Nearly everyone living in the East Mountains worries about access to water, especially since hotter and drier years means frequent fires and lower aquifer levels..
That’s exactly what users of the Tranquillo Pines Water Users Co-Op are experiencing.
Dozens of co-op members and other concerned residents showed up to a crowded meeting on Thursday August 22 at 6 p.m at Los Vecinos Community Center in Tijeras to discuss water shortages in the community, partly due to a post on the neighborhood app Nextdoor.
Chuck Davidson has been a member of the Tranquillo Pines Water Users Co-op since the early 1990’s. Davidson was also a plumbing contractor for several years who specialized in water treatment and water conservation projects. He previously wrote a column called “Water Matters,” which appeared in the Independent under a previous publisher.
Davidson says that the Aug. 22 annual co-op meeting was the first in 32 years that he can remember a large number of community members attending.
“When I drove up, both sides of route 66 were packed with parked cars,” Davidson said.
The water system was created in the late-1970’s to serve a group of rural neighborhoods, including Tranquillo Pines, on large wooded lots abutting the national forest along South 14. Although most of the streets are still dirt, neighbors prioritized a few amenities including a public park and a private water system — a co-op — owned by the homeowners and maintained by volunteers. Today, the system serves about 265 connections (670 people and a few pigs, goats and horses) through a system built almost 50 years ago.
Davidson says that his co-op membership fees have increased 100% in the past several months and attributes the rate increase to the fact that the co-op has been hauling in thousands of gallons of water weekly to supply the community with safe drinking water.
An alert from the Tranquillo Pines website said, “Due to water hauling cost, our savings accounts went from $118,657 to zero, we were out of money and facing bankruptcy. The total amount spent on water hauling was astronomical to the tune of $166,043.”
The co-op’s volunteer board members say they are working round the clock to remedy the problem.
According to Tranquillo Pines Water Users Co-op Secretary and Treasurer Gary Ashcraft, co-op members are looking for leaks by testing the system at night so that they don’t inconvenience community members. He said that the co-op is losing 10,000 gallons of water per day.
“I don’t believe anyone appreciates how hard we’re working at night,” he said. “Our highest priority is finding the leaks and we’ve never had something like this occur in the 50 years of our existence. We’ve repaired normal leaks, the ones that show up where they come up out of the ground, but something else is happening. We can’t find this major loss of water.”
One possible solution to the problem of maintaining dry or leaky wells would be for the co-op to become a mutual domestic water association. This would allow the community to receive state funding including grant money to maintain the old water systems. Ashcraft says the possibility of becoming a mutual domestic is something Tranquillo Pines is exploring.
Terry Jones, president of Sierra Vista Mutual Domestic Association, a 15-minute drive up the highway in Cedar Crest, gave a short presentation to the board at the Aug. 22 meeting about the benefits of joining a mutual domestic during the meeting.
Jones said he wanted to “alleviate the fears that you’re just handing over everything to Santa Fe and you have no no say or any guidance, and that’s clearly not what happens whenever you do become a mutual domestic.”
“You are then eligible for state funding from about 12 different sources,” Jones said. “It opens almost an infinite variety of ways of addressing financially the things that they need.”
But not everyone in the membership-run co-op is on board. For one thing, reorganizing to be able to accept public money requires the association to follow public purchasing and transparency rules. That’s exactly the kind of government bureaucracy some residents moved here to escape.
“Some of the board members expressed strong opposition to becoming a mutual domestic on the grounds that the requirements around procurement were too cumbersome. One of the board members stated that he would quit if the membership chose to pursue becoming a mutual domestic,” Zack Withers, an attendee of the co-op meeting said.
This problem will not be unique to this neighborhood. City Desk ABQ recently reported water levels in the East Mountains area are declining at an average rate of almost 2 feet per year on average, with some wells declining by 6 to 10 feet per year.
If declining water levels weren’t enough to cause community concern, Tranquillo Pines homeowners say they are also battling water theft. Earlier this month, an alert posted on the co-op’s website said that thieves have been pulling up to hydrants overnight and filling 800-1000 gallon tanks in as little as 30 minutes, further depleting valuable water resources that take the system about 2 ½ hours to recover — if at all.
At least for now, not much will change. There was no consensus to pursue a reorganization that could possibly open the door to state funding and no one seriously suggested raising rates to replenish the bank account used to buy emergency water. In the meantime, Ashcraft says he will continue to go out nightly checking for leaks — and looking out for water thieves.
Davidison says the area’s water woes are a “perfect little microcosm” of a larger water shortage issue across New Mexico.
“I think it needs to be held up as an example of the changes that need to take place statewide to start working on protecting our potable water sources,” Davidson said, “We have enough problems with being one of the poorest states in the country to begin with, and this is a prime example of why that’s the case. People aren’t taking care of what they have.”