Navajo Nation Awards Contract to Advance $2.2B Water Pipeline for Thousands

The Navajo Nation awarded a $7.3 million sole-source contract to the Navajo Engineering and Construction Authority to press forward on the $2.2 billion Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, a decades-overdue infrastructure effort that could end daily water hauling for tens of thousands of families across the eastern Nation.

The contract, funded through a combination of the State of New Mexico, the Navajo Sihasin Fund, and the Bureau of Reclamation, tasks NECA with the next phase of construction on a pipeline system that has been under way since 2012. With roughly 100 miles already in the ground, the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources turned to the sole-source designation to stay on schedule, citing NECA's extensive experience building water infrastructure across Navajo lands.

The scale of daily need is stark. More than 40 percent of Navajo Nation households have no running water and haul it instead, filling tanks from remote distribution points and traveling hours across a reservation spanning more than 27,000 square miles. In Gallup, one of the project's primary beneficiaries, groundwater levels have fallen roughly 200 feet in the past decade.

When complete, the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project will route water from the San Juan River Basin through approximately 300 miles of pipeline, 19 pumping plants, and two water treatment plants. The system is designed to serve around 250,000 people across 43 Navajo chapters, including Window Rock and Fort Defiance in Apache County, the southwestern portion of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup, sustaining those communities for the next 40 years.

Construction on the San Juan Lateral, the project's main trunk line, is targeted for completion in 2028. NECA, a construction enterprise wholly owned and operated by the Navajo Nation, brings institutional knowledge of the terrain and regulatory landscape that outside contractors would struggle to replicate.

The project is anchored in a federal water rights settlement enacted through legislation in 2009. Funding has arrived in waves, including $120 million released from the Bureau of Reclamation's Reclamation Water Settlements Fund in March 2026 and $55 million secured earlier in the fiscal year. The $7.3 million NECA contract is the latest concrete move in a construction timeline now entering its fifteenth year.