'A water right is a hunting license not a warranty deed.
Overheard at the 19th Annual New
Mexico Water Dialogue Thursday, January 10, 2013
The official
title was 'Reviving Water Planning: Successes, Challenges and
Opportunities' but I prefer mine. One overwhelming point that stuck with me from the day: hard choices
are going to need to be made about water. And those choices can be made more equitably
through water planning - a collaborative effort involving varied
interests.
There were a couple of elephants in the already well-populated room
at the Pueblo Cultural Center. One was called-out by an attendee - the
City, more accurately but irritatingly, the Albuquerque/Bernalillo
County Water Utility Authority, to whom we are to be eternally grateful
for not having included 'wastewater' in their name. The 'they' there is
actually nobody but well-paid staff and a fluid mix of representatives
from the member governments. It's a structure, I believe, designed to
distance it's member board from accountability and its actions from
public transparency. The elephantine status comes from being the biggest
water user in the State.