The Mayor and City Council Santa Fe met for months in secret to consider a scheme to pump water 65 miles from Estancia to Santa Fe and by all accounts concluded that it was feasible and a good idea. When they recently revealed the plan to the public it was met with incredulity and an uproar of opposition.

Subsequently the City Council's Public Utility Committee composed of five Council members and chaired by Council member Mathew Ortiz, whose license to practice law has been suspended by the NM Supreme Court, voted unanimously to postpone the Estancia water scheme.

This abrupt reversal after prolonged study once again brings into question the ability of the Santa Fe City Council to perform due diligence. This question has been on the minds of Santa Feans ever since the City Council promoted the purchase of Sangre de Cristo Water Company from PNM in 1995 for about $60 million.

The rationale offered for this purchase was to contain water rates but as every Santa Fean knows rates have continually escalated ever since as a consequence of the water company being in a state of dilapidation at the time of purchase (a fact that City government failed to discover in time, along with the rumor that PNM was looking for a way to abandon the water company).

The mismanagement of the water company by City government since purchase is well documented on this website. And City government continues to punish home owners by maintaining the imposition of Stage 2 water restrictions and surcharges in contravention of the Emergency Water Ordinance which stipulates that "Stage 2 applies during periods when the probability exists that the city of Santa Fe water utility will not be able to meet from 16% to 35% of the water demands of its customers". There is no indication that this probability currently exists.

The Estancia water scheme should have been dead upon arrival at City Hall. It is so unscrupulous and unrealistic that one wonders what possibly could have motivated the Mayor and City Council to accept it.

In the first place what moral right does the City of Santa Fe have to take the underground water upon which the people in an agricultural basin in a different county depend, without their approval or recompense to them? Sierra Waterworks Co., a private firm in Estancia, claims to have 7,200 acre feet of water rights and water that it would sell to Santa Fe along with the ability to mine the Estancia Basin aquifer and would be willing to sell out its neighbors without any benefit to them. The Santa Fe City Council saw nothing wrong with this nefarious offer.

This is a case of "might makes right" where money is the might.

And Council member Carol Roberston-Lopez has stated that the State of NM should make it easier to transfer water rights from agricultural lands to municipalities, which would lead to population centers surrounded by desertification.

Even if the State Engineer authorized the transfer of water and water rights from the Estancia Basin to Santa Fe, which is uncertain, there is no doubt that the citizens of Torrance County would instigate legal action to prevent it, and the City of Santa Fe would be engaged in another very expensive legal battle with great uncertainty of prevailing.

Financially the piping of underground brackish water 65 miles to Santa Fe makes no sense at all. The City Council was willing to spend $7 million to purchase an option, which was completely unnecessary, to initiate this scheme, because no other organization would even contemplate spending $millions to investigate such an obvious boondoggle.

The City Council opined that it would cost $127 million to finance the pumping, piping and desalinization of the Estancia Basin water but provided no details of this cost nor the cost of maintaining such an elaborate and expensive water system.

This would be in addition to the $150 million that the City Council is planning to spend on a water diversion system from the Rio Grande. The City does not have the enormous funds for either system nor has it provided details on how it plans to raise and amortize these costs and pay for the maintenance of either system, nor what it would cost individual Santa Fe water users.

The City Council has also failed to provide techical information about how it could desalinate the brackish water and continue to mine the aquifer as the water level dropped. This would involve untested technology and at best it would be a very expensive project with inestimable costs.

And lastly, who in Santa Fe would benefit from the building of this complex infrastructure to import water? It is a certainty that the costs would be passed onto present water consumers who would not need that amount of water if future development in Santa Fe was based on sustainable resources and water conservation.

However the prospect of massive new quantities of water whether real or not would inevitably lead to uncontrolled and unsustainable development that in no way would benefit present Santa Feans, just the opposite.

The Estancia water scheme should be abandoned without further deliberation and the Mayor and City Council of Santa Fe should be admonished to put aside their fantasies and shenanigans and embrace reality and ethical practices.

William J. Salman