New Mexico officials disappointed after U.S. Supreme Court denies plan for Rio Grande water
*Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with a quote from New Mexico’s attorney general.
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – For decades, Texas and New Mexico have been fighting over legal access to water in the Rio Grande. Recently, the two states reached an agreement on how to share water, but the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the settlement.
The case goes back to 1938, when Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico agreed to the Rio Grande Compact, which requires New Mexico to allow a certain volume of water to reach Elephant Butte and further south to Texas. Then, in 2013, Texas sued arguing that they weren’t getting their fair share of water.
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After a lengthy court battle, Texas and New Mexico reached an agreement that would have established a new way to calculate water deliveries – a method that took into account New Mexico’s groundwater pumping from the 1950s through 1970s.
But, the federal government objected to the agreement, arguing that the agreement essentially took away the federal government’s role in the water distribution. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed, meaning the proposed agreement will not move forward.
“We are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court has remanded the case back to the Court’s Special Master for further proceedings,” New Mexico State Engineer Mike Hamman said in a press release. “We need to keep working to make the aquifers in the Lower Rio Grande region sustainable, and lasting solutions are more likely to come from parties working together than from continued litigation.”
New Mexico’s attorney general also lamented the outcome: “We are profoundly disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to reject a comprehensive settlement that would have safeguarded the rights of water users throughout southern New Mexico,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a press release. “But we are even more disappointed that the federal government would stand in the way of an equitable resolution of a decades-long case that neither Texas nor New Mexico wish to continue. This decision will result in millions more spent on legal fees and more uncertainty for New Mexico’s water users, all because the Interior Department feels the need to dictate how New Mexico meets its obligations to the State of Texas. It’s a sad day when two western states are able to resolve a generational dispute over water only to have that deal undermined by lawyers and bureaucrats in Washington D.C.”
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