ALBUQUERQUE — The Interstate Stream Commission continues to move ahead on an environmental study of a proposed water diversion project on the Gila River despite opposition from top New Mexico politicians.
The commission voted Thursday at a meeting in Albuquerque to delay a scheduled vote on paying the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation an additional $1.8 million to continue working on an environmental impact statement for the diversion project until commissioners and staff have a chance to review a draft study released this week.
However, the commission agreed to pay the federal agency to continue work on the project using some $940,000 in unspent project money that it approved for the project last year.
The ISC push to continue spending on the diversion project comes despite Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s veto earlier this year of nearly $1.7 that the ISC had requested for project planning and design. Before taking office, the governor said she would work to end the Gila project.
Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has yet to appoint new members to the Interstate Steam Commission. The sitting commission, appointed by former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, has supported the diversion project.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., released an opinion piece this week saying he believes it’s time for the ISC to abandon the diversion project. He noted that the state already has spent $15 million in federal funds on it.
Congress in 2004 allocated $66 million to New Mexico in exchange for development of water from the Gila farther downstream on the Colorado River system. New Mexico was given the option to use the federal funds to build a dam or other water project on the upper Gila or to use the money for other regional water supply projects that proponents say would benefit far more people.
“It has become abundantly clear that we should stop lining the pockets of contracting firms and throwing our limited amount of federal funding down the drain,” Heinrich said in his statement this week. “Let’s relegate these fruitless and destructive Gila diversion proposals to the history books and put the rest of our federal money from the Arizona Water Settlement Act to work on more realistic and practical water infrastructure projects that we know will work.”
Heinrich noted that the upper Gila is the last free flowing river in the American Southwest. “The river is the heart of the Gila National Forest and the Gila Wilderness—America’s first wilderness,” he said. “Because of the Gila’s natural flooding regime, the river’s floodplain is dominated by an amazing gallery forest of native cottonwoods and white-trunked Arizona Sycamores towering over riparian willows. Many species of plants, fish, birds, and other animals rely on this natural hydrology.”
The Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP) has opposed the plan to divert water from the Gila. The group issued a statement Thursday saying the ISC’s decision to continue funding the work using unspent funding from last year possibly violates the state’s Open Meetings Act.
“The ISC and the New Mexico Central Arizona Project Entity have wasted 15 years and $15 million in a fruitless attempt to develop a viable project,” GRIP stated. “Despite their inability to meet the December 2019 federal deadline for completion of the environmental impact statement, the groups continue to squander millions in federal funding on an infeasible project, when it could instead be spent on priority community water projects that can bring real water security to low-income communities in southwest New Mexico.”
