunting, herding cows and sheep and hauling wood and rocks.  It makes a bee-line from the early Spanish village and even earlier Tiguex pueblo at Alameda to the closest canyon in the Sandias.

The villagers in Alameda lost their adobe church, and everything else, in a flood in 1904. In 1907 the community began construction of a new church under the direction of Father Troy. To assure that this one would never melt in a flood, it was built of stone - huge granite boulders and sandstone rocks from the Sandia Mountains. Parishioners pulled wagons and dragged giant boulders in chains behind teams of horses  between 1907 and 1911 when main construction was undertaken. This explains the deep scars that make the road bed still visible today.

The church, Nativity of The Blessed Virgin Mary, was consecrated in 1913 making this is the 100th anniversary of the "new" church. It will be celebrated. The road won't.  The road has been eclipsed, truncated and duplicated in name. "Alameda Boulevard" slices across the valley carrying commuter and truck traffic across the Rio Grande to and from Albuquerque's sprawling westside and Interstate 25. 

But you can still see a little bit of the road in the valley for a short stretch between Fourth Street and Edith Boulevard - an unremarkable segment except for the view to the east. Where once a mental institution dominated the mesa, now the Balloon Fiesta Park and Museum command the mesa and the view.

(Photo from Nativity Church)

Butchery of Equines in History

What started the 1540 Tiguex War in what is now the Albuquerque area was what ended the Battle of Glorieta during the Civil War - butchery of innocent equines.

At Glorieta Union soldiers snuck to Confederate supply wagons and killed all the mules.  In the fields along the Rio Grande the Tiguex killed the Spaniards' mules and horses.

They were the first the Tiguex had ever seen. The superiority afforded the Spanish mounted on the new beasts played into the massacre no doubt, as did the horses' offense of being allowed by their Spanish masters to graze and trample Tiguex fields that terrible winter. The horses were priceless to the Spanish and no doubt highly trained, carefully bred and valued above nearly all else.

It was a turn-key event. Sad to imagine but no less part of the history that "started badly and stayed that way a long time."

It's still not so great for Spanish horses. 

Tiguex War

Events surrounding Coronado's first contact with the Tiguex people in what's now the Albuquerque area are among the most dramatic in North American history. Clay Mathers, expert in all things Spanish Colonial Archaeology, thinks so and this amateur is inclined to agree with him. Mathers spoke about Coronado and his new book at the Old Albuquerque Library Saturday morning.

For one thing, the 1540 entrada was huge - an estimated 2800 people, maybe more, traveling with 7000 animals at one point. The size of this military expedition alone had big consequences. Natives didn't have a  food surplus and were not expecting thousands of guests and their animals. As Mathers puts it, things started badly and stayed that way.  .

Tiguex resistance was immediate and long running. The war waged against them was called "savage and without mercy" by a chronicler at the time. That's saying something given the general savage and merciless treatment of other natives that same year, like the Zuni.

Mathers gave an overview of the larger forces at work during the time of Coronado's entrada, like global trade and political positioning.  He also notes the impact of  native resistance against the Spanish here and other places. Coronado's extended absence from his own home in Mexico, for example, was occasioned by a native uprising.  And the Chichimec war stymied Spanish settlement of Northern Mexico for 50 years.

Mathers notes significant long term consequences of the Tiguex War and Coronado's little visit to the Middle Rio Grande. Most notable among them was Don Juan de Oñate's choice to just keep riding when he got here. Seething resentment among the Tiguex was still evident 58 years later and enfluenced his choice for a capital much much further north at San Gabriel.

Kuaua Painted Kiva

 

 

Edgar Lee Hewitt led the first excavations at what is now Coronado Monument in the summer of 1934. In trenching the following year they discovered the painted kiva.

Hewitt originally wanted the entire site exposed for visitors to see and intended to rebuild the pueblo as it would have looked when occupied - a Tiguex Williamsburg in time for the 400th Anniversary of Coronado’s arrival. But the deadline loomed and he ran out of money.

Only two structures were replicated: a one story room block that no longer exists and the square painted kiva. Restoration of this replica kiva and its murals was the subject of the lecture April 21, 2013 sponsored by the Friends of Coronado Monument.

Preservation History of the WPA Era Painted Kiva murals at Kuaua

Richard Reycraft, Cultural Resources Program Manager, New Mexico State Monuments.*

Puaray LA 717

The  pueblo called Puaray was large at the time of Coronado's 1540 entrada. It was in the northern portion of a collection of at least a dozen villages in and along the Rio Grande in the Albuquerque area. With the notable and treasured exception of Kuaua at Coronado Monument, almost all of the Tiguex ruins are lost.

Puaray and another pueblo ruin called Maigua were both close to Alameda, site of yet another large Tiwa pueblo located where the elementary school is today. Like elsewhere in the valley, remnants of Alameda pueblo were used as road base in the 1930’s and largely forgotten or disregarded thereafter.

 

Gravel mining destroyed any archaeological or paleontological sites ever located along the eastern edge of the Rio Grande.  A quick comparison of aerials shows the massive extent of earth removal and rearrangement. As the area where “Renaissance Center” Costco is located at Montano Road was mined in the 1970s, fossil hunters prowled the area. I also remember a man who discovered tiny ancient hand-made beads on his gravel roof and was forever thereafter obsessed with the search for more.

 

Site grading for new buildings, trenching for pipelines and utilities and excavation for drainage ponds ::coughBernalilloCountycough:: has completely altered physical history of the once great Tiguex Provencia as well.

 

Puaray, like so many other pueblo ruins in the vicinity of today's Albuquerque, is gone, gone, gone.

Boy that was a different place. Everyone can see the current photo of this place at present by zooming in on north Albuquerque from current imagery.

1. The MAGIC map room really is just that.
2. Shocking how much dirt has been moved in fifty years.

When I moved to the valley...

Lessons from the 2013 #nmleg

The capitol building itself is a wondrous place. This year again I found myself walking round and round looking for a committee room that had disappeared. A friend remarked it would be a bad place for a bad acid trip. Look! That buffalo is coming out of the wall!

The final days of the session were a little stale and sad - like the last weekend of the State Fair when all the grass is brown and the animals are gone. The bills are like those 4-H livestock projects. A whole lot of work. Few trophies. They die.

Sitting in committee hearing rooms turned up interesting details and occasional spontaneous outbursts of sincere emotion. No less interesting were instances of calculated misdirection or omissions in testimony -  and the potent questions left hanging

How much gas or oil do we get for all that fresh groundwater?

And shouldn't water be worth more than oil? 

The major things:

1. New Mexico consistently overvalues engineers, businessmen and big construction projects and undervalues artists, teachers and intangible natural assets. It's all about the money. No less at the legislature. Probably more so. Treatment of water in a drought is one example. Water rights market wheeling and dealing is very hot right now. Many predict those who can not pay for water lawyers and hydro-geologists will be left high and dry. Small farmers. Small fish. Meanwhile big water pipeline projects with fat construction contracts will be justified with magical incantations.* Gila River? Go Fish.
 
2. The negative impacts of the oil and gas industry are denied, ignored and suppressed. To use water as an example again, the industry uses veritable buttloads of water and pollutes it as fast as they can frack. But the state doesn't track this water use at all. Nor do they know what's in it before it's disposed. Any bill considered 'unfavorable' to the industry is met with exhortations to stop 'antagonizing' oil and gas. This from legislators who proudly hail intimate ties to the business.

The sign by the door of the Senate press room calls it the 'Print Media Gallery' which could imply exclusion of a blogger or social mediaist. But like a lot of other things in the Roundhouse the sign does not reflect reality or truth. Or it would read, 'Senate Staff Lunch Gallery.'

*Jobs, jobs, jobs- the magic words for any proposal that might otherwise lack merit.

Coyote in the Schoolyard - Oil and Gas

The metaphor of the fox in the hen house is overused. Self-policing by the oil and gas industry is more like a coyote in the school yard. He pays for the place. He can go where he wants and do what he likes.

Loosely regulated and in the driver’s seat of the economy, oil and gas dominates the Roundhouse. Efforts to restrain, regulate or alter New Mexico’s relationship with the industry are met with a collective moan from lobbyists who swat at bills like antagonizing flies. They use terms like, ‘industry economics demand’ and have some ‘business friendly’ Democrats on their side.

The problem with being ‘business friendly’ is that it nearly always means being unfriendly to someone or something else. Like employees or the environment.

Senator Soules bill SB 547 to ban fracking was tabled in Senate Conservation on 8-2 vote. Opponents to this and other ‘unfriendly’ bills testified there are ‘no verified cases of drinking water contamination’ and that oil and gas are the ‘lifeblood’ of the state and crucial to our economy and schools in particular. Dependence on tax revenue from non-renewables is never posed by industry advocates as regrettable. It’s a fact of life. A fact that conveniently dampens criticism.

We are further led to believe by the oil and gas industry proponents that frantic unregulated drilling is absolutely necessary to heat our homes. This is getting a little harder to dish out in light of renewables, but it is easy to consume without thinking. We do it with water too. We are sheltered from costs we don’t pay. Again, this is not a bad thing for oil and gas.

Senator Smith's Pipe Dream

Senator Wirth has said there are no silver bullets for the water problem. But Senator Smith has a silver pipeline in mind. He's said he’s just sending a message with his capital bill to pipe the Gila River to Las Cruces. He told the Las Cruces Sun, "In the event they don't come to a consensus, I'm going to look at the prospects of transferring that over to the Rio Grande."

Shorter Senator Smith: Either everybody agrees or I’ll decide for you.

He’s referring to a ‘consensus plan’ among multiple interests in four counties on how to use water rights from a  2004 federal Gila River settlement. There’s a 2014 deadline for some federal money attached to the settlement and that’s what has Smith worried - dangling dollars.

In a letter to the New Mexico Senate Finance Committee dated February 27, 2013, Las Cruces Mayor Pro Tem Sharon Thomas, City Councillors Nathan Small and Gill Sorg and Doña Ana County Commissioners Billy Garrett and Wayne Hancock, express their strong opposition to both Smith’s pipe project and Senator Cervantes’s SB440 and strong support for water planning funding. (Letter after the fold.)

SB440 was passed out of the Senate Conservation Committee with 'No Recommendation' after an unusual closed session to discuss the pending litigation with Texas. I'm betting lawyers told the Senators mostly the same thing that's in the FIR for the bill. La Jicarita has excellent coverage of this and other water issues.

Fine Fine New Mexico - HB286

The Texas Legislature is considering raising their penalties for oil and gas violations from $10,000 per day to $200,000. New Mexico's HB286 would raise the daily maximum penalty from $1000 to $10,000. I dislike Texas comparisons as much as the next New Mexican, but come on. That makes a fine of $1000 per day for violators that pollute land and water a new new low.

HB286 is scheduled to be heard by the House Judiciary Committee this morning.

Can’t Buy It Back - Water Update

I still don’t get how you can buy your way out of drought. Seems like that’s what a couple of bills are about. SB440 is for $120 million for the lower Rio Grande and SB462 would give the Carlsbad Irrigation District $2.5 million . But let's face it. No amount of money for water rights is going to make it rain. Unhappily for all of us, whether we’re in denial or not, climate change means we should set policy for big water use reductions and super-efficiencies.

It might help if we didn't pollute so much of it.