From: John Horning Subject: Re: The River and Mr. Thornburg Date: June 7, 2007 To: George Johnson George, As a proponent of the municipal check-off programs I decided to share my disappointment in your dismissal of them as a useful tool in re-shaping western water policy on a local scale to make policies more environmentally friendly. First of all, let me explain the broader strategy. We are working to get every major municipality in the Rio Grande watershed to adopt a check-off program on municipal water bills. Albuquerque has already committed to one and it will be implemented in late 2007 or early 2008. We are also working with 5 other cities in the Rio Grande watershed in New Mexico to get those cities to adopt similar check-offs. By trying to work at scale across a large western watershed we are trying to demonstrate that there is a constituency for restoring one of the West's iconic rivers. The mere establishment of a Living River check-off in every community in the watershed says that people care. Thenif we can then get each city and even the state to match contributions perhaps we do begin to operate at scale. But even if these efforts are largely symbolic and we don't create adequate financial capital to address the problem, -which wouldn't surprise me- we're doing something else very important. In a world in which most people don't know where their water comes from I believe that these check offs can be one vehicle that reminds people of our connection to and dependence on our rivers. The ethical dilemna as I see it is: as we rely on our rivers to sustain us so what can we do as urban dwellers to sustain them? Obviously there is a whole lot more. The next step in this grand strategy is to build on the constituency established through the check-off to ask and then demand that water saved through efficiencies be re-allocated to environmental purposes and not simply to save water to subsidize the next bit of sprawl. If we can be successful on that front, we will have another point of leverage to demand the restoration of flows to our rivers. Of course, the greatest opportunity to reclaim a western river's rights to its own water is to focus on agriculture, given that agriculture diverts 75% of the Rio Grande's flow and that's about the average for most western rivers. And then uses that water largely quite inefficiently. We have been working for over a decade now to bring some greater accountability to how the Rio Grande's flows are managed by powerful agricultural interests. We are now working with the Albuquerque Water Utility Authority to create a political mandate for agricultural water leasing. In fact, in the next few days we'll be sending a joint request from Mayor Martin Chavez and myself and others to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission to provide $750,000 in funding for a pilot agricultural forbearance program. The City of Albuquerque and environmental groups have already established a $250,000 Living River fund that we intend to use to leverage this and other state and federal commitments to establish a pilot agricultural water leasing program. Of course the next frontier on agricultural water is also efficiencies. Currently there is not framework for reallocating saved water to the river or requiring that when water is transferred from agricultural uses to urban uses that a percentage of that water be allocated to the river. Those policies need to be put in place as well and I hope they will be in the years ahead. Having worked on river protection efforts in the West now for more than a decade I can tell you there is no silver bullet to restoring flows to a western river whose water is completely overallocated and overappropriated. River die a death of a thousand cuts and they won't be restored through any single action but rather a suite of actions all built towards reclaiming their flow. Which is why I return the river check-off. A panacea; hardly. A little misleading, maybe. A path to providing some flow in a too-long forgotten stretch of river- hopefully and possibly. And in a now drying and warming Southwest in which we're constantly swimming upstream against institutional and cultural biases against river flows sometimes hope and possibility are a good start. With respect and warm regards, John C. Horning Executive Director Forest Guardians