Corrales unveils two water projects to boost reliability, pursue federal funding

Village of Corrales officials told the Village Council on Feb. 23 that two planned water-system improvement projects are intended to strengthen reliability and address aging infrastructure; the council briefing included technical recommendations and maps of the affected areas. The briefing did not, in the excerpt provided to the public, list exact project names, costs or firm funding sources.

Corrales is actively seeking outside funding for infrastructure work, including federal grants under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the village has identified several candidate outcomes it hopes a grant would support. Those possibilities include expanding a small wastewater treatment system that now serves residents on a single road; installing a Membrane BioReactor (MBR) to convert treated wastewater into forms usable for irrigation and watering soccer fields (but not for drinking); and building a new water tower tall and large enough to supply firefighting pressure without requiring pumps.

The village’s longstanding firefighting water-supply issue remains central to planning: many existing hydrants in Corrales are supplied by tanks that require pumps to develop pressure, and local materials have noted the community needs more water lines and hydrants to serve additional areas. Mayor James F. Fahey Jr. has been quoted stating, “septic tanks and associated leach fields are the greatest cause of contamination of the groundwater.” Those groundwater and septic-system concerns factor into both wastewater and water-rights planning.

A pasted excerpt of a New Mexico Finance Authority project list shows a suite of Corrales entries and a line reading, “Grand Total for Corrales 15,640,000 5,425,000 665,000 100,000 100,000 2,727,000 24,657,000 21,930,000 24 projects.” The excerpt names a variety of Corrales items, including Corrales Road Pathway Mainstreet, Vactor Truck, Corrales Library Annex, Fire Substation #3, Underground Utility along Corrales Road and a 5,000,000 Performing Arts Center, but the table in the excerpt is not fully aligned and does not make clear which projects are funded versus which remain applications.

Water-rights and long-range planning are moving in parallel. Mayor Fred Hashimoto and the village’s “water team” have prepared a draft 40-year water development plan required by the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer; the draft acknowledges Corrales has never formally submitted a water plan to the OSE and states the plan’s goal “to promote water conservation and to provide a plan for the reasonable use and development of the village’s water rights and water resources.” The village is also preparing an application to the OSE to combine and commingle existing water rights so rights tied to specific locations could be pooled for village-wide use; the draft notes that if commingling is approved “that would reduce the amount of water rights the Village needs to acquire.”

River and bosque work tied to flood risk and habitat is underway alongside the utility planning. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Corrales RM 199 project completed public scoping meetings March 26–27, 2025 and extended a scoping period to April 26, 2025; the scoping record notes “No comments were received during the public scoping period.” The proposed action includes longitudinal stone toe protection and three floodplain benches, three side channels, raising the riverbed 1 to 3 feet, and six bed control features to reduce levee failure risk; three 2-tiered stone toe protection features at Corrales Siphon bend, BB-343 bend and RM 199 bend would total roughly 4,700 feet. Reclamation work in the bosque is scheduled to continue through April 15, 2026, pause for nesting season, and resume in August 2026.

Corrales faces practical constraints as it seeks upgrades: the village of roughly 8,300 residents sits about 13 miles north of Albuquerque along the Rio Grande, lacks a central drinking-water or wastewater system with most households on well water and septic systems, and suffers damaging floods every few years. Local grant-capacity efforts have been evident; one local participant identified only as Lattin praised an online federal-grants bootcamp, saying, “I love it, everyone should take it. It has given me the confidence to write federal grants I wouldn’t haven’t tried before. It is an amazing program.”

The Feb. 23 briefing set a technical foundation for next steps: village officials presented maps and recommendations and are pursuing federal funding avenues to move design and permitting forward for the two projects outlined to council.