Guest: Phil King

With a final agreement in sight that would settle Texas's 13-year-old lawsuit against New Mexico over water use on the Rio Grande, Rin Tara and John Fleck and joined by Phil King, retired New Mexico State University professor and one of the experts who has been helping sort out the complex details of the agreement.

In the lawsuit, Texas charged that New Mexico's groundwater pumping was depriving Texas communities of water to which it was entitled under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, an agreement dividing the Rio Grande's water among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

King explains how the proposed settlement would create a new way of measuring the flow of the Rio Grande from New Mexico to Texas, and require the retirement of agricultural land in Southern New Mexico as part of an effort to bring water use in line with available supply.

The proposed settlement has won preliminary approval from the "special master" who has been advising the Supreme Court of the United States on the case, with final action on the agreement possible later this year

With irrigation water flowing through the irrigation ditches of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at the latest snowpack numbers, river flows, and the remarkable temperatures Albuquerque has seen over the fall and winter of 2025-26.

Links:

• USGS Albuquerque gage (Why do they spell it “gage” instead of “gauge”?)
• Snowpack reports
• Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (SCORP!)
• Utton’s Rio Grande Basin Documentary
• The European Space Agency’s Copernicus Browser, for the latest satellite data
• Albuquerque temperature data from xmACIS

The latest round of storms helped the snowpack in New Mexico’s headwaters rivers a little, but we’re so far behind that we still should expect to see a dry Rio Grande through central New Mexico this summer.

In this week’s Water Update, the Utton Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck take a look at the snowpack, the runoff forecasts, and the latest reservoir storage numbers. Spoiler alert: they’re not good.

But despite the bad news, both Tara and Fleck managed to get out to the river and find joy in what we’ve got.

Correction: Aldo Leopold was the Secretary of the ABQ Chamber of Commerce from 1917-1919, not a member of City Council.

Show notes links:

· Colorado River Post-2026 management Environmental Impact Statement process

· Snowpack maps

· Streamflow at Albuquerque

Guest: Stacy Timmons, Associate Director for Hydrology Programs at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources

When the New Mexico legislature approved the Water Data Act in 2019, the state turned to Stacy Timmons to turn an idea into useful data tools to help communities around New Mexico manage a future with less water. Operating out of a third-floor office of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology building on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro, Timmons oversees the bureau’s efforts to figure out what sort of data communities need, and to help them get it - or get access to the myriad different kinds of data already being collected, turning it into useful tools.

The program’s latest project is using aerial surveys to measure water beneath the ground in places where there are not enough measurement wells to give communities the data they need to manage their aquifers. On this edition of Water Matters, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk with Timmons about groundwater measurement, aerial surveys, the importance of good data to support good decisions, and the joys of running along ditchbanks think about the water around us.

The snowpack and runoff forecasts for New Mexico’s rivers have begun conjuring up stories about the epically dry 2002. On this week’s episode, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the forecast, and the comparison.

On the Rio Grande, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is forecasting just 35 percent of median runoff at Otowi, in north-central New Mexico, with very little water at all making it down past San Marcial downstream from Socorro.

One big difference between 2002 and this year: in 2002, New Mexicans had a lot of water banked in upstream storage to keep the Rio Grande flowing during the dry summer months. “Only thing that allowed us to manage thru the year was releases of water stored in previous years. If this dryness continues, with no storage to speak of, 2026 will be a very difficult year of water management/flows and, unfortunately, possibly fires,” Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, retired New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission chief, wrote in the comments on John’s blog.

John posted a graph on his blog showing the comparison between 2002 storage and today.

Also on the latest episode:

• Rin talks with us about their conversation with Alex Hager at KJZZ in Pheonix about the possibility of a short-term agreement on Colorado River management as a federal deadline looms.]
• A pitch to join Utton and the broader New Mexico water community for a screening of Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico, a film by the Utton Center. March 2, 2026, 5-6:30 p.m. Room 2401, UNM School of Law, 1117 Stanford NE, Albuquerque.

With Albuquerque’s first big snow storm of 2026 in the rearview mirror, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at how the mountains holding the critical snowpack for New Mexico’s Rivers fared.

They also share the latest on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s challenges in keeping Lake Powell’s water levels high enough to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s outlet works, and the implications that will have for Colorado River management in 2026.

For more on the snowpack, check out the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s west-wide maps to see how the winter is progressing in the watersheds you care about.

Other links for this week’s edition:

· Interstate Stream Commission meeting information

· Reclamation’s Post-2026 Colorado River Management Environmental Impact Statement process

Guest: Dr. Ladona Clayton

As the New Mexico legislature begins a budget-focused 30-day session, the New Mexico Water Ambassadors have laid out their top legislative goals, critical steps needed to move the state toward a more sustainable water future. Dr. Ladona Clayton, Executive Director of the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy, joins Rin Tara and John Fleck on this edition of Water Matters! to talk about the opportunities and challenge in the state’s water future, and the steps state government can take to help. A 32-year veteran educator and political leader in Eastern New Mexico drawn to water work by the groundwater challenges faced by the Clovis-Portales area, Clayton was one of the leaders of the 2022 New Mexico Water Policy and Infrastructure Task Force, which met for much of 2022 to craft a broad set of goals for the state’s water management future. The Ambassadors grew out of the Task Force’s work, to move the group’s work beyond a report sitting on a shelf.

The snowpack in the headwaters basins of northern New Mexico and Colorado points to another low-runoff year on New Mexico’s major rivers. The January federal forecast projects flows of less than half the most recent 30-year average on the Rio Grande at Otowi, the key measurement point for central New Mexico, and just 17 percent at San Marcial, just above Elephant Butte Reservoir. With three months of snow-accumulation season left, those numbers will go up or down depending on weather between now and when snowmelt begins in April. But water managers urge caution, saying the runoff is more likely to go down from the initial forecast than up.

The bad news for 2026 also includes extremely low reservoir levels, with little water left over from last year to make up for shortfalls in this year’s runoff.

Other topics on this week’s pod:

· The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River management Draft Environmental Impact Statement

Proposed budgets from the New Mexico Legislature and Governor