Updated water plan proposed

An updated plan to send water uphill to Santa Fe via pipeline from the Fort Sumner area in eastern New Mexico has been proposed.

A controversial previous plan to do the same thing was offered by Ron Green, a Roswell rancher, in 2007 and sparked widespread opposition from southern New Mexico.

There were about 35 protests — including from the federal Interior Department, five cities, two counties, legislators, water organizations and the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau — filed before the Office of the State Engineer rejected the plan in 2011. But Green told a City Council committee Wednesday that all but a few of the protests were resolved.

The previous plan by Green’s Berrendo LLC would have pumped 6,600 acre-feet of water a year (more than 2 billion gallons) out of wells in De Baca County and transported it through a 145-mile pipeline to Santa Fe, where the water would have been stored in a tank, and could have been bought by governments and developers. Any remainder could have gone into the Rio Grande to flow downstream for entities in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho.

Many details of the new plan are provided in a memo from city water resources coordinator Andrew Erdmann. It provides a new proposed route for the pipeline — along N.M. 60 from Fort Sumner to Encino, then north along U.S. 285 to Interstate 40, east on I-40 past Moriarty to N.M. 344, north to N.M. 14, and then on into Santa Fe through Golden, Madrid and Cerrillos. Erdmann’s memo says Santa Fe is being offered up to 1,000 acre-feet of treated water per year at a “recurring cost” of $7.50 per thousand gallons, or about $2.4 million annually for all 1,000 acre-feet, as well as upfront costs.