Clarity: Water and Politics

If you read the last couple of posts on Taos Friction, Judi Cantu’s piece on governing, the Friction piece on water issues and politics, you might be confused by the tortured prose. Let us try and clarify the issues.

Water Issues: shorthand

In terms of water rights issues, the Abeyta-Taos Pueblo Water Settlement is an attempt to reconcile the historic claims of senior users (Taos Pueblo) with the junior users, including claims by the historic Taos Valley acequias (54 signatories), the Town of Taos, El Prado Water and Sanitation, and Twelve Mutual Domestic Water Associations (MDWA).

Historically, the law favors priority users, called “senior users”: those who arrived first and practiced “beneficial use,” get the water first for drinking, watering livestock, orchards and fields. The first arrivals generally established senior rights. Subsequent arrivals were accorded rights based on the dates that coincided with their arrival and use. Homeowners and towns are considered “junior users.”

The details of the Abeyta agreement reflect the complex history and claims of water users, buttressed by hydrological reports, and a ton of jargon, which aims at clarifying competing claims. But the solutions amount to what I call a “hydrological shell game,” which merely “muddies the water.”

Signatories want to sink mitigation wells, pipe water, inject water into underground storage systems, and/or pump water up and down hill, while impinging on shallow to deep aquifers, where it can take hundreds of years to recharge the water stored in nature’s depths. Or the signatories want to pump water from springs that feed the Rio Grande, taking water that may belong to downstream claimants. The Abeyta signatories are pretending to reorganize and distribute or “create new sources of water” despite the prerogatives of Mother Nature, who holds the keys to the clouds.

The courts and the bureaucrats, like the “Office of the State Engineer,” have categorized and quantified the right to water as a “private property right,” which goes against the notion of custom, stewardship, and the organic manifestation of watersheds. Watersheds protect and preserve the use of water. While the origin and capture of water, whether as surface or ground water, remain the result of natural resources and artificial constructs (dams and ditches) the attorneys have created another artificial layer of “paper water rights” that can be transferred from one place to another, generally without the water itself on the same bus.

Water tends to stay with the land and follows a natural water course, while the “water rights” now become markers in a second shell game or the “free market,” also known as the “fixed market,” which aims at enriching agents of capital and politicians, whether on local ditches, in local communities and water districts, or, ultimately, in downstream cities for developers of property and industry. Regardless of how water rights are described, the function of water, a part of Mother Nature, should be viewed holistically.

The challenge for elected officials, who are signatories to Abeyta, the ones from the Town of Taos, El Prado, the valley’s acequias, mutual domestics, and Taos Pueblo, is a the requirement to negotiate through the layers of language in a highly complex document that is fraught with the jargon of engineers and attorneys, which discourse itself requires an expert consultant to interpret. Instead of a shovel to turn the water out into a field, you need a formal education to decide what to do.

Taos County represents the non-signatories: a hundred acequias, villages, neighborhoods, watersheds, the Towns of Red River, Questa, and the villages of the Penasco Valley, which areas have yet to be adjudicated. So, while the Abeyta signatories are loaded with an estimated $130 million in federal dough that they can begin to spend in the early spring of 2017, the rest of the county is being subjected to the dangers of a gold rush and possible new case law, as well as ill will among neighbors on acequias and adjacent farms, who have been targeted by Abeyta signatories.

The new water market could impoverish areas of the County, as is being done today to Sunshine Valley and Top of the World and Questa in northern Taos County. The Abeyta raid on the Questa area is similar to the way the infamous Los Angeles Water Department raided the Owens Valley up north in California during the last century. The politics of water exploitation on behalf of capital growth was memorialized in the movie, “Chinatown.” The term “Chinatown” is shorthand in water lore for skullduggery.

Town Hall Politics

Despite the hysteria and melodrama surrounding the famed Friday night meltdown of civility at the Town Meeting, the issues have less to do with paranoid claims or a power struggle and more to do with “bad manners.” It’s difficult to quantify “bad manners.” Given our multicultural community, however, social relations can be deadly in a pressure cooker political environment, when politicos seek to change the way and manner in which business is done.

Apparently, and historically, according to employees and elected officials at his previous employer, Taos County, the manager has a history or pattern of ignoring emails, phone calls, and requests for clarification. He’s referred to as abrupt and cryptic. An insensitivity to elected officials, especially to Councilor Cantu, has created a sense of exclusion. Some Town residents, like the Town Councilor, have trouble figuring out what the new administration has accomplished apart from a “change in attitude,” producing a few events and the Farmer’s Market on the Plaza i.e. more controversy. We can blame Mother Nature for the pot holes but…

Veteran observers of local politics might remember the good old days at the turn of the century, when Commissioners, Becky, Red, and Virgil, raised hell and took no prisoners at Taos County. Unless the Mayor can step up and find some new kid gloves, the Town appears to be on a parallel course with that legendary comedy, which a judge characterized as a version of  “Hogan’s Heroes.” In Horse Fly, one of the first pieces I wrote about the Town included a headline: “Town well-organized but dull.”

Now, as Virgil might say, “I feel sorry for the Town of Taos.”