When we last spoke with you: The state engineer’s office had given the Augustin Plains Ranch LLC until the
end of the year to provide more specifics on what type of water rights
would be developed, how the water would be used and what municipalities
or industries would benefit.
The foreigners, even with all of their legal-beagle trash working full time, couldn't come up with diddly-doodle, and so they LOST Round 2. Now they have another "revamped" application submitted to the state engineer. Round 3 will start up as soon as the state engineer posts official NOTICE of the new application in the local papers.
Our foreign operators seem unable to get a "taker" for the agua who will sign on the dotted line. That's not surprising really. Even the dimwits in Rio Rancho would be, could be, should be....hesitant about getting involved in un-American, anti-American crap like this. If the Modena Organization is encouraged in any way, you can be sure the Veterans groups and pro-Americans across the state will be screaming bloody murder, when all the facts come to light. And well they should. According to law:
New Mexico water belongs to New Mexicans....
PERIOD! Not to a bunch of foreign thieves
who hide behind lawyers and scumbags like their Project Director, Michel Jichlinski, whose firm got caught red-handed stealing millions and millions of American tax dollars on war zone contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These people are dangerous.... these people are pigs.
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STOP THE WATER GRAB! “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” Confucius
Here's page 3 of the Augustin Plains Ranch LLC website.
We'll have commentary about this page and their entire site
after we have two interviews next week with experts in the field.
The idea of replacing all of the water pumped from
the aquifer with rainwater they collect at the ranch is still
the most blatant upfront falsehood in their presentation.
There's other problems with their hydrology, but we'll
hold our peace until the pros weigh in on these matters.
Patience. If you'd like to see their entire presentation go to: www.sanaugustinwater.com We'll be picking apart their info and reasoning over the next few weeks, once we get more interviews.
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A Sustainable Project
Augustin Plains Ranch, located approximately 150 miles southwest of Albuquerque, sits atop a portion of an ancient lake that holds an estimated 50 million acre-feet of water (see page 117 of Appendix D of the Southwest New Mexico Regional Water Plan). This water is pure and meets federal drinking standards. To help accommodate New Mexico’s growing need for water, the Augustin Plains Ranch proposes to develop an eco-friendly water reclamation and transport project that will pump 54,000 acre-feet of water out of the aquifer every year and pipe it to New Mexico communities. The design is exciting as it takes advantage of the ranch’s unique location to enhanced recharge and replace all of the pumped water with rain water and snowmelt currently being lost to evaporation. No water mining would occur.
This “green” project will also have a zero carbon footprint. A hydroelectric power plant at an elevation of 5,800 feet would produce 75% of the energy required to pump the water from the aquifer. The balance would be produced by solar energy as the Agustin Plains are one of the areas of New Mexico with the best potential for solar energy. Gravity flow would be used to convey the water from the hydroelectric plant to the Greater Albuquerque Metropolitan Area. .
GRAVITY FLOW
DOWN from the Plains to Socorro,
and then UP to Albuquerque.
It reminds me of a drawing by M.C. Escher.
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The concept of a "siphon" is behind getting the
water to Rio Rancho, Albuquerque, and beyond.
The water would go down to Socorro, in the Rio Grande
Valley and then hook a left and run up the valley to
Rio Rancho, for instance. Because Rio Rancho (5200 ft) is
lower than the location of their proposed hydroelectric plant, (somewhere at 5800 ft., which would put it between Magdalena and Socorro), the water will be able to "run uphill" theoretically,
once it leaves Socorro (4600 ft) to go north. It's the old siphon idea. With a few twists.
(We'll see what the experts tell us.)
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Here's an excerpt from a book of essays about
New Mexico titled The River in Winter by Stanley Crawford of Dixon, New Mexico.
The essay: "DANCING FOR WATER" - is insightful and holds a message for those interested in the San Augustin aquifer issue, as well as anyone interested in New Mexico's water. . "Everyone has been startled at least once by the miraculous imagery of the saying that water can be made to flow uphill toward money. It is the genius of the image that it seems to settle for a moment the arguments that bring it into play. Everything has its price. We live in a world of buying and selling. What else can we say? . Yet we also live in a world of other kinds of value, and sooner or later we will need to ask whether it is good for anything but money for water to be made to flow uphill, and whether it is bad for streams, rivers, traditions, communities, and even individuals. . Some time ago I sat in on a water rights adjudication hearing in Santa Fe - my first, so I was able to pretend to view it through somewhat innocent eyes. There was the small, cramped courtroom in the old stone Federal Courthouse, probably not unlike courtrooms and hearing rooms where these proceedings have droned on in New Mexico for hours and days and months and even years and decades. .
. There were the twenty-five or thirty silent, patient defendants from the far north village of Questa, who were landowners, working men, probably miners or former miners, Hispanic all, dressed in plaid western shirts and cowboy boots. There were the attorneys and legal assistants for the New Mexico State Engineer Office, four in all, Anglos all, with their table covered with huge aerial photographs, yellow legal pads, clipboards of lists, notebooks. There was the defendants' table, presided over by a lone attorney from Northern New Mexico Legal Services and a volunteer assistant from Questa. There was a tripod from which hung detailed maps of the section of Questa being debated, with parcels of land blocked out in green and red and pink. There was the imitation wood paneled box of the witness stand where sat, during my time there, a succession of Mr. Raels and Mr. Valdezes. There was the judge, a kindly black-suited gentleman who patiently elicited and presided over a river of minutiae about fences and culverts and walls and houses and ditches and pastures and the placement of this or that boulder, all of which made up the substance of the proceedings. .
. What I witnessed for a few hours was the operation of that legal mechanism by which water is prepared for its eventual pumping toward money. It has to have its claim of ownership documented, it has to have its title quieted, it has to be made merchantable, salable, which is what enables it to be freed up from land, acequia, community, and tradition. A horrendously expensive process in itself, this elaborate preparation, as anyone can easily estimate by calculating the legal hours, the research time, surveying time, driving time, lost work hours for the landowner defendants, and so on, that must go into a hearing of this sort, which in this case lasted well over a week. And this was a minor one at that, concerning some relatively small parcels of land that had been left out of a previous adjudication suit. And in the larger sense there may never even be an end result. The number of readjudication suits being opened up suggests that the process may well be perpetual. And who pays? In a state with a regressive tax structure, the expense of it all will be disproportionately born by those most likely to suffer from its effects. And wherever there has been an end result, it has been to pave the way toward the dissolution of the traditional connection between land and water, and to break down the fragile webbing that binds water to land and to acequia and to what may be called community itself in the rural areas of northern New Mexico. In short, the adjudication of water rights is social policy disguised as something else. . Yet there was something dully reassuring about the hearing. No sparrow that fell thirty years before would be overlooked by the court, no garden grown by a grandmother or tenant or neighbor or friend, within living memory. But before my eyes began to glaze over and my own memory set about sorting through other lists, the grand oddness of it all flashed through my mind. There was something missing. Questa was here, in this courtroom, but also most obviously, in the deepest sense, Questa was still where it was, spread out over the sloping land a hundred or so miles to the north, in the shadow of the northernmost peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range in New Mexico. .
. What we were looking at was a Questa that had been evaporated out of its real setting to be reconstituted here, in distilled form, on paper, in words spoken in the courtroom - a Questa which had been driven through the abstract filters of quantification and the law, depositing a powdery residue of its real self in the courtroom. The proper place for these hearings, I thought, should be in the very fields and orchards and gardens of the actual landscape, and they should be conducted while climbing fences, wandering down driveways, walking ditches, sitting on boulders, while eating and drinking, in the bright sun or the wind and the rain and snow - not here, under flourescent lights, in air that has been warmed too many times by the city's fevered lungs. . Water should go - we all know - to those who tend it, who use it, who love it, who dance for it, and it should flow downhill from stream to river, and river to sea. Yet we have licensed our society to scheme for it to flow toward those with power and money, and we have turned over our public servants to them, we have in effect given them the keys to the treasury so that no expense will be spared in drawing lines, making maps, conducting research, surveying boundaries, and filling vaults and basements with mountains of legal testimony. . What is oddest of all - I thought as I regained an open sky fretful with the sharp winds of a March afternoon - is that this legalistic hairsplitting over water rights needs the long-term ratification of the weather in order to work at all. And the weather, of course, is what no one can ever bring to court. Being, I suppose you would say, above the law. Capable, in short, of rendering the vast social labor of adjudication quite irrelevant - in these times of rapid climate change all over the globe. A kind of higher adjudication of the environment, you might say, that could be trying to tell us that fooling around with the elements is something we should think and talk long and carefully about before anything else, and in ways that make us all more neighborly, not less so." .
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. For centuries, Native Americans of the arid Southwest used a system of ponds and gravity-fed ditches (acequias) to grow crops with the little water they had. When the Spanish arrived in 1598, they were quick to adopt this system, establishing a unique tradition of irrigation and agriculture. Below is a 26 minute program produced by KNME-TV (PBS) Albuquerque, about the acequias in northern New Mexico, narrated by Stanley Crawford, the author of the essay above. It's very good - very New Mexico. .
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