By RICHARD NEBEL
Los Alamos

I took a look through the county climate action plan and I found an issue that I think needs to be  addressed. The plan calls for aggressive water conservation due to future water scarcity brought on by climate change. My experience is that water storage tanks cost roughly $1/gallon of storage. If you look on your utility bill at the thousands of gallons of water that you use every month, new water storage is a non-trivial expense.

How is the county going to convince people to make this investment to reuse water when the county isn’t utilizing the water rights that it already has? I’m talking about the allocation that Los Alamos has from the San Juan River Diversion Project. Albuquerque uses their allocation. It’s now their primary water supply. Santa Fe uses their allocation. We sell ours. How can you claim that there is a looming water shortage when we aren’t even using the water that we already have?

This was looked at a few years ago and it was decided not to go ahead with securing this supply. I think we need to reconsider this decision. Things have changed. LANL and Los Alamos are both growing. That’s going to require more water. If we don’t secure this water source, I suspect that we will lose it.