“. . . Water is for Fighting!” Catron County is fighting for survival foreign-owned company, the Augustine Plains Ranch, LLC, has applied to the Office of the State Engineer for a permit to drill 37 deep wells and pump 54,000 acre feet of water annually from the San Augustin Plains. They plan to sell the water to unnamed entities in the central part of New Mexico. The San Augustin Water Coalition was formed in 2008 to protest this application. The LLC owns a very small part of the basin’s landmass (1.4 percent), but if this proposal succeeds, they will control a vast majority of the groundwater in the basin to the detriment of every other rancher and landowner. The LLC’S first application, submitted in 2007, was eventually denied by the OSE in March, 2012. An appeal to the District Court in Socorro upheld that denial in November, 2012. Their next appeal was to the New Mexico Court of Appeals in January, 2013, and a hearing was scheduled for
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August, 2014. Before that hearing took place, the LLC filed another application with the OSE. It was much more in-depth, but basically the same proposal to appropriate the same 54,000 acre feet of water and sell it to still unknown entities at some unnamed future time. Speculation at its worst. Groundwater is a finite resource that cannot be replaced as easily as it is depleted, if at all. Ancient aquifers need mapping to determine what is actually
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in the New Mexico Stockman. Call: 505/243-9515.
there, and the science is available to do that. The deep aquifer on the San Augustin Plains is such an aquifer. It consists of “ancestral water” deposited during the Pleistocene Epoch which ended around 11,700 years ago. The Plains watershed is also a closed basin encompassing some 1,992 square miles with no surface streams to supply extra water. Additions come from rain and snow, and those amounts closely match evaporation and leakage rates out of the basin (from Blodgett and Titus, 1973). Since that report, which estimated 100,000 a.f. of precipitation annually, New Mexico has been in a protracted drought, and nowhere near that amount of precipitation has fallen on the Plains. Topographically high, the Plains also leak groundwater out of numerous faults into other watersheds, including the Gila-San Francisco and the Monticello Box. The LLC should have to provide an independent modeling of the basin to the OSE before any decision is made. Their claim of “hundreds of millions of gallons of water” is without scientific merit. The future of water in New Mexico lies in knowing our limits on use, living within those limits, and dealing with facts instead ■ of corporate greed.