What's on Tap?
Public meetings on water, land issues wrap up

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

City officials met Thursday evening to determine the future of Gallup's water supply. Options for where the city will get water -- a reverse osmosis filtration system, new wells or a pipeline -- were discussed. [Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent]

GALLUP — The way Gallup Joint Utilities Director Lance Allgood puts it, the date has a way of standing out from all the maps and charts around the room: By 2014, he said, the city could start running out of water during peak-use summer hours if nothing more is done.

"I didn't know it was that soon," said Anna Rondon.

She was one of roughly a dozen locals who attended the last in a series of public meetings Thursday evening the city hosted throughout the week to bring the general public and the business community up to speed on what it was doing to make sure that, when 2014 arrives, the water will keep flowing.

Rondon, who deals with some of the same issues as a planner for the Eastern Navajo Land Commission, liked what she hears.

"I'm glad to see the plans are in the works and that they've gotten this far," she said.

The city scheduled the meetings to address four key water and land issues facing the area: the Navajo-Gallup water supply project, water reclamation through reverse osmosis, the G-22 well field east of Gallup, and the 27,000 acres around Gallup that Gamerco Associates may or may not be selling soon.

Rondon only wished that more people had shown up, as did the mayor.

Attendance at the four noon luncheons the city hosted Monday through Thursday open to all but intended more for the local business community was better than expected, Bob Rosebrough said; however, he was expecting a larger turnout Thursday evening. The city conducted its last meeting inside the Council Chambers to accommodate the crowd it was hoping for. As it turned out, the groups that crammed into the mayor's much smaller conference room for the noon luncheons were sometimes bigger.

Even so, Rosebrough was pleased with the results.

After a standard presentation from the city, officials took questions from the audience, from the broadly conceptual to the highly technical. And while city officials welcomed and entertained the few suggestions people offered, they planned to do most of the talking.

"The main point of the exercise was just to be informational," Rosebrough said.

And although all the issues on the table have been brewing for some time some for months, others for decades Rosebrough had a few reasons for the timing.

For one thing, the Navajo-Gallup project, a pipeline designed to deliver as much as 7,500 acre feet of water to Gallup per year from the upper San Juan River Basin, has been showing renewed signs of life. Some 40 years after the project's inception, the Navajo Nation and State of New Mexico only recently reached the critical step of settling key water rights claims. Also, the interstate water commission that oversees the basin has finally authorized transfers from the upper basin where the intended water for the pipeline originates to the lower basin where Gallup sits. What all that means is that Congress could consider a bill asking for project authorization, and funding, as soon as September.

For another, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wrapped up a month-long study this week of a reverse osmosis pilot plant at the city's wastewater treatment plant designed to make raw sewage potable. The city hopes to use the bureau's data to help it design a permanent reverse osmosis system of its own. It's already hired DePauli Engineering for $300,000 to plan and design it.

Recent news that Gamerco Associates was looking to sell its substantial land holdings, Rosebrough said, also began to generate a number of questions from local business owners. The association has offered most of its holdings to the Navajo Nation, but city and business leaders worry that that much land just outside of city limits in the hands of a single government agency could hamper the community's growth. The city has offered to buy the land itself from just a few thousand strategic acres to the full 27,000 with plans to return most of it to the private sector, but has yet to receive an official reply.

Gallup Water Board Chairman Larry Winn hopes the meetings will also help prevent at least some of the misinformation that tends to attach itself to City Hall. He hasn't heard any tall tales about the specific issues these meetings addressed yet but worries that he might, especially with three seats on the City Council coming up for election next March.

Rosebrough shares that hope, but said it did not affect his decision to host the meetings now, and isn't sure they would do much good in the face of a determined campaign anyway.

"No matter what," he said, "there would be some amount of spin."