Smart water projects for southwestern New Mexico
Sen. Martin Heinrich
It has been nearly two decades since Congress passed the Arizona Water Settlements Act (AWSA) of 2004, which was meant to deliver millions of dollars in federal funding to southwestern New Mexico.
Unfortunately, in all that time, the body that New Mexico put in charge of figuring out how to best put those funds to use — the New Mexico CAP (Central Arizona Project) Entity — squandered $16 million of the AWSA funds studying unproductive and wildly expensive proposals to dewater and divert the Gila and San Francisco rivers. Nothing that the CAP Entity proposed ever made fiscal, ecological, or economic sense. Unfortunately, the millions of dollars that they wasted studying unviable ideas is something that we can never get back.