Stansbury secures $500,000 for Albuquerque water storage project

A $512,320 federal infusion will help the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority finish design work on two aquifer storage recovery wells, a project meant to keep treated water underground for drought years. For Sandoval County readers, the bigger question is not the headline amount but what it buys: more regional water security, or simply another step in a long-running effort to stretch an already stressed supply system.

Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury’s office said she announced the funding on June 15 for the authority’s Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project. The money came from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through her Community Project Funding request in the Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act. The authority said the new wells could inject up to 5 million gallons per day of highly treated potable surface water into the aquifer, adding storage that can be drawn on during dry periods.

The project sits inside a much larger water strategy that has shaped Albuquerque’s supply decisions for decades. The authority says its WATER 2120 plan, adopted in 2016, is a 100-year blueprint built around conservation, aquifer storage and recovery, storm-water capture and wastewater reuse. It says the system now serves about 660,000 customers in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County and relies on six supply sources, including groundwater, surface water and ASR.

The stakes trace back to scientific studies in the early 1990s that showed Albuquerque’s aquifer was smaller than once believed and was being pumped twice as fast as nature could replenish it. That finding drove the city toward the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project, completed in 2008, which ended sole dependence on the aquifer. The authority says that project cost more than $400 million and was paid for through seven dedicated rate increases over several years.

Even that imported water supply has limits. Water Authority materials say San Juan-Chama deliveries cannot always be counted on during drought years and periods of low mountain runoff, which is why the agency has continued to expand aquifer storage and recovery as an emergency reserve. The authority’s 2026 annual information statement says the design work now underway involves two new wells, a sign the storage plan is still being built out more than a decade after the broader WATER 2120 strategy was adopted.

For households across central New Mexico, including those watching how water pressure, drought resilience and future rates ripple through the region, the issue is not whether $512,320 sounds large. It is whether that money helps buy breathing room in a supply system that has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce the risk of running dry.