Right This Way

New conflicts and decades-old Pueblo water disputes are at a boiling point

A no man’s land exists in the small community of El Rancho, a checkerboard of private property that sits inside the eastern edge of San Ildefonso Pueblo but has long been a part of Santa Fe County.

Jurisdictional confusion reigns on a daily basis in this incorporated community of 800 residents.

Every time residents drive County Road 84, the main drag that leads in and out of their community, they're technically trespassing, not just on this road but on a half-dozen smaller ones that cross the sovereign nation.

It's something the US Bureau of Indian Affairs made clear two years ago in a letter to Santa Fe County, in what since has become a race to own the easements underground and charge the county when the time comes for operating a regional water delivery system via a pipeline that has yet to be built.

And if it's not the roads, then it's their private wells. Every time residents draw from them, they're taking water from the San Ildefonso people who, in times of shortages, are supposed to get first dibs, in accordance with state law.

It's a decades-old, circular argument that pushes the buttons of residents who counter that they've been using water there for decades, if not centuries, and that it's their public right under the state constitution.

Even in law enforcement, boundaries interfere with justice.

Just a little over a month ago, for example, a Pueblo teenager crashed her car into David Neal's adobe wall, then fled the scene in mid-day, darting back into the nearby safety of San I a quarter-mile away. When Santa Fe County sheriff deputies responded, they told Neal there was nothing they could do about it. Even though it occurred on county land, once the teen returned to Native land, it was up to tribal police.

"It's an entirely different ballgame out here. It's like we're not living in the United States," says Neal, 67, whose private well, adding insult to injury, could be limited to a minuscule amount of water in the next couple years as the state engineer, in wide-scale measures across the entire basin, tries to return the majority of the water to the San Ildefonso, Pojoaque, Nambé and Tesuque pueblos.

Why? Because the Pueblo people were here first and are considered Aboriginal. That's one of the points of the Aamodt settlement agreement, a proposal intended to resolve a lawsuit that has been kicking around since 1966, when the state engineer sought to get to the bottom of who owned water in the region. He sided with the Pueblos by naming as defendants dozens of residents who lived adjacent to Native land and were diverting water.

But in the span of nearly five decades, the objectives have changed. Now, non-Pueblo residents, who own roughly 2,600 private wells in the basin, have to make a choice before a Sept. 17, 2017, deadline for the agreement: either give up their wells entirely and hook up to the pipeline or keep their wells and see the amount of water they're allowed to draw drop significantly.

The plan would usher in a reversal of water rights in the basin, handing over 6,100 acre-feet of water to the four Pueblos and leaving non-Pueblo well-owners with access to between 1,500 and 2,300 acre-feet per year.

The only problem with this scenario is that Neal is just one among 800 well owners who have refused to hook up to the system, and in order to make the system financially self-supporting, Santa Fe County needs at least 1,500 well owners to acquiesce.

So far, only 120 non-Pueblo residents have agreed to forgo their well water and buy into the pipeline, with between 30 and 40 percent of the owners never weighing in to the state engineer as the redistribution of water gets rolling.

The greater issue is that Pueblos represent only 15 percent of the basin's total population (8,450), while the non-Pueblo residents account for the majority, at 85 percent.

Given that the Pueblos, all told, only consume 1,600 acre-feet per year, the "extra" water could represent an economic windfall.

Those who would lose water rights say they will suffer in the long term. Generations of families, both Hispanic and Anglo, would not have the same amount of water to irrigate their land, sustain their orchards, nourish their livestock or grow their dream vineyards on their one- to five-acre parcels.

As such, it has divided non-Pueblo people from the Pueblos, a distinction that only recently has entered the vernacular as various government agencies figure out how to divide the cost of the pipeline.

The estimated cost has now climbed to about $245 million, with the federal government responsible for $150 million, the state $72 million and Santa Fe County now $23 million.

Carl Trujillo has a problem with the pipeline, which would start at the Rio Grande and end at Bishop's Lodge, delivering water. The Democratic state representative claims New Mexico not only failed to send certified letters to well owners but also caused panic when some letters mailed in February 2014 gave recipients only 60 days to choose between the pipeline or their wells.

"It's like a Realtor saying he's got this great deal for you, but he can't tell you how big the house is, where it's at or whether it has a leaky roof," Trujillo says. "We don't even know yet who's going to build it, much less what the monthly water rates are going to be and who's going to own the easements, and already the state is making the people decide?"

While Santa Fe County would help build, maintain and operate the pipeline, the four Pueblos would control it by holding four of the five seats on the regional water authority board.

Not much of a swing vote there, when it boils down to how up to 4,000 acre-feet of river water will be delivered.

"Wait a minute," says Nancy Carson, who's lived in El Rancho since the mid-1980s. "They're going to tap my well, take water from the Rio Grande, chlorinate it, then sell it back to me, when I already get my water for free just a few feet away?"

That seems to be what's going on, the pitfall, perhaps, of living on what amounts to historically gerrymandered parcels of land that sit inside all four Pueblos, all the result of land grants that date as far back as Spanish colonization and the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s. For centuries, the sovereign nations and the people worked together in what was a triangle of cultures, with Anglo homesteaders coming in later years.

How Much Water?

An acre-foot represents an acre of land covered a foot deep in water—or 325,861 gallons.

But an acre-foot for an entire year’s worth of irrigation isn’t that much in an agricultural context.

Some of the private well owners in the area subject to the Aamodt Settlement Agreement are facing the prospect that rather than being able to draw up to 3 acre-feet annually from a well, an adjudication will allow them about a half of an acre-foot, closer to the amount of water used by an average home in the Casa Solana neighborhood.

Eventually, it became what is called fee simple property and was folded into Santa Fe County. But as far as the non-Pueblo residents are concerned, it's the Bermuda Triangle as it pertains to ownership, and the easements have become revenue-generating commodities for the Pueblos as they seek to control them and resort to fighting words like "no trespassing."

It led the Santa Fe County Commission to suspend its funding for the pipeline, fearful that as the future operator of the water delivery system, the county could fall victim to high easement costs if it doesn't outright own the roads where the pipeline will cross sovereign land.

As a precedent, consider the beleaguered Jemez Mountains Electric Cooperative, which just under three years ago dug itself a budgetary hole by signing a 25-year lease with five Pueblos for the use of its land and easements, passing the high costs on to thousands of its customers.

Disgruntled to say the least, El Rancho residents have seen a 40 percent hike in their bills over the past year; some are now choosing between buying medicine or paying for gasoline, groceries and heat.

So the county wanted no part of that scenario as it came to water. Officials say they're at an impasse with San Ildefonso and are trying to figure out where other Pueblo leaders stand on the easement issue.

The county's hesitation is not unwarranted, notes Trujillo. He grew up in Nambé and says the same problem can be an obstacle to broadband Internet service in rural areas near the Pueblos.

He says telecom companies are sometimes timid to approach Pueblo officials because of the high costs they command, which merely leaves the rural communities in what Trujillo describes "as the Dark Ages."

Now in his second term in the state Legislature, Trujillo says he can understand the logic behind the Pueblos wanting to get the fair market value of land by charging more for easements but added, "It's quite another [thing] to quadruple the value and make one generation pay for it."

Enter attorneys versed in land rights, who often help tribes recoup money that Native American governments lost out on in earlier decades, either because of discrimination or inadequate legal representation.

Some area residents, like Heather Nordquist, who grew up in El Rancho, refer to this as "reverse discrimination."

"Fancy schmancy lawyers," she says, "are just greedily rubbing their hands together for more money as they analyze the rights-of-way clauses in government documents."

Then they conspire with the Pueblos and sock it to the hard-working folks, including Pueblo people themselves, saddling everyone with higher bills, Nordquist says.

But others regard the high costs as a long time in coming for Native communities, who so often have been excluded or taken advantage of.

Land is their only tried-and-true asset, and yet, there's only so much they can do with it, because reservations are held in federal trust, and each one has to renew its lease agreement with the US government every century.

"Americans are quick to forget that they wanted the Indian people to be capitalists and to do their best to assimilate into society while living out on the reservation," says Chris Stainbrook, president of the nonprofit Indian Land Tenure Foundation, based in Little Canada, Minn. "But how soon everyone quickly forgets, when it comes time to start renegotiating leases, and their money is at stake. Well, that's capitalism at work, and the sovereign nations need the money.

"There are very few tribes who are well-off in this country," Stainbrook adds.

And San I assuredly is one of the less fortunate. Its 500-member Pueblo doesn't have lucrative contracts or large hotels, which some tribes use to bring in more casino cash. It's mostly known for its black-on-black pottery and the annual Feast Day celebration that unfolds on the reservation at the end of January.

And so in late August, when Santa Fe County decided to pull its portion of the Aamodt funding over the roads dispute, San Ildefonso Gov. James Mountain told SFR the Santa Fe County Commissioners were acting irresponsibly and said the claims of trespassing were necessary for the Pueblo to protect its sovereignty as a nation, so that it could grow and expand.

"It shows their inability to act in good faith. I don't know what the county's line of thinking is, but I do know that the settlement agreement is a separate matter versus the trespass matter, and the county appears to have intertwined the two, which is very inappropriate," Mountain said.

It appears now that matters are inextricably linked. But when SFR asked Mountain why it was so important that the Pueblo own the roads after allowing the county to maintain them for decades, a San I public relations consultant shut down the interview without any further discussion about the water delivery system. Mountain did not respond to requests for a second interview.

Robbie Robinson, the attorney representing San Ildefonso Pueblo, calls the county's recent decision to bow out of the construction "nothing more than political theater." Robinson tells SFR that he's trying to work out a price for the use of future easements that everyone will be happy with.

All parties will be satisfied, the suspension of funds will be lifted and the construction of the water delivery system will yield greater returns in the hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in business, he predicts.

"It's a tactic, it's a threatening pressure, a card to play with respect to the road issue," he says. "The histrionics have got to end."

Robinson, who specializes in capturing the fair market value of land for Native Americans by tapping their natural resources, founded the Center for Applied Research in Denver in the late 1980s.

By no means is he new to the game, and he long ago set up shop in Santa Fe, on Old Pecos Trail, to meet the demand here.

While Robinson mostly keeps his cards close to his chest, his firm's website is rife with success stories in developing master plans and refining energy policies on Native land, and his long list of clients includes the Navajo Nation and the Jicarilla, Acoma, San Ildefonso, Nambé, Pojoaque and Tesuque tribes.

And amid the legal points and counterpoints, a new organization has sprung up: Northern New Mexicans Protecting Land, Water and Rights. The group's signs are a common sight on the front lawns of many an El Rancho resident, sometimes complementing the "For Sale" signs, with the multitude of "No Trespassing" signs from the Pueblo not too far off in the distance.

Some of the group's members picketed outside Santa Fe County administrative offices earlier this month, appealing to the county assessor to help raise the values of their homes, whose resale prices have plummeted as a direct result of the road ownership dispute and a lack of title insurance.

Slowly, they're beginning to come to the awful realization that they may just be living in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the Aamodt settlement agreement draws closer to a reality, their lives spin out of control while they file lawsuits in court and seethe as the charges of racism fly at various public meetings.

Beverly Duran, who grew up in one of the closest houses to San Ildefonso, went so far as taking a DNA test to try to establish her own lineage; the results, she says, show she's 35 percent Native American and 29 percent Iberian Spanish and part British.

But the mean spirits keep flying on both sides, which is sad, because there was a time when they were all one close-knit community.

"It's like we've gone back 400 years, and there's this revolt that's going on," says Duran, 48, president of the nonprofit organization, which has entered the lexicon so often it has been abbreviated to just Northern New Mexicans Protecting. "We used to all be friends. We used to hang out together, go to school together, celebrate Feast Day together, but those days are gone, and it's become this 'government versus government' sort of fight."

Two weeks ago, at a meeting of the Legislature's bicameral Water and Natural Resources Committee, Trujillo continued the fight, walking that fine political high wire. He doesn't serve on the committee, but he encouraged its members to lean toward approval of New Mexico's remaining $57 million obligation to the water delivery system while pleading for some major revisions, among them changing the political power on the authority board and giving more equity to non-Pueblo residents.

The kind of volume that they're getting now, thanks to the adjudication process, is more in line with a single house in the Casa Solana subdivision, not for rural residents who have come to rely on the water for irrigation and livestock.

"Water is a right for everyone," Trujillo said during the meeting. "It's life."

But in the end, after three hours of testimony, committee chairman Sen. Peter Wirth claimed there wasn't much the Legislature could do except decide whether to fund the water delivery system under the current settlement proposal.

The last thing anyone wants, Wirth said, is for the longest-running lawsuit in the history of the state to bust the deadline on the settlement agreement, when everybody is so close.

Meanwhile, here sits Barbara Aamodt in Jacona, a community like El Rancho, only much smaller in size and on the edge of the Pojoaque Pueblo. This is where it all started. She celebrated her 98th birthday this month, and although of Irish descent, she ended up marrying a Norwegian physicist, Rodney Aamodt, whose last name will forever be associated with the controversy. At that time, she recalls, the issue was only over surface water, not groundwater.

The wrinkles on her face bear testimony to the years she's lived, while the lawyers and the politicians and the assorted governments jockey for position and try to claim what's theirs and what's not.

She sits back, aghast, incredulous that it's not resolved. She says she remembers a time in the 1950s when the wife of San I Pueblo's governor would come over and pick flowers with her in her garden. Sometimes, she recalls, she'd pick the flowers for the governor's wife and have them waiting for her.

Now, every day, she has to read and hear about the settlement agreement that begins with her name, bastardizing it in no uncertain terms.

"It's kind of boring, to be honest, and it's really annoying," she says.

Then she thinks about the history behind how Natives were displaced from their homes, how they were killed by the settlers during the days of the Wild Wild West.

"I'm kind of torn by it all," she says. "I understand that the Indians have been shorted, and there have been some great injustices done to them. I understand that they have been wronged, but I don't think people who've lived here for generations should suffer because of what happened such a long time ago."

She then calls out in the infinite wisdom that comes with nearly a century of living: "Can't we all just work together?"

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