Voters should not authorize Santa Fe County to issue up to $51 million in general obligation bonds payable from property taxes, to acquire property and construct water projects as proposed on the November 2 ballot.

This amounts to a blank check to the County that has not provided details on how the money would be spent and where the actual water would be found. The authorization of this massive expenditure is very likely to spur development beyond sustainable limits and the County has not indicated what controls if any it intends to enforce.

Presumably an undisclosed amount of this money would be used to finance the County's contribution to the Buckman Direct Diversion (BDD) that would divert San Juan Chama water from the Rio Grande and is estimated to cost $120 million (probably a low ball amount like most estimates). The City and Las Campanas are currently the other two entities that would share the cost of the BDD and hope to divert water from the Rio Grande.

This writer has been unable to find any estimates of how much water would be available when the BDD is completed years from now. This not a question of water rights but of the actual availability of "wet" water.

However there will be many demands upon Rio Grande water, some current and some not yet asserted. The silvery minnow is an endangered species protected by Federal law and in recent years the Rio Grande below Albuquerque has gone dry and water has had to be diverted from municipal and agricultural uses to provide water for the minnow.

The City of Albuquerque currently depends for its municipal water supply upon the Santa Fe Group Aquifer but it is being rapidly depleted. So Albuquerque is planning to expend $275 million to divert 90,000 acre feet or more of San Juan Chama water annually from the Rio Grande by 2007 (it promises to return half that amount to the River as reclaimed waste water!)

Several Indian Pueblos have yet to assert their water rights to Rio Grande water and the effects of such eventual action are unknown but could be substantial.

Recently it has been disclosed that PCBs, that are considered toxic, carcinogenic and persistent, are present in the Rio Grande from Pilar to Isleta Pueblo and in the Chama River watershed. They were evidently used in the manufacturing processes at the Los Alamos National Lab.

So there are numerous questions, about the quantity of water available in the future from the Rio Grande and its quality, that need to be answered before more than $100 million is spent to build a water diversion system.

And then there is the question of whether the City/County of Santa Fe will use the unsubstantiated promise of more water in the future to allow more uncontrolled development. Already the County allows plans for major developments to proceed without the existence of necessary water rights and wet water. And as recently as 10/20/04 the City Public Utilities Committee overrode City rules to approve water service for two new developments outside of the city limits.

Lastly there is the question of whether the City/County has the ability to exercise due diligence in expending large sums of money for water projects. Certainly the City did not do so in 1995 when it purchased the dilapidated SDCW water company from PNM for $60 million of taxpayer money.

In the interest of time this is just a cursory review of some of the issues that need to be considered by voters before they go to polls on November 2 to vote whether the County should be allowed to spend $51million for unspecified water projects. I do not believe that we know nearly enough about the Water Projects Question, as now presented, to approve it.

I will try to provide more information on this subject soon.

William J. Salman