A shift in the design for where and how river water joins the system has caused the potential wait. The Public Service Company of New Mexico, the state’s largest utility, is closing the San Juan Generating Station as early as next year and has offered to sell the power plant’s reservoir, which draws from the San Juan, as an alternative staging ground for water for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project.
The benefit to Gallup is negligible, Romero said. But the Bureau of Reclamation believes the change would result in beneficial long-term cost-savings for this massive, over-budget federal project.
Pooling water in a reservoir would enable mud from spring runoff and monsoon storms to settle, saving on costs to make the water safe for human consumption. Using the existing facility could cut $50 million from construction expenses, according to a 2019 letter from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to the city.
It also offers a protected reservoir, should the river see another spill like the one in 2015 that flooded the San Juan River with 3 million gallons of orange, mine waste-filled water. That’s a priority for tribal members, said Jason John, director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources. Without a reservoir, the Navajo Nation would be forced to turn off water to dozens of communities if a similar spill happened.
“We’re trying to make sure we have a project at the end of the day that’s going to be able to provide the water that was promised and to provide that water in a reliable fashion and one that makes sense in terms of operations and maintenance costs as well,” John said.
PNM’s offer came late in the planning process.
“The timing wasn’t the greatest,” said Pat Page, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Four Corners office, which is overseeing the project. But after an initial look at the facilities, “We felt like we couldn’t walk away from that, even as bad as the timing was.”
A more detailed analysis is still wrapping up, Page said, and everything points toward this new option.
The problem is, Gallup developed its current water use plan assuming surface water would arrive by December 31, 2024. Leaning longer on already over-tapped wells puts the city and all its customers, including Navajo communities that have begun buying water from it, at risk.
“A four-year delay is going to be expensive. It’s going to take money and more wells,” said DePauli, the engineer.
The city is already in for $75 million for the new water system. Now comes an added expense of drilling new wells, at a price of about $3.5 million each.
When the work is done on the pipeline, operations and maintenance transfer to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, and Gallup will contribute to ongoing costs. The Bureau of Reclamation has proposed to reassess Gallup’s share of future utility costs in return for supporting the new water intake system.
The city has recently added to its water rights, positioning it to weather this delay and provide for nearby communities in need, said George Kozeliski, a former city attorney who has worked on water rights for Gallup. The Office of the State Engineer recently approved Gallup’s use of other well fields, with water opening up now that the Escalante Generating Station, just east on Interstate-40 in Prewitt, and Marathon Petroleum’s refinery have shut down. That well field reaches into an aquifer Gallup hadn’t yet tapped, and the city now has rights to more water than its average annual use.
“That aquifer has got a lot of water in it, and these others, if they do fall — and they are falling — then that one can take care of Gallup,” Kozeliski said. “Everybody was worried about the same thing, and I don’t want to say we did a shotgun approach, but everything just kind of came together now.”
But, Romero said, it’s only a right on paper Kozeliski is talking about: The city still needs money to drill wells to access that water.
Gallup began pursuing more groundwater in 1983, but the Navajo Nation and Bureau of Indian Affairs challenged the application to increase the town’s groundwater rights. Last year, after COVID-19 made the need for water even more urgent, both challenges were dropped as Gallup agreed to use some of that water to supply additional Navajo communities.
“A lot of Navajos feel like the water in a lot of this region belongs to the Navajo Nation, but we’ve been able to try to set aside some of those long-standing disputes about groundwater,” Jason John said. “We’ve fought very hard to make sure that the city, if it’s going to continue to use water, that some of the use of that water should go to the benefit of Navajo families adjacent to the city of Gallup.”