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Forest Service keeps watch, doesn’t stop
Caitlin McGlade Arizona Republic USA TODAY NETWORK
(Blogger note: Obviously NOT published in Ruidoso News USA TODAY section)
RUIDOSO, N.M. — Sandy Farris’ front yard bends toward a deep, rocky trench.
She’s found fragments of ancient pottery and tools strewn around the edges. With each piece she discovers, she wonders: Did enough water rush through this dry creek bed to support life at one point?
Likely yes — evidenced by the pottery remains, according to the director of the New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies. But precisely when Eagle Creek stopped flowing above ground with some regularity is a point of contention.
A hydrologist who contracts for the Village of Ruidoso said the creek has always plunged underground upstream from there because of a deep fault line, and only flows above ground in times of extremely heavy rain or above-average snowmelt. He cited a state engineering map dating back to 1909 but wasn’t able to locate it.
A federal topographic map from 1963 describes Eagle Creek as “intermittent.”
Some residents have attested that Eagle Creek regularly flowed at least several months out of the year from the slopes of the Sierra Blanca mountain range, well past Farris’ property.
One homeowner, who had a Ph.D. in water resource engineering, said the water stopped flowing soon after he bought his property in 1999. He lost 15 large trees — cottonwoods, oaks and a box elder — not long after. His well “dried up to a dribble,” requiring the well to be drilled deeper.
In fact, most of the members of the Eagle Creek Conservation Association, a group of residents who lived along the creek, had to deepen their wells, according to a legal complaint.
A rancher said he experienced less water flowing into the river on his property, which left limited irrigation for his crops. The water was more polluted, too, he said.
The culprits, they said, were new upstream wells, drilled on national forest land in the late 1980s by the Village of Ruidoso, a popular destination for wellheeled visitors looking to escape the broiling Texas sun.
And the village was using those wells long past the date its permit had expired.
In 2005, the homeowner, William Midkiff, and the rancher, Gerald Ford, sued to get Eagle Creek flowing. But they didn’t sue the Village of Ruidoso. They sued the authority charged with “securing favorable conditions for water flows”: the U.S. Forest Service.
Ultimately, the village agreed to follow new rules in order to continue pumping. The Forest Service would not answer questions about how frequently it puts conditions, such as monitoring water use and its effect on the watershed, on water users that extract from forest land.
But experts familiar with the permitting process told The Arizona Republic this seldom happens.
The agency tried to require groundwater use reporting nationwide back in 2014. But the head of the agency met so much backlash from governors, Western cities, ranching, agriculture, bottling, mining and energy companies, that he gave up.
Never mind that standard well permits are only supposed to last for 20 years. Data show at least 100 well, spring or windmill permits remain active at least three years past their expiration date, with some decades past their check-in date.
Ruidoso’s permit is now current, but it operated for more than 20 years on one that expired before having to make adjustments.
The Forest Service attested that it “began discussions” between 1996 and 2005 about renewing the permit that had expired in 1995.
Nationwide, about 12% of all currently authorized permits in the Forest Service’s water use permit database — including anything from wells to pipelines to reservoirs — expired at least three years ago.
Forest Service program and realty specialists told The Republic that they send annual reports to forest supervisors reminding them of their expired permits, but they don’t require them to do anything about them.
It’s unclear if those have been received.
The Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California, for example, has let about 80 currently authorized permits expire beyond three years — some for decades — but the forest supervisor’s office said they had no memos alerting them.
The Forest Service even allowed a water user as high profile as Nestle to move water across national forest land for decades on an expired permit. The Desert Sun reported in 2015 that the agency hadn’t examined the ecological effects of drawing tens of millions of gallons each year from springs in the San Bernardino Forest.
Only after that story did the Forest Service reexamine the permit.
John Horning, executive director of the environmental advocacy group WildEarth Guardians, said the Forest Service tends only to scrutinize special use permits when exposed for neglecting them or when it gets sued, like in the case of Ruidoso.
“It’s unfortunate, but it’s the only way you get the agency to do things that are controversial and require them to stand up and protect the forests, wildlife and the streams and rivers that they’re charged with protecting,” Horning said. “The culture is captive to the industries, whether that’s oil and gas, timber, grass or water.”
Horning’s got about 100 bank boxes full of permits stored in his basement and has been studying the problem off and on for decades.
The Forest Service denied requests for an interview for this story.
‘It looks like paradise, but there’s a water shortage’
Ruidoso, New Mexico, perches nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, surrounded by steep, piney slopes of the Sierra Blanca mountain range that reach even higher — up to 12,000 feet.
The village’s main drag is bustling with boutique shops, restaurants and bars that run parallel to its namesake: the Rio Ruidoso.
That means “noisy river” in Spanish. You can hear it clamor over rocks from the patio of one of the independent coffee shops. Locals will tell you it used to be a lot louder.
The mountain vistas and relatively low summer temperatures make for a welcome getaway, so the streets are often packed on the weekends. It’s hard to find a table for lunch on a Saturday without waiting an hour.
The village is home to three golf courses and a couple of man-made lakes that folks use for recreation. Deer and elk casually strut down major thoroughfares, and after an unusually wet summer last year, bright yellow wildflowers and purple thistle busted through anywhere there was an opportunity to grow.
Lincoln County’s population has nearly doubled since the 1980s to about 20,000. But former county Commissioner Jackie Powell says the area can swell to 50,000 on holiday weekends.
“People got tired of the heat in Texas,” she said. “We were a tiny place hidden away for a while, and they found us.”
On the surface, there’s little evidence of the village’s precarious relationship with water. A few signs are posted around town that read: “Water Restrictions in Effect,” indicating a ban on watering lawns or strict rules about irrigating vegetables and fruit trees.
That’s only for people on the village’s water system.
Outside village limits, residents tend to depend on their own wells.
Several decades ago, various developers bought up about 10,000 lots that came with the privilege to pump at least 326,000 gallons each year per lot — enough water for a resident to take about 52 showers a day.
Developers can no longer buy new property, subdivide it and simply promise groundwater. They have to buy water rights from existing rights holders for every home in the subdivision, Powell said The new rule came after Powell, when she was a county commissioner, defeated pressure from developers who came to meetings wearing pins displaying her face with a red line through it.
But some 9,000 lots were grandfathered in, and they’re still up for grabs, she said.
Tension over water can get high in Lincoln County. One homeowner growing corn in the front yard posted a sign indicating the property was on a private well. Powell said people do that to avoid getting bothered by passersby who might think they’re breaking village water restrictions.
One man who lives along Eagle Creek told The Republic that on one rare occasion that water flowed on his property, his grandchildren got reprimanded when seen playing in it.
They were building a little dam with some rocks and someone in a passing car stopped to yell that they could get in trouble for diverting water.
“Mountain Water 101: It looks like paradise, but there’s a water shortage,” Powell said.
Look outside the village and the scars of drought are apparent.
A fire took out more than 44,000 acres in 2012. Some stretches of the mountains remain covered in clusters of dead pine that protrude from the earth like toothpicks.
The fire actually had a positive effect on the water supply. The forest was overgrown and trees either sucked up water or caught snow in their highest branches, which would then evaporate instead of sinking into the earth to recharge aquifers, said Roger Peery, a hydrogeologist who contracts with Ruidoso.
With fewer thirsty trees, groundwater levels have risen and the creeks and rivers have picked up more flow.
But data suggests that might not last. Forest Service researchers project that the area could get much drier. Under a low carbon emissions climate change model, the watershed is expected to produce about half as much average annual runoff by between 2030 and 2049 compared with what it had on average from 1960 to 2015. Under a high carbon emissions model, average annual runoff could drop by more than 80%.
Powell, whose priority as county commissioner was to conserve water, says people have this wrongheaded idea that water availability increases with the population.
On an afternoon drive through the forest this past summer, she pointed to a parched stretch of Eagle Creek barely trickling over some pebbles alongside the road.
“That’s it. That’s what we’re fighting over,” she said. “I fight for every drop because I want my grandkids to have something.”
‘Sealed off from any other users’
The Village of Ruidoso was running out of water in the 1980s. City leaders needed a solution fast.
They hired the Atkins and Landfair consulting firm to explore. The search turned up a pocket of groundwater on national forest land that no one had ever claimed before. The village got first dibs on the water rights, the Roswell-based consultants said.
Best of all, the consultants told the Village Council that this newly discovered basin was closed off and had no connection to the flow of the Rio Ruidoso or any other drainage.
The village secured the water rights from the state engineer’s office, received a permit from the Forest Service and started drilling in 1988 right next to Eagle Creek.
A newspaper headline at the time exclaimed “Jackpot,” gushing that the new water could quench the village’s thirst for 200 years.
The village manager was quoted as saying the discovery would be a “lifesaver for future development.”
One news article reported that if people thought their access to water would be affected by the wells they’d have to prove it.
“Since the basin appears to be sealed off from any other users, such a claim would be extremely unlikely,” Jackie Atkins from the consulting firm told the newspaper at that time.
Atkins told The Republic in an October email that it was recognized within just a few months that the new source wasn’t separate from the greater system, known as the Hondo Groundwater Basin.
Other water users could have filed lawsuits to try to stop the development but no one did, he said.
Today, water experts agree: The basin is connected to everything else in the watershed, Peery, the village’s hydrogeologist, said. “I think they honestly just didn’t know what the connection would be. Nobody had really looked at the correlation between streamflow and pumping at that time. There are some areas, geologically, that are isolated from the rocks or the sediments around them and basically you’re kind of pumping out of a bathtub. That’s not uncommon in a lot of places and perhaps they thought that was what was going on here. They just didn’t know.”
Peery said the village scaled back its water right when it became clear there wasn’t enough water to meet expectations set in the 1980s. And, after extensive paperwork, the forest land wells are now pumping from water considered supplemental to the village’s surface water rights that it had before the 1980s, Peery said.
A Forest Service study conducted decades later found that a stream gage on Eagle Creek always detected a flow, even with below-average precipitation, before the village dug the wells.
There wasn’t a single day from 1969 through 1980 that the stream gage recorded a dry creek. That gage was decommissioned, but a new gage farther upstream recorded no flow on 789 days during the 20 years following the wells’ installation. Even when the area was getting above-average precipitation, the creek ran dry.
Peery said the creek has always had dry periods, and the likely explanation for the findings in that report had more to do with the location of the new gage compared to the old one. The new gage, he said, is located in an area where a thick bed of sand and gravel fills up the creek channel. The creek may appear to not flow there, but if you were to dig enough you’d likely find water.
The old gage was located in an area that had no sand and gravel to mask the water — the river flowed freely on the surface there, he said.
Peery said that he doesn’t think the creek runs any more fully than it did prior to the wells.
The Forest Service acknowledged this as a possibility, but still reported that the creek would flow better without the wells. The agency considered pulling the village’s permit.
They wanted the pumping to stop
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of federal lands across the U.S., much of it at the headwaters of important watersheds. The agency has a tough job. It must balance the health of waterways and wildlife with drinking water needs of the public. This involves a complex and contentious web of state-administered water rights.
If the federal government so much as mentions the words “manage” and “water” in the same sentence, things get ugly fast.
Forest Service lands provide the largest source for municipal water supply in the U.S., serving more than 60 million people in 33 states, according to the agency.
But the extent of the agency’s responsibility to protect water resources changes depending who you talk to.
Former Director Tom Tidwell said the Forest Service should maintain streamflows and also understand the impact that withdrawals have on groundwater.
He cited the Organic Administration Act of 1897, which charged the Forest Service with improving and protecting the forests “for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows.”
“With climate change, this is going to be a bigger and bigger issue. I’ve always felt that the number one use of national forests is going to be for water. Recreation second. Everything else is going to be dependent on how to maintain healthy watersheds to produce clean water that comes off our national forests,” he said. “It was one of the primary purposes of why national forests were created back in 1905 to begin with, was because of water.”
Managing special use permits is a big part of that. Tidwell said it’s important to reexamine permits when they expire.
“There are situations where we have a diversion that have been in place for many, many years but because of the change in climate, extensive droughts, that the diversion point has to either be changed or altered in a way to be able to maintain instream flows,” Tidwell said.
But Andy Stahl, who represents agency employees through his group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said forest supervisors have little to no control over water diversions because states dictate water rights. Forest managers have little incentive to monitor water use and even keep permits up to date, he said.
No one can make them, he said. “The Forest Service can choose not to use its resources, time, money and staff processing an old permit,” Stahl said. “The district ranger can say, ‘I have a lot better things to do. I’ve got no money to do this, and there are thousands of these things littering my office landscape. And anyway, I wouldn’t make any different decision today because Joe’s been using this water for 150 years.’” He said people think the Forest Service is supposed to protect the watershed for the sake of the environment. But a Supreme Court decision in 1978 made it clear that the agency is only supposed to protect the watershed on behalf of irrigators and other users downstream, he said.
The decision, he said, came as a brutal surprise.
“It was not to protect the watershed, or the birds, the bees, the trout and the like. We protect the watershed in order to ensure the irrigator can grow alfalfa,” he said. “It is antithetical to the conservation ethic of many Forest Service employees.”
Horning, with WildEarth Guardians, took issue with that, saying forest managers have a legal and ethical duty to protect the watershed.
“In an era of climate crisis-induced changes, it is totally incumbent on the Forest Service to know what traditional uses are out there and some of those traditional uses might no longer be viable,” he said.
Horning cited a 2001 opinion by a Forest Service chief that said federal law “is explicit in its requirements that the Forest Service establish terms and conditions to minimize damage to scenic and aesthetic values and fish and wildlife habitat and otherwise protect the environment.”
The chief at the time added that the agency is obligated to examine applications to build on forest land and review permits when they expire.
“There is culture, and there is a law, and there is a way that that culture shapes the way agencies interpret the law,” Horning said. “The U.S. Forest Service was founded ... to protect a renewable source of water.”
The Forest Service manual for Region 3 — Arizona and New Mexico — says a water development permit can be denied if analysis indicates that forest resources could not be adequately protected.
According to that manual, permit applicants should prove that they’re unable to access water outside the forest limits, report how much water they plan to use and explain what they can do to mitigate damage done during construction.
The manual also calls for environmental analyses prior to approval and says the agency may monitor water withdrawals to protect forest resources. If long-term monitoring reveals that the project is hurting the forest, the agency can suspend or revoke the permit.
That’s for new permits, Stahl said. It’s unclear to what extent this process has happened with existing permits.
“The Forest Service is loathe to create new property rights that rely on use of the national forests, so it doesn’t make the process easy,” Stahl said.
In Lincoln County in the mid-2000s, Bill Midkiff and Gerald Ford argued the Forest Service wasn’t fulfilling its duty.
The Village of Ruidoso’s permit to operate wells in the Lincoln National Forest expired in 1995 and village leaders asked for a renewal.
The Forest Service did not renew the permit, but let the village deepen one of its wells and continue pumping. Ruidoso assured the agency that the well water had no connection to Eagle Creek. Even if they drilled deeper, they said, the creek’s surface flows would not be affected, according to the legal complaint.
Midkiff and Ford demanded the pumping stop unless the Forest Service conducted an environmental analysis and properly issued a new permit.
They argued the Forest Service had the power to stop the pumping.
In the end, the two men settled for environmental and hydrologic studies, to cost the village up to $450,000.
Users united in an uproar
Ruidoso’s contract is one of more than 7,600 permits or easements that have been issued for structures that store or carry water on and across national forest land. The permits cover water diversions for dams, reservoirs, wells, pipelines and ditches.
Though the Forest Service is charged with overseeing this activity, the agency doesn’t have the authority to put requirements or restrictions on all forest water users.
One of the major limitations on the Forest Service’s power is the Colorado Ditch Bill Act.
Passed by Congress in 1986, it required permanent authorizations of agricultural and livestock water systems that have been on forests since 1976 or earlier. Water users had to submit applications to qualify before 1997.
Stahl referred to these as “permanent, no-strings-attached property right granted by the feds to divert water across federal land for private use.”
A Republic analysis of water use permits found that at least 20% of all current water development operators are indefinitely protected under the Ditch Bill Act.
When Tidwell tried to take greater initiative over things the agency could govern, water users big and small united in an uproar.
The agency argued in a 2014 policy change proposal that it needed to more thoroughly examine the impact groundwater pumping had on forest land resources. This would mean establishing nationwide criteria for approving and renewing permits that enabled groundwater use, requiring permit holders to report how much water they used and to conserve when appropriate.
Tidwell, who was chief from 2009 to 2017, told The Republic that some forest permit applicants were going through a variety of environmental impact studies while others had to do very little.
He wanted to create consistency. Not only would this help the Forest Service identify potential threats to the health of a watershed and ways of addressing them, but it would be more fair to the permit holders because their treatment would not differ depending on who was in charge locally.
The Forest Service had recently gotten sued in two states for approving permits without adequately analyzing the potential groundwater impacts. The courts sided with the plaintiffs and told the Forest Service to do a better job.
Upon proposing the directive, the agency asserted it had a critical role to protect water on forest land and needed to actively manage it, in cooperation with the states.
Tidwell said during congressional testimony in 2014 that his agency is in a “very poor defensive position … when it comes to evaluating proposals that may impact groundwater.”
Taking steps at that point — in 2014 — would better position the agency to find and manage the consequences of climate change, he said.
Dozens of academic scientists wrote in favor of Tidwell’s suggestions, saying that groundwater must be protected from excessive withdrawals and contamination to keep enough water circulating through streams and wetlands and to provide reliable supply to local and downstream water users. Aquifers provide water storage, contribute to streamflows, naturally purify water, regulate erosion and control floods, they said.
“Outside of glaciers and ice caps, groundwater is our largest bank of fresh water on the planet, yet we currently lack an adequate accounting system from this resource,” stated a letter signed by dozens of scientists. “Insufficient groundwater monitoring and management has led to severe groundwater level declines in many parts of the U.S.”
One Colorado-based retired groundwater hydrologist said the Forest Service’s proposal was long overdue.
“The headwaters for much of the water supply in the west are located within the National Forests, both as surface and groundwater sources, and these sources need to be protected,” wrote Patrick Tucci.
But their words of encouragement were drowned out by roughly 150 letters criticizing the proposal. Many argued that the Forest Service was out of line. They said the agency had no business managing groundwater because state governments — not the federal government — allocate water rights. They insisted the Forest Service didn’t have the time and money to take on such a massive responsibility.
“Forest Service budget itself seems always under siege,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon. “Wildfires consume an ever-increasing amount of it. The ability to manage our forests is in question at this time. So I am very concerned about taking on a whole other initiative, no matter how well intended. Where are we going to get the resources?”
Critics added that the cost of additional environmental studies would hurt industries that depend on forest water. A congressman from Ohio fretted that the proposal, if carried out, would stymie oil and gas exploration efforts.
The phrase “disastrous impact” was used several times.
Mining and Environmental Consultants wrote that the directive would impose “an insurmountable burden” on small mining companies by requiring studies be done to demonstrate that their work “would not affect forest groundwater uses.”
One group argued that the Forest Service’s finances would suffer. The agency could lose revenue from fees if businesses, seeking to avoid more regulation, stopped working on forest lands.
Marlene Kouba, then Hettinger County, North Dakota, Farm Bureau president, wrote that what she does with her well or any pipeline is her business — not that of the U.S. Forest Service.
“This proposal seems like just another politically-motivated attack on water rights that will negatively impact farm and ranch families and tribes who live and operate in North Dakota like me, my friends and neighbors,” she wrote. “Especially in the western part of the state where the new Bakken oil fields are prospering to fill the energy needs of the nation and world.”
One rancher called the proposed directive a “water grab” that threatened the family ranch, the cattle industry, private property rights and state water rights.
“Five generations of our family have lived and worked on this ranch since 1864,” said Kris Stewart, of Paradise Valley, Nevada. “It smacks of an out of control Washington bureaucracy that believes it knows better for citizens than we know for ourselves.”
Ruidoso participated in the onslaught, arguing that it had already been subjected to the proposed directive, which was “ruinously expensive, protracted and exhausting.” Debi Lee, village manager at the time, wrote in a letter that the Forest Service’s actions basically ignored the village’s water rights and cost them more than $1.5 million for an environmental statement.
The New Mexico state engineer at the time backed her up in testimony before Congress.
“The Service has proposed to dramatically cut back the quantity of water that the village may divert and use in order to protect aquatic habitats, streamside recreational uses and other water uses,” Scott Verhines said.
That didn’t end up happening. Under pressure, Tidwell surrendered his nationwide efforts. To this day, he said, he doesn’t think the agency has a uniform policy on groundwater.
“I felt that the agency was all alone,” he told The Republic this summer.
Current Forest Service staff did not respond when asked what the agency has done to protect groundwater resources since the directive failed.
The least controversial option
Nearly two years after Tidwell’s attempt at increased oversight, the Smokey Bear Ranger District made a decision about Ruidoso’s wells.
The forest supervisor, Travis G. Moseley, wrote that the agency had three options.
One: Allow the village to keep pumping the same amount of water but require it to measure how much it’s taking and to show how that affects the water table. The permit would last up to 20 years, with check-ins possible as frequently as every year, and definitely every five to 10 years.
Two: Stop pumping. Let the wilderness get back to its natural self.
Three: Allow the village to pump but limit the amount it can take. Monitor how the pumping affects the watershed and adjust limits accordingly.
The second option was the “environmentally preferred” one, Moseley explained. It would result in increased water flow and fewer days when Eagle Creek ran dry.
“Eventually, the natural water balance would be restored,” he wrote in the report.
But denying the permit, he said, would leave Ruidoso without reasonable access to water it has grown to depend on since the 1980s — and water it is likely to need in the future.
The wells directly supply, on average, as much as 29% of the village’s water and it’s unlikely the village could find a replacement, according to the report.
Besides, the wells have been pumping for more than 30 years so the watershed, riparian and aquatic habitats “have likely reestablished a new equilibrium under the existing pumping regime and it is questionable if they have changed at all.”
Moseley made it clear that the agency is required to consider options like Option Two for all environmental impact statements.
The other choice to reduce dry periods, Option Three, was difficult to justify because the creek downstream from the wells “does not represent a highquality fishery or host rare species.”
The social and financial costs of such water cutbacks would be too high. And it was unclear those cutbacks would even substantially improve aquatic habitat or riparian resources.
So Option One it was. The village could keep its access to the water — but not without scrutiny.
Every month, a contractor for the city drives to the end of a winding, gravel road that follows Eagle Creek. He maneuvers over Eagle Creek by way of fallen logs and rocks and takes a brief hike to his first stop — being careful to acknowledge the fierce little dog that rushes at him from a family cabin along the way.
His first destination is a stream gage. It looks like a big white ruler submerged part-way under water. He makes sure that there isn’t any debris nearby that could give false measurements and logs the stats on his phone.
The contractor then drives to each of the village’s wells and logs how much water they’re drawing. He also lugs what is essentially a massive, metal roll of measuring tape to several wells built just for monitoring the aquifer. He unravels the thread until it strikes water and records how far below the surface water stands.
Pine trees tower above and wildflowers scatter pops of purple, red, white and yellow throughout tall and tangled grass. A stillness surrounds: The only sounds are bird chirps, the creek’s trickle and the clanking of the contractor’s tools as he works.
Everything he documents goes to the Forest Service, which will ultimately determine if the village’s wells are sustainable for the watershed.
Moseley set out to answer a long list of questions back in 2016. Among them: How much water can the aquifer hold and how fast does it recharge? What effect does pumping have on Eagle Creek? How much snowpack and precipitation does this watershed collect?
The agency also ordered the village not to work on any equipment within a quarter-mile of northern goshawk and Mexican spotted owl habitat during their breeding season. Ruidoso had to follow best management practices to avoid disturbing vegetation and causing soil erosion. And it had to develop a water conservation strategy.
Moseley wrote that this plan was sustainable in the near term, but maybe not in the long term.
“The influence of climate change on the southwestern United States will continue to be of great concern in managing the region’s water resources. Similarly, it will present challenges in balancing the needs of water use and the need to protect water-dependent natural resources,” his report says. “The decision to continue current levels of pumping, combined with the future effect of climate change, may mean that the purpose and need to protect natural resources may not be achievable.”
The key here, though, is that adjustments can be made before things get too bad. Monitoring the situation gives the Forest Service the ability to protect the environment in the long run, Moseley said.
And that is a reason why Tidwell tried back in 2014 to compel all forest supervisors to establish monitoring and plans to mitigate any damage permit holders might be having on the environment.
However, Tidwell said arrangements like Ruidoso’s are probably not common, based on his past experience.
Current Forest Service staff did not answer when asked how many water development permits require monitoring.
“It’s downstream users that lose out,” Tidwell said. “There could be developments that are occurring, and either today or a few years from now, people downstream are going to have less water and they’re not going to have the opportunity to say no, or to understand, or for mitigation to be put in place to mitigate impacts because we just don’t know.”
He said the agency wanted to just display impacts of water developments so downstream users could be empowered to oppose diversions that might affect them.
“Some states don’t want that,” he said. “The last thing they want is for the Forest service to share information that maybe makes their job more difficult.”
Tidwell stressed that the states should take charge of understanding and displaying impacts on groundwater.
Certainly, some states in the West do track water, who uses it and where it goes but the picture is not always complete.
For example, Utah collects diversion data for about 80% to 90% of surfacewater- irrigated acreage. But a state engineer estimated Utah records diversion amounts for just 10% or less or the total groundwater-irrigated acreage.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the amount of groundwater pumping for agriculture in annual reports on a valley- wide basis.
In California, only groundwater users in Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have to report how much water they’re using. Most groundwater diverters in the state don’t have to submit annual water reports to the Division of Water Rights because most groundwater use requires no permits or licenses.
To get a right to groundwater in California, you can typically just pump the water and use it for a beneficial purpose.
Nevada has no uniform requirement for water rights holders to report how much they’re using. Some are required as a condition of their state-issued water right permit, or by order of the state engineer based on the area.
Colorado maintains a sophisticated database that will tell you exactly where water diversion structures are, what they are, how much water they take and when, along with a vast trove of other data points.
The Colorado Division of Water Resources maintains its database for specific reasons: to create a record of the use of a public resource and to ensure fair records of who gets to claim water and how much. Not among those reasons, though, is any specific protection for watersheds as a whole.
That is a job for the Forest Service.
Conservation comes easier when someone is watching
It seems Ruidoso’s current planners are no longer at odds with the Forest Service, despite the complaint back in 2014.
Peery said that one plus of the monitoring is that they’ll be able to find out if the Forest Service’s dire projections for the area’s future reflect reality.
Eric Boyda, Ruidoso’s water rights and conservation specialist, said he’d rather spend money on water infrastructure projects than the Forest Service requirements. But, he said, monitoring groundwater levels and making models for the future helps the village strategize.
“A lot of the stuff that the Forest Service is requesting is stuff that we should be doing anyways,” Boyda said.
After all, the monitoring has brought the village welcome news. Testing has shown the village’s aquifer recharges quickly and groundwater levels have not trended downward since the village started measuring, he said.
Boyda insisted that the village’s current water restrictions have nothing to do with the fact that the Forest Service is watching.
“It’d be the same either way,” Boyda said. “Just the mentality of being in a high stress water area, conservation has always been a critical concern for the village at least in recent decades.”
But Powell pointed out that it took a lawsuit to launch environmental impact studies and monitoring requirements that make sure the village isn’t taking too much.
She gives Boyda credit for better managing water than previous administrations, but she is glad the Forest Service is watching on the mountain.
“There needs to be an understanding from here to kingdom come that you will always be held accountable for what you do up there,” she said. “For the sake of the watershed.”
Horning, the director of WildEarth Guardians, estimated some 95% to 99% of special use permits have no monitoring requirements. And, while his organization was party to that suit in Ruidoso and would have preferred the pumping to stop, he said measuring is a step forward.
“At least in the case of Ruidoso, they are obligated to understand how much they’re taking out and what the impact is,” he said. “And hopefully that will force the agency in some future scenario to do more to protect the stream and all the creatures that depend on it.”
This article was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Reach Caitlin McGlade at caitlin. mcglade@arizonarepublic.com.
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