Santa Fe city councilors are apparently considering changes to a 2003 settlement agreement with Las Campanas related to water issues — an agreement reached after months of intense controversy over how the Santa Fe area’s water supply should be parceled out in times of drought.
The agenda for Wednesday evening’s meeting of the council’s Public Utilities Committee listed a closed-door executive session on “potential modification” of a settlement with Las Campanas, the affluent subdivision northwest of Santa Fe.
The closed meeting was held under an exception to the New Mexico Open Meetings Act that allows public bodies to meet in private for discussion of “threatened or pending litigation.” City Attorney Frank Katz declined to comment further on the matter.
While the agenda didn’t specify exactly what settlement is up for modification, it likely refers to a 2003 agreement between Santa Fe and Las Campanas that called for the subdivision to reduce its water use and follow city water restrictions in times of drought in exchange for the city selling treated city sewage water for irrigation of Las Campanas’ two golf courses.
The deal ended more than a year of legal wrangling over how much water Las Campanas was entitled to through the city’s Buckman Wells and whether the subdivision was bound by city drought restrictions.
In 2002, the city sued Las Campanas in an effort to force the development to abide by the city’s drought-times wateruse limits.
The political tinges of the fight still reverberate around Santa Fe. Bumper stickers proclaiming: “I’ll stop watering my garden when Las Campanas stops watering its golf course,” can still be seen on some Santa Fe cars.
Las Campanas attorney Charles Dumars said this week he had received a vague e-mail from the city but wasn’t sure what the council might be discussing.
The city and Las Campanas, along with Santa Fe County, are partners in the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, a $180 million-plus effort to pipe about 3 billion gallons of San Juan-Chama water annually into the Santa Fe area from the Rio Grande. The project is tentatively scheduled for completion in 2011.
Las Campanas currently owns several hundred acrefeet of permanent water rights. It also has an agreement with the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Authority to lease up to 1,600 acre-feet a year of San Juan-Chama water, which it uses to offset pumping from the Buckman wells.
That agreement ends in 2011, however, and the water authority has indicated it isn’t eager to extend the contract.
