River Stakeholders
Colorado River Water Use Highlights:
Navajo Reservoir is located mainly in northern New Mexico with several miles extending into southern Colorado. In New Mexico, Navajo Reservoir is the second largest body of water next to Elephant Butte Reservoir. Three developed recreation areas in New Mexico comprise Navajo Lake State Park. The Pine River and Sims Mesa sites located on the lake near the dam include visitor centers, developed campgrounds, and full-service marinas. The San Juan River site located on both sides of the river below Navajo Dam has wheelchair-accessible fishing facilities on the river, several hiking trails, seven-day use areas, and a campground. This area is also well known for the excellent trout fishing.
Inflows for Water Year 2025 have been below average. For Navajo Reservoir in particular water inflow was 41% of average. Total releases from Navajo Dam for this year have been 363,349 ac-ft. As of September 16, flows have dropped back down to 500 cfs. Due to the low river flows in the Animas River this summer, ditches were put on a rotation schedule to help with flows in the river.
San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program
Implementation of the Recovery Program was identified as a reasonable and prudent alternative for the 1991 AnimasLa Plata Project biological opinion, which created Colorado’s Lake Nighthorse. Following this, the Recovery Program was established through a cooperative agreement in 1992 and currently includes signatories from Colorado, New Mexico, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the Navajo Nation. The Recovery Program’s goals are to recover the listed and Colorado Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus lucius) and Razorback Sucker (Xyrauchen texanus), while new and existing water development projects continue in compliance with state, tribal and federal law on the San Juan River.
San Juan Chama Project
The San Juan-Chama Project consists of a system of diversion structures and tunnels for transmountain movement of water from the San Juan River Basin to the Rio Grande Basin. Authorized as a participating project of the Colorado River Storage Project, the San Juan Chama Project provides an average annual diversion of about 91,100 acre-feet of water from the upper tributaries of the San Juan River. Primary purposes of the San Juan-Chama Project are to furnish a water supply to the middle Rio Grande Valley for municipal, domestic, and industrial uses. The project is also authorized to provide supplemental irrigation water and incidental recreation and fish and wildlife benefits.
Great movement was made to the Water Security Planning Act this year. The Water Security Planning Act (WSPA) is New Mexico’s guiding legislation for regional water planning and management to secure a resilient water future. It creates a roadmap for regionalized water planning and implementation that prioritizes the unique needs of local communities, makes use of the best available science and data, and maintains compliance with federal and state laws. Robust engagement is an essential feature of the WSPA. To inform rulemaking and the creation of guidelines, an extensive series of community open houses and an online survey were conducted by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission (NMISC) during the Spring and Summer of 2024. The inperson and online engagement process was supported by consultants at Brendle Group and MediaDesk. Brendle Group then developed two reports to summarize the engagement results, observations, and interpretations:
- Engagement Report: The engagement report provides a compendium of engagement results and themes.
- Observations and Considerations Report: This report provides observations and interpretation of the results of the engagement process. It offers preliminary considerations to inform rulemaking and the development of the guidelines for regional water planning.
The primary audience for these reports is the NMISC (New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission) Planning Team who will use them to guide the drafting of WSPA rule and guideline language ahead of a formal review, rule promulgation, and guideline adoption process in 2025. The reports also provide accountability and evidence to all those who provided input during the engagement process, documenting how input was interpreted and incorporated into the development of rulemaking and guidelines.
The 2024 engagement process was led by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission’s (NMISC) planning team. Consultants from Media Desk and Brendle Group provided technical expertise and additional capacity to support NMISC with the statewide public engagement effort. The engagement process included one open house held in each of New Mexico’s 16 water regions from the previous rounds of planning. To expand participation beyond the in-person open houses, an online open house was provided on the Main Stream New Mexico website. In total, more than 710 people attended open houses in-person and another 1,600 completed the online survey. Together, these efforts garnered more than 25,000 unique responses (i.e., dots placed, comments written, survey questions completed) to inform WSPA rule and guideline development.