Stansbury secures $500,000 for Albuquerque water storage project

Rep. Melanie Stansbury announced $512,320 in federal funding for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project, casting the money as a long-term bet on water security and drought resilience for central New Mexico. The project sits inside the utility’s WATER 2120 strategy, which pairs conservation, reuse, aquifer storage and recovery, and San Juan-Chama surface water to stretch supplies for decades.

For Albuquerque and Bernalillo County households, the stakes are more concrete than a line item. The Water Authority says the region relies on groundwater from the Santa Fe Group Aquifer and water from the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project, with the combined system producing about 32 billion gallons of drinking water each year. The utility also says the San Juan-Chama project, completed in 2008, ended Albuquerque’s sole reliance on an overtaxed aquifer.

ASR is meant to make that system more durable when runoff drops and demand rises. The Water Authority says purified San Juan-Chama water is added to the aquifer primarily during winter months, when demand is low, so the aquifer can serve as a backup supply in drought years. It also says per-capita water use has been cut in half since 1994 and that conservation and surface-water additions have produced a historic rebound in the aquifer beneath Albuquerque.

The bigger political question is whether that resilience can be expanded without pushing more cost onto residents. The Water Authority says WATER 2120 will not require new or additional rate increases for implementation, but the system still depends on San Juan-Chama water that cannot always be counted on during low-runoff and drought years. Stansbury’s office said the award supports a major, long-term investment in central New Mexico’s water security, and for Bernalillo County that promise will be judged by how much water can actually be stored before the next dry stretch hits.