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The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Water Matters! podcast looks at water and natural resources issues in New Mexico and beyond. Housed at the University of New Mexico School of Law, the Utton Transboundary Resources Center is a state-funded research and public service project that believes in the pursuit of well informed, collaborative solutions to our natural resource challenges. The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Sairis Perez-Gomez designed the podcast logo and wrote and performed our theme music and Student Research Assistant Francesca Glaspell produced this episode.
Rin Tara is a staff attorney specializing in water policy and governance at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center. They are primarily interested in questions of water management in the face of climate change. They have done work in riparian restoration, river connectivity, tribal water sovereignty, climate change adaptation, and water rights. They have authored several papers on topics related to the future of western water management.
John Fleck is Writer in Residence at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico School of Law; and Professor of Practice in Water Policy and Governance in the University of New Mexico Department of Economics. The former director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, he is the author of four books on water in the west, including the forthcoming history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande – Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City.
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The latest round of storms helped the snowpack in New Mexico’s headwaters rivers a little, but we’re so far behind that we still should expect to see a dry Rio Grande through central New Mexico this summer. In this week’s Water Update, the Utton Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck take a look at the snowpack, the runoff forecasts, and the latest reservoir storage numbers. Spoiler alert: they’re not good. But despite the bad news, both Tara and Fleck managed to get out to the river and find joy i...
Guest: Stacy Timmons, Associate Director for Hydrology Programs at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources When the New Mexico legislature approved the Water Data Act in 2019, the state turned to Stacy Timmons to turn an idea into useful data tools to help communities around New Mexico manage a future with less water. Operating out of a third-floor office of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology building on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro, Timmons oversees the bureau’s e...
The snowpack and runoff forecasts for New Mexico’s rivers have begun conjuring up stories about the epically dry 2002. On this week’s episode, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the forecast, and the comparison. On the Rio Grande, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is forecasting just 35 percent of median runoff at Otowi, in north-central New Mexico, with very little water at all making it down past San Marcial downstream from Socorro. One big difference between 2002 and this year: in...
With Albuquerque’s first big snow storm of 2026 in the rearview mirror, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at how the mountains holding the critical snowpack for New Mexico’s Rivers fared. They also share the latest on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s challenges in keeping Lake Powell’s water levels high enough to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s outlet works, and the implications that will have for Colorado River management in 2026. For more on the snowpack, check out the Natural Resources Conservation Ser...
Guest: Dr. Ladona Clayton As the New Mexico legislature begins a budget-focused 30-day session, the New Mexico Water Ambassadors have laid out their top legislative goals, critical steps needed to move the state toward a more sustainable water future. Dr. Ladona Clayton, Executive Director of the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy, joins Rin Tara and John Fleck on this edition of Water Matters! to talk about the opportunities and challenge in the state’s water future, and the steps state gov...
The snowpack in the headwaters basins of northern New Mexico and Colorado points to another low-runoff year on New Mexico’s major rivers. The January federal forecast projects flows of less than half the most recent 30-year average on the Rio Grande at Otowi, the key measurement point for central New Mexico, and just 17 percent at San Marcial, just above Elephant Butte Reservoir. With three months of snow-accumulation season left, those numbers will go up or down depending on weather between ...
When Irving Berlin penned “White Christmas” more than six decades ago, he did not have Albuquerque in mind. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of actually seeing falling flakes here on Christmas are about one in thirty. But that does not stop Rin Tara and John Fleck from hoping, scanning the long range weather forecasts as they write those last holiday cards and record their last podcast of 2025.
Guest: Stephanie Russo Baca The old Western cliché that whiskey’s for drinking while water is for fighting over has always been problematic. Frequently attributed to Mark Twain, it seems that Twain never said it. And research by the Utton Center’s Stephanie Russo Baca shows that sharing water – ensuring that no one goes dry when the water runs low – is a viable approach to New Mexico water management. In practice, New Mexico’s water law has always had an uneasy relationship with the “doctrine...
This week, Rin and John talk about flows on the Rio Grande, planning for a new federal river management project south of Socorro, groundwater contamination questions, and the future of federal clean water regulation. Rio Grande With the irrigation season over and the Rio Grande’s riparian vegetation shutting down for the winter, river flows are up through Albuquerque. But the biggest reason for the high flows is the annual Rio Grande Compact accounting exercise, as water stored in Abiquiu res...
Guest: John Fleck A decade ago, the Utton Center's Writer in Residence John Fleck published his book Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West, an exploration of water governance in the Colorado River Basin. Amid an often pessimistic literature, led by iconic titles that Fleck read as a young journalist - Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desertand Philip Fradkin's A River No More, among others - Water is For Fighting Over offered an optimistic narrative, stories of a governa...
Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of November 10.
Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of October 27. A full interview episode will be available later this month.
Guest: Don Bustos, Santa Cruz Farms Irrigated from the Acequia del Llano running across the upper end of his four acres outside Española, New Mexico, Don Bustos' Santa Cruz Farms feels as if it has been there as long as the land itself. A rambling walk through the farm follows ditches carrying the water past patches of asparagus and the last of the blackberries, down one side past some new herbs Bustos is experimenting with - a path the water has traveled for the 400 years this land has been ...
Guest: Enrique Romero, head of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo division of the New Mexico Department of Justice Acequias are a traditional irrigation practice with roots across the world. The inhabitants of New Mexico have used ditch irrigation since time immemorial, though the acequias used today took their present form about 400 years ago. Enrique Romero, head of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo division of the New Mexico Department of Justice, explains the history and governance of New Mexi...
Guest: Craig Allen Formed in a series of volcanic eruptions between 1 and 2 million years ago, the Jemez Mountains dominate the cultural and environmental history of central New Mexico. For more than four decades, forest ecologist Craig Allen has studied them, engaging in what has come to be known as “place-based ecology,” with deep roots in what the Nuevo Mexicanos would call “querencia” – a deep love and sense of place. The resulting of Craig’s passion is a vast body of scientif...
New Mexico’s summer monsoon is upon us. The rainy season began the last week of June, bringing moist air north from the Gulf of California – pumping up flows in drying rivers, wetting forested landscapes and in the process reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires, and perhaps most importantly bringing the visceral joy that of rain. Streaming up through the mountains of central Mexico, the moisture from what scientists call the “North American Monsoon” brings 50 percent or more of t...
Guest: Paul Tashjian, Director of Freshwater Conservation for Audubon Southwest The Middle Rio Grande is home to not only a myriad of species, but also to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD). At first blush, environmental water uses, and agricultural water uses may appear to be in conflict, but the truth is more complicated. This month Water Matters hosts Paul Tashjian, Director of Freshwater Conservation for Audubon Southwest, to discuss the agroecosystem of the Middle R...
Established by treaty in 1868, the modern boundaries of the Navajo Nation span 27,000 square miles across the deserts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. While its water rights were guaranteed on paper in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1908 Winters decision, getting actual “wet water” to meet the needs of the nation’s 175,000 residents remains a challenge. This month the Utton Center’s Water Matters speaks with attorney Bidtah Becker, a University of New Mexico School of Law graduate who has be...
Guest: Diane Agnew of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority With one of the worst winter snowpacks on record, New Mexico’s water supply forecasts for 2025 look grim. Can we avoid the apocalypse? The Utton Transboundary Resources Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck talk to Diane Agnew of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority about adapting to the realities of a changing climate. At a time in early spring when the Rio Grande should be rising, swollen w...
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