WATER SECURITYTexas Sued New Mexico Over Rio Grande Water. Now the States Are Fighting the Federal Government.
After the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the federal government in the long-running water dispute, the states — which had finally worked out a water-sharing agreement — are back to the drawing board.
When Judge D. Brooks Smith traveled from Pennsylvania to Colorado, he passed over the 98th Meridian, the longitude line separating the water-rich East from the arid West.
The former chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals left a land of rushing rivers and ample rainfall in western Pennsylvania to gather facts in a case called Texas v. New Mexico Supreme Court over water rights from the Rio Grande.
Now a senior judge in the Third Circuit, Smith is serving as a special master to advise the U.S. Supreme Court on what is one of the longest-running disputes over dwindling water in the West, which also involves the federal government.
Smith traveled for a five-hour status conference last week at Denver’s federal courthouse involving attorneys representing the states, the federal government and several intervenors known as friends of the court.
At issue is the water Texas and New Mexico are entitled to under the Rio Grande Compact, signed in 1938 to allocate the waters of the Rio Grande between the states. Texas brought the current lawsuit against New Mexico in 2013, alleging that farmers pumping from groundwater wells in southern New Mexico were diverting water that the compact allocates to Texas.
The states reached a proposed settlement agreement in 2022 out of court. But the federal government opposed the deal. The Supreme Court then ruled in June that the case could not be settled without the federal government’s consent. Now the states and the federal government must resolve their disagreements to avoid going to trial in federal court, and Smith has ordered the parties to return to mediation no later than Dec. 16 in Washington, D.C.
The outcome of Texas v. New Mexico could fundamentally change how groundwater is managed in the Rio Grande basin in New Mexico and far west Texas, both for the agricultural industry and cities like Albuquerque and Las Cruce, in New Mexico, that pump water from aquifers. It will also be a bellwether for how deeply the federal government can intervene in inter-state water conflicts, which are likely to increase as drought and aridification grip the western United States.
“[The United States] is going to have to take some sort of action to get a handle on groundwater over-pumping,” said Burke Griggs, a professor of water law at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. “They really do want to keep the case alive.”
