As the state senator from District 28, I sponsored this past legislative session a bill to fully fund the Grant County Regional Water Supply Project. The bill would have addressed the immediate and critical water supply needs of Hurley and other Mining District communities.
Senate Bill 248 would have directed the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) to provide an additional $13 million in Arizona Water Settlements Act (AWSA) funding to construct the Grant County Regional Water Supply Project. The project would create a regional water system comprised of a new well field at the Grant County Airport and the necessary transmission lines to connect Hurley, North Hurley, Bayard, Hanover, and Santa Clara with a new source of water supply. The project would also complete a regional water distribution network between Silver City and the Mining District.
Our Mining District communities are currently facing a water crisis. Hurley will lose its water service from Freeport-McMoRan in 2018. Based on a 2002 Office of the State Engineer groundwater modeling study, Santa Clara and Bayard can't sustain pumping rates through 2040 given the location of their well fields at the margins of the Mimbres aquifer. The State Engineer recommended connection to a regional water system using other sources of groundwater supply as a more viable option for these communities.
Silver City, Mining District communities, and Grant County, under the umbrella of the Grant County Water Commission, have worked very hard for more than a decade to make this regional water system a reality. At completion, the project will remedy the short-term water emergency in Hurley and other Mining District communities, while also serving the long-term water needs of 26,000 people, nearly 90% of Grant County residents.
The ISC is currently sitting on $40 million in funding from the AWSA, $13 million of which could be spent now on meeting high priority water needs through the Grant County Regional Water Supply Project. In 2015, the ISC approved only 14% of the $15 million needed to complete the project, while it approved 98% of the funding for the Deming Effluent Reuse project and 70% of the Gila Basin Irrigation Commission's proposal, among others.
While these are worthwhile projects, this inequitable distribution of available AWSA funding unnecessarily and unfairly impacts our neighbors in the Mining District who are under pressure to complete the regional water project before Freeport-McMoRan's 2018 deadline. Other state and federal sources of funding are being pursued by the project's partners, but the $13 million shortfall in project funding is currently not secured while the clock is ticking.
Under the New Mexico Constitution, the state legislature holds the "power of the purse" in appropriating funds. Given the lack of buy-in by legislators and stakeholders in southwestern New Mexico regarding the ISC's AWSA planning process, I and my Senate colleagues have sponsored bills over the past few years to direct AWSA funding to "non-diversion alternatives" that can immediately and cost-effectively meet our region's water needs without causing fiscal impact to the drastically-reduced state budget or financial hardship to low-income communities in the four-county area.
Regardless of whether you are for the Gila River diversion or against it, we need to do the right thing and come together to help out our neighbors and support using AWSA funding to construct the Grant County Regional Water Supply Project.
Senator Howie Morales, District 28