JESSE AND KYLE have spent their lives swimming, rafting, and talking water. Oh, and inventing and implementing all local water policy.
Jesse is the Director of the City of Santa Fe’s Public Utilities Department, overseeing water, wastewater, and environmental services. Kyle is a partner at Harwood Pierpont, a water law attorney and specialist in Natural Resource Law.
They are, in other words, our resident action heroes of water. — OL
The City of Santa Fe’s Annual Report is good news all across the board. Talk about Santa Fe as a model for how things go right.
Kyle: It’s the ability to manage change — having resources to handle regular stresses and unusual ones. This water system has the same number of challenges as a system ten times its size, and it’s navigating them successfully.
Jesse: We serve an estimated 90,000 people, and having four fairly distinct sources of water is incredible for a system this size. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities associated with each supply by itself, but when you put all four together, you get resilience — the ability to cope with stress you perhaps didn’t anticipate because you have this variety of supply. Like financial management, we have a diverse portfolio.
What are the four sources and what variables are they sensitive to?
Jesse: First is the Santa Fe River, which is why the town’s here. That was our only supply for agriculture and municipal uses until the 1950s.
In the 1950s, during a big regional drought, the utility drilled wells within the city limits — that’s the second source.
Now, with surface water, we know exactly how much water we have, to the gallon almost. The groundwater we don’t understand as well. There’s a lot more groundwater, but if you overuse it, it’s not going to bounce back quickly.
Kyle: The financial analogy we use is that the Santa Fe River is the checking account — money you can see that you live on regularly. The Santa Fe River aquifer is the savings account. When your checking account’s insufficient — say you need new tires for your car — you dip into your savings account.
Jesse: The third source is the Buckman Well field from the ‘70s. The Buckman wells are separate systems from the city wells.
Kyle: Then, in 2002, alarms started going off everywhere.
Jesse: All the water levels in all the wells we were pumping were dropping.
In summer 2002, city parks went dry. Fort Marcy was brown. It took ten years for these parks to come back. That was our water apocalypse of 2002.
I remember bumper stickers on cars: I’ll stop watering my lawn when Las Campanas stops watering their golf course. There was social tension about where water could be used. I remember my mom showering with buckets so we could keep the trees alive.
So what happened?
Jesse: Three things led to a change in behavior: price, recognition of how important it was to save water, and an effort to go after toilets and infrastructure.
Kyle: One of the key things the city council did was raise rates extraordinarily for the time, and that drove a ton of behavior change. A public water system has an easier time raising rates than a private system. In the mid-’90s, there was debate internationally about public systems becoming private, but in Santa Fe, a private water system became public.
Then, someone flew to California and found a program where if you converted from high-flow toilets to low-flow toilets, you could quantify the savings based on average people per house and average toilet usage. So we asked developers to retrofit high-flow to low-flow toilets.
We inadvertently created millionaire plumbers who bought ranches across northern New Mexico. They’d show up and offer to pay you $1,000 for the rights to switch out your existing high-flow toilet with a new one. You didn’t pay a dime for the toilet or installation, and you got a $1,000 check because that credit in aggregate allowed new development to happen.
We were talking three or four gallons per flush, and now we’re down to one.
We got penetration into the community that you could never have done with a government-only approach. It was government prerogative to impose the offset policy, but private sector that went into houses and converted toilets.
Jesse: So the fourth water supply was crucial — the Buckman Direct Diversion. In the ‘60s, somebody from the Bureau of Reclamation came to Santa Fe and said, Hey, let’s bring water from the other side of the Continental Divide. Let’s bring water from Colorado.
The Buckman Direct Diversion is how we divert water directly from the Rio Grande and move it up to a treatment plant where it’s treated to potable standards and then into the city. Now on an average year, probably half our supply comes from the Buckman Direct Diversion. We’re incredibly lucky to have that resource.
Has the Colorado River drama affected you?
Kyle: It’s a big deal what’s happening. But deliveries into Heron Lake from the San Juan-Chama Project have been decreasing mostly because of hydrology, not because of infighting between the seven states over Lake Powell and Lake Mead so far. Right now, the biggest constraint has been lack of snow in the San Juan Mountains.
Jesse: The flexibility of the BDD has allowed us to rest our wells, and water levels in both aquifers are coming back up. Since 2011, when the Buckman Direct Diversion came online, our portfolio split has shifted to being 80% from rivers and 20% on average from wells.
What could go wrong?
Jesse: During the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez, the Rio Grande turned black. We weren’t able to use that supply for four to six months.
When the Little Bear Fire burned in the Gila, it burned a whole watershed over a reservoir that Alamogordo uses. It filled up, and they lost use of that reservoir for at least ten years.
When we do long-range planning, we put in a baseline of climate change, a baseline of increasing demand — that baseline is kind of rosy. We’ve got four supplies, we’ve got conservation. We can handle this baseline case.
What happens if we can’t use any one of the supplies for ten years? We look at that. If we can keep our wells rested and ready, we think our wells could supply us for five or ten years. We would probably implement some fairly severe restrictions until things got back to normal.
But many other water systems in the regional Southwest have nothing like the resilience of Santa Fe, and they’re kind of okay. They’re rolling the dice with much bigger consequences than here.
Kyle: But they don’t die. They adapt. We’re very good at adapting in the West. Just like Jesse knows, he’ll figure it out if the Rio Grande goes dry for some reason. This community will figure it out. Managers of those other towns also reckon they’ll figure it out. They’re just going to have fewer marbles to work with.
There’s one other thing. We’re engaged in a long-range water resources planning effort that’s cutting edge. When we decide how to rate the quality of potential actions we can take, we’re doing it across four different dimensions.
The first is obvious: reliability. This is usually the only thing a utility would look at: in 2090, when I turn on my faucet, will water come out? That’s one of the most important drivers, but there are three others.
The second is sustainability. Does water come out of my tap, but we’ve destroyed our aquifers and we’re in trouble next year? We don’t want that. There are two different scenarios where I turn on my tap in 2090 and water comes out. One where our well fields are in really good shape and our aquifers are in good shape is a much better outcome than another where water comes out but the wells are in bad shape.
The third dimension is in this community, people care about how much water is in the upper Santa Fe River and lower Santa Fe River. How blue is our river? We could have a scenario where there’s no flow down the river and those first two are fine. We could have a scenario where those first two are maybe almost as good and there’s flow in the river.
The fourth dimension is how much shade is there, how much outdoor shade? How much green space and how accessible is that green space? So we’re going to reach out to the community to understand how high we should rank these different pieces.
Kyle: That’s super on-brand for Santa Fe to have those quality-of-life criteria in long-range planning. Most utilities only focus on the first one.
Jesse: There’s a third paradigm shift coming. We don’t care as much about you using water indoors. We really don’t want you using it outdoors, which means we really like Siberian elms. I’m getting ready to go to the governing body and ask for a change to rate structure. We have two tiers for cost of water right now. It’s going to three tiers, and we’re going to send a strong signal that if you’re using water outdoors, you’re going to pay for it.
Looking ahead, there are things we worry about. But we’ve got four water supplies, conservation ethics, and this community figured out how to solve its own problems. Policy decisions were informed by what they thought was good for the city, and they acted on it.
Kyle: We solved our own problem. Don’t let a good crisis go to waste! That’s what Santa Fe did with the crisis in the early 2000s. We took a very real crisis and did really good things. We basically built the Buckman Direct Diversion Project with very little federal funding, which is unusual for a large Western water project. It was largely a locally funded project. We were lucky to have the ability to pay for that. We were lucky to be able to work out tensions between the city and county, who were forced to become partners.
Jesse: I think we’ve experienced two major paradigm shifts in the last 25 years. One is this conservation ethic we talked about. The other is using surface water primarily and preferentially, using our river water, and allowing our groundwater, our aquifers, and our wells to rest for when we need them. And we will need them at some point.