Pueblo’s construction of water treatment plant ruffles feathers of its rural neighbors

San Ildefonso says it has minimal authority over federal project

Liz Roybal described feeling shocked to see crews converge on a vacant field where she played ball as a child.

They began building an unsightly structure that mars El Rancho’s rugged, scenic beauty, she said.

Roybal learned it was a treatment plant San Ildefonso Pueblo is building at the edge of its land, abutting the El Rancho community, as a key part of the massive Pojoaque Basin Regional Water System.

As Roybal tells it, the plant began materializing without notice, angering her and some other neighbors.

She said she understands San Ildefonso is sovereign and can do what it wants on tribal land. But the pueblo’s leaders should have called a meeting with area residents to inform them such an unsightly structure would be built at the main entrance of El Rancho, she said.

“It’s just a monstrous project,” Roybal said. “There was no communication. I thought we had a better relationship with San Ildefonso.”

The construction itself is disruptive, with heavy equipment and dozens of workers at the site, and big trucks going in and out of the entrance on the narrow road, she said.

Crews have excavated the land and erected walls, making her feel as though she’s entering a nuclear facility when she goes into El Rancho, she said, which is ruining the community’s rural charm.

“They have thousands of acres of property. Why did they have to put it there?” Roybal said of pueblo officials.

The treatment plant is deemed a crucial component of the regional water system being built to help settle the decades-old

Aamodt litigation — one the country’s longest-running water disputes — by boosting the area’s limited groundwater supply. The project will draw and treat water from the Rio Grande, which flows through San Ildefonso Pueblo.

In March, officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is overseeing the project, said crews would begin building the treatment plant later that year.

They never stated where exactly the plant would be located.

Work began about three years ago on the system, which is aimed at easing the stress on wells and streams while providing water in an area stretching from Española to Santa Fe.

The system is slated to be completed in 2028.

When finished, it will supply up to 4,000 acre-feet of drinking water a year — about 1.3 billion gallons — to about 10,000 people in Nambe, Tesuque, San Ildefonso and Pojoaque pueblos as well as to other Santa Fe County customers in the Pojoaque Valley.

Federal agencies are authorized to spend up to $413 million on the work.

The state has chipped in $100 million, and Santa Fe County is paying $17.5 million.

In a 2008 engineering report to an association representing the four pueblos involved in the project, the water treatment plant’s proposed location was near the Rio Grande, south of N.M. 502 and a good distance from El Rancho.

That was the proposed treatment plant site for nearly a decade, which made more sense partly because it was in an uninhabited area, said Devin Bent, a longtime Nambé resident.

When the Bureau of Reclamation conducted an environmental impact statement in 2017, the agency eliminated it without explanation and gave San Ildefonso three other options, all in the El Rancho area, Bent said.

“You can search through the environmental impact statement and you won’t find a reason — no reason given,” Bent said.

Officials continue to offer no explanation for the change in siting. The Reclamation Bureau didn’t respond to emailed questions about why it scratched the Rio Grande site in favor of one in the middle of a rural community.

In an email, San Ildefonso Pueblo Gov. Christopher Moquino wrote the pueblo has limited authority over the federal project and went with what seemed the best option it was given for siting the treatment plant.

“The Bureau of Reclamation is the entity ultimately responsible for the design and construction of the system,” Moquino wrote.

The public had a chance to review and comment on the system’s design, including the water treatment plant’s location, in a series of meetings in 2016 and 2017, Moquino wrote. The bureau hosted several of the hearings and invited written comments at that time, he added.

The Interior Department approved the pueblo’s “preferred alternative” for the treatment plant’s location in 2019, he wrote.

Although the system will serve other pueblos and county users, San Ildefonso agreed to house most of the infrastructure, including the treatment plant, on its land to serve the larger area, he added.

San Ildefonso, he wrote, “sees this as benefitting not just the pueblo but the entire community in the Pojoaque basin that will benefit from a reliable source of safe and clean drinking water.”

Bent said the pueblo took the best of three bad choices.

One of the proposed sites would have put the plant near an electrical substation that flooded in the 1950s, and another would’ve been very close to the road, he said.

The site where it ended up is only a little better, next to the El Rancho Senior Center, Bent said. The big, drab, intrusive structure is the first thing people will see going through the entrance, and there’s also a question of whether the large volume of chlorine that will be used to treat the water will pose health risks, he said.

“I think personally it’s a bad area,” Bent said. “There’s all sorts of other places they could have put it. The closer you put it to the river, the more sense it makes.”

Bent said he blames the county more than San Ildefonso for the outcome. As a partner helping to fund the project, the county could have pushed to have the plant built elsewhere.

“To me the villain in this is the county, which just did not stick up for us,” he said.

But county spokeswoman Olivia Romo in an email echoed Moquino in saying the bureau is in charge of the project.

“The County appreciates the concerns of residents,” Romo wrote. “Ultimately, however, the County did not control the location of the water treatment plant.”

Questions about the plant’s location and the variety of factors that went into the decision should be addressed to the bureau, she added.

Roybal said it’s an unwelcome addition to the community, and no one would have accepted it if they’d had a choice.

There are also safety concerns such as what could happen if the plant springs a leak, she said.

She’s aware that no amount of complaining will make it go away, but says it’s important to object to a project that’s poorly handled.

“This could have been better thought out,” she said. “We could have had better communication. It’s just disappointing. They’re going to do what they want to do.”