By JULIE ANN GRIMM, The New Mexican
September 15, 2007
First part of a 3-part series: City, county prepare to tap the Rio Grande
It was about five years ago when people started to notice the fissure.
A crack in the earth big enough to see from space stretches for a half-mile along the Rio Grande, marking the place where Santa Fe city wells pump water to the surface from the aquifer below.
As water is sucked away, the ground subsides, leaving a widening crevasse that has forever changed the landscape at this spot west of the city. Although it rebounds when wells are rested, as more water is pumped out and piped uphill to Santa Fe, the fissure grows.
So too, does the region's population, and its thirst for larger quantities of imported water. Officials are planning a water project they say will again transform riverside land known by the family name Buckman.
In a move that will allow reduced pumping at a dozen-plus sites in the Buckman Well Field, the city and county intend to build a structure to draw surface water directly from the river.
The Buckman Direct Diversion will be the most expensive construction project ever built by Santa Fe's local government.
It's supposed to be working by this time three summers from now. But hurdles remain, including the need for federal permits and the question of how to pay for $171 million worth of planned structures and their continued operation.
The Buckman bandage
The project will pull water from the Rio Grande, run it through a treatment plant, then deliver it to municipal and county taps. Visible elements will include a low-profile concrete structure near the former Buckman town site, named for Harry Buckman, a late-1800s lumber lord. Today, more locals know the place as the end of Buckman Road, near a remote, outdoor gathering spot at Diablo Canyon.
The diversion is intended to stall or forgo what a recent environmental report called "undesirable consequences" to the area's underground aquifer unless its depletion from overpumping slows.
Most of the water that Santa Fe will take from the river will have rolled downstream from Colorado, passing through a tunnel under the Continental Divide that brings flows from the San Juan River down to the Chama River and into the Rio Grande. The project will allow the Santa Fe area to more fully exploit water rights acquired through the federal San Juan-Chama Diversion Project.But just how long will the Buckman bandage last?
Officials hope the river diversion buys time while they look for more ways to deal with limits on the area's water supply. While alternative sources of water and/or changes to water-use practices will be needed, a team of city water experts recently concluded that the city must continue acquiring water rights but did not call for another major water-supply project in the next 40 years.
The County Commission is still considering expanding a county water system that serves fast-developing areas on the southern and western fringes of the Santa Fe city limits. In addition to taking part in the river diversion, the county has applied for state approval to pump more groundwater from wells. However, estimates indicate the county won't max out its water rights from the river diversion until 2020 or later.
An estimated 80,000 people live in Santa Fe's urban area, and housing grows by about 2 percent each year. Meanwhile, overall water conservation has become part of daily life for most.
Despite growth, the citywide annual demand for water is lower now than it was in most of the 1980s and '90s. Residents used 9,600 acre-feet last year. That compares to nearly 12,000 acre-feet in 2001.
Covering the costs
The projected cost of building the Buckman Direct Diversion has changed since long-simmering plans developed into more solid discussions in 2002, and city and county officials are scrambling for ways to cover the huge investment.
While the project is a mostly government undertaking, federal officials have forced the city and county into a partnership with developers of Las Campanas, a luxury-home subdivision with golf courses northwest of Santa Fe.
Developers independently sought permission to build a diversion around the same time as the city, but the federal government indicated only one such project would be allowed for Santa Fe.
"The federal government said, 'We don't want three different diversions, so we are going to give a permit to one entity,' " said Rick Carpenter, the city's senior water resources coordinator and project manager for the Buckman diversion. ``We were essentially forced into a partnership.
Later, when the developers sued the city over water-use rules, a settlement agreement stipulated that Las Campanas would get water from the diversion and bear a proportionate cost for shared facilities, an amount now estimated at about $9 million.
After that cash contribution and any future federal and state financial help, the two jurisdictions have agreed to split whatever remains of the $171 million estimated price tag, Carpenter said.
So far, the quest for outside help in paying for the project has produced about $21 million from the state Water Trust Board. The project also has tentative approval from that board for another $2 to $6 million and hopes for about $1 million that New Mexico's congressional delegation is trying to secure in Washington, D.C.
Carpenter said he expects those state and federal contributions will grow. "Once the feds or the state fund a project, the tendency is that the funds keep coming," he said.
Operating the plant will require another funding scheme. Most costs for personnel and maintenance will be shared by the governments and Las Campanas based on how much water they use. At full capacity, the city would pay about 60 percent, the county about 19 percent and Las Campanas about 21 percent of those costs.Santa Fe County already has warned that it might be approaching the upper limits of what it can afford. When the local governments agreed to split the capital cost, the county's estimated share was about $51 million, and voters approved issuing bonds to cover that cost.
But now the county's share could amount to something in the $80 million range. The shortfall will be made up by dedicating up to $31.5 million in cash from a gross-receipts tax collected countywide, both inside and outside the city limits.
Sharing the burden
County Commissioner Jack Sullivan, who represents the county on a joint board that governs the project, said the cost-sharing agreement might appear lopsided at first glance.
But since the gross-receipts taxes are collected both inside and outside the city limits, it makes more sense to look at the project as regional than to examine which government is allocating more funds, he said.
"City residents are county constituents," he noted. "They pay taxes in the county. ... They pay property taxes and they pay gross-receipts taxes. So it's entirely appropriate that their money be used to pay for a joint city-county undertaking," he said.
Discussions about how the costs would be shared were arduous, Sullivan said, but most of the arguments have ended and shouldn't resurface. City Councilor Rebecca Wurzburger, a city member on the project board, agreed.
"I believe the (Buckman Direct Diversion) project is the shining star of cooperation between the city and the county," Wurzburger said.
The city will use a combination of sources to pay its share. Current plans call for bonding against revenue from a special gross-receipts tax dedicated to water projects and from revenue generated through water rates billed by the city.
Gross-receipts tax revenues for the project already are being collected from those who buy goods and services in the region, including nonresidents, and property taxes to pay off some bonds already are being levied.
While water-rate hikes are possible, no one is willing to talk about that possibility in much detail. So far, taxes have been local governments' preferred method of raising funds to help pay for the Buckman project. One rationale is that this approach spreads the burden more widely. If the huge cost of expanding water facilities was passed along directly to water ratepayers, the added burden would show up on water bills for about 2,000 customers in the county and about 20,000 customers in the city.
In addition to the capital costs, the county still has to buy several hundred acre-feet of water rights in order to take as much water from the river as officials plan.
Remaining hurdles
The timeline for the diversion project has been a moving target. Planners have spent years applying for permits from the federal government and creating contract documents. A pair of contractors submitted competing bids this week for the job of designing and building the project, and officials are expected to enter into negotiations with the winning team by the end of the year.
The final record of decision on an environmental-impact statement has been expected for months from the U.S. Forest Service. With four federal agencies involved in the review, the target deadline for the document has changed many times.
Last week, local officials learned it could be as long as six more weeks before that record is published, followed by another public-comment period lasting a month before the ruling is final, said Sandy Hurlocker, project manager for the Forest Service.
The statement will define how the project has to mitigate potential effects on endangered species by leaving enough water in the river for fish habitat during dry times.
While a basic design was contemplated for the required federal review, one major element remains undecided: What to do with sediment that comes with the river water. Options include improving roads so the sediment can be delivered to a landfill or returning the sediment to the river's edge downstream.
Public Service Company of New Mexico says electric-power loads associated with the Buckman project would accelerate the need for planned upgrades in the area. To that end, the power company and the project board are negotiating costs, and Carpenter is pricing other options, such as creating an energy cooperative to serve the project instead of using PNM's power supply.
Despite snags, the project is expected to be in operation by July 2010. That will allow the city to slow the pumping of its wells, theoretically resting the underground aquifer. However, some city leaders warn that they won't be able to stop worrying about water resources, especially in light of climate fluctuations. "We are not going to have an increase in available water," said City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer. "We need to look at this in a comprehensive and serious way. We're using less and less water, and that is good, but in the last few years, because they have been wetter, we have not had a sober discussion about what the city is going to do about water for future growth."
Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.
