CREATING A THOUGHTFUL WATERSHED PLAN
All water in the Santa Fe River watershed begins as falling rain and snow. This may sound simplistic, but often we assume that we have always had reservoirs, rivers, and groundwater to draw from. We say our river flows from Santa Fe Lake to the Rio Grande, but this isn’t quite true — flows are not all on the surface and visible.
Webster’s dictionary defines a watershed as a ridge dividing the areas drained by different river systems or the area drained by a river system. These definitions basically refer to surface geography, but what about the underlying aquifers? In the subsurface world, there are ridges and rivers that may not resemble or coincide with the surface features at all. It’s a tale of two worlds, and the two worlds are absolutely connected.
We at the Santa Fe Watershed Association like to take a “watershed approach” to our river, aquifers and region, and we recognize that, like a spider’s web, if you pull on one strand, it affects all the other strands. We are proposing that we embark on creating a watershed plan.
The Santa Fe Municipal Watershed is the top of our watershed and has been
closed to the public since 1932 for water security reasons. This area of approximately 17,000 acres is part of Santa Fe National Forest and the Pecos Wilderness area. It has been collaboratively managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the city of Santa Fe since 2010. From these upper reaches, approximately 4,000 to 5,000 acre-feet (1 acre-foot is 325,851 gallons) per year flow down the riverbed and then through the city pipes to our homes. This is the source of 40 percent of the city of Santa Fe’s drinking water.
The 2012 city of Santa Fe Living River Ordinance allows for water flows within the riverbed mimicking historical flows up to 1,000 acre-feet per year if the watershed snowpack and reservoirs are at 100 percent of historic levels. When the snowpack and storage is below 100 percent, then the river flows are proportionally reduced.
Our river’s flows generally start “going subsurface” near the Camino Alire bridge. It stays subsurface all the way to the outflow of the Paseo Real Wastewater Treatment Plant (just west of the N.M. 599Airport Road intersection), where the river is infused with between 5,600 to 8,960 acre-feet per year. River flows are replenished by only six perennial springs at La Cieneguilla, La Cienega and Cochiti Pueblo to varying degrees until the river’s remnants may make it to the Rio Grande. From the accounts of early Spanish explorers, there were upward of 36 springs feeding the Santa Fe River.
In the lower watershed areas, the river surface flows have been severely reduced by the decline of groundwater levels. The past decades have seen a large increase in the number of private wells that have drawn on that aquifer, and that surface water chases the groundwater downward. Therefore, the Santa Fe River surface flows in the lower reaches are dependent upon our ability to manage the groundwater reservoirs.
Without knowing the amount of groundwater, we cannot manage it, so we are strong proponents of including the Santa Fe River Traditional Communities Collaborative in a Santa Fe River watershed plan. All stakeholders to the watershed must have a voice in this process, be open and transparent, and formalize the heretofore verbal collaborations. This plan ultimately creates the “web” that becomes the operating agreement and which will touch all of us in the Santa Fe River watershed.