Tuesday, October 14, 2008 : 10:00 a.m.
Ground Water Law: What is the logic?
The western U.S. was slow to incorporate groundwater into the legal regime controlling surface water withdrawals. State law determines how groundwater is regulated, with a resulting cacophony of policies across the west. For most legal systems the operative question has been how a particular aquifer is related to surface water. Groundwater as a nonrenewable resource has received minimal attention in the political arena and the state policies that affect the mining of groundwater are almost comically dysfunctional.
New Mexico groundwater policy illustrates the water policy failures that result from the current regulatory regime. While there are multiple examples, the pumping of groundwater to meet an interstate compact is one; another is a proposed transfer of groundwater rights to an out of state investment corporation (the transferees have raised the possibility of selling these water rights to offset surface water use in the Rio Grande); but the most questionable is state and federal subsidies given to projects designed to rescue jurisdictions from their reliance on diminishing groundwater reserves.
The articulation of policy solutions is far more difficult than listing failures. Many policy solutions to groundwater mining have had unintended consequences. The conversation about groundwater mining in arid regions must be moved to broader circles of stakeholders and removed from the exclusive domain of water managers.
Denise D. Fort, University of New Mexico Fort has extensive experience in environmental and natural resources law and policy. She chaired the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission, a Presidential commission that prepared a seminal report on western water policy concerns. Fort also served as Director of New Mexico's Environmental Improvement Division, as the Governor's representative to the National Governors Association, as an environmental attorney with New Mexico PIRG and Southwest Research and Information Center, as Executive Director of Citizens for a Better Environment (CA. She writes extensively about water policy, and was a member of the National Research Council’s Water, Science, and Technology Board.