U.S. Water News Online
SANTA FE-- Santa Fe city councilors have agreed to sell 2,500 acre feet of city water stored in Abiquiu Lake to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to keep water flowing for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow.
The council approved selling unused water from the city's San Juan-Chama allotment to the federal agency for $100 an acre foot.
The bureau probably will send the water downstream in the next few months, bureau spokeswoman Mary Perea Carlson said.
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinion sets how much water must flow in the Rio Grande to the ensure the tiny fish's survival. The agency sought to buy extra water this year because of the drought.
San Juan-Chama water is pumped from upper San Juan River tributaries through concrete-lined tunnels to Heron Lake, then sent to Abiquiu Lake for storage. Contractors must remove their allotted water by December each year and store it or use it.
Santa Fe cannot use its yearly allotment of 5,230 acre feet until it finishes a diversion project, expected by 2009. Since it can't use the water right away and needs to free some storage rights in Abiquiu Lake, selling water to the Bureau of Reclamation was a win-win solution, said Claudia Borchert, water project manager for the city's Sangre de Cristo water division.
Environmentalists took the federal government to court in 1999 and won a decision three years later that requires habitat and river flow protection on 157 miles of the Rio Grande from the San Acacia Dam to the Isleta Diversion Dam.
Biologists say the minnow needs a certain flow for spawning, larvae dispersal and migration.
The Bureau of Reclamation also purchased one-time use rights to 6,000 acre feet of water from the Jicarilla Apache Nation, 2,000 acre feet from San Juan Pueblo, 1,200 acre feet from Los Alamos County, 450 acre feet from Belen and 66 acre feet from Red River.
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