Water Matters!
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.
Water Matters!
13: Managing the Water in a Very Tough Year
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Guest: Anne Marken
Anne Marken gets up every morning and looks at snowpack data and river flow numbers. As the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s River Operations and Telemetry Manager, it’s Marken’s job to marshal the Rio Grande’s precious water through New Mexico’s Middle Valley, juggling a dizzying array of competing needs, interests and values.
In this week’s Water Matters, Anne talks with Rin Tara and John Fleck about what that means in this most difficult of water years, with declining river flows, little upstream reservoir storage to make up for the snowpack’s shortcomings, and one of the warmest springs on record.
If you’re interested in the latest on river flows, you can do no better than Anne’s monthly report to the Conservancy District Board. In this episode of Water Matters, Anne talks about how she thinks about managing water in a difficult year like this.
If you’re interested in more information:
· Irrigators information meetings May 28 – June 24
· MRGCD’s real time river and irrigation system flow data
And, to quote Marken’s monthly request, with which she ends her report to her board, “Pray for rain.”
