Jason Sanchez has been working on water for close to twenty years. But he’s not a lawyer, or a legislator, or even a water utility manager. He’s the vice president of a small community bank in Gallup.
During a recent conversation, Mr. Sanchez had just arrived at the bank, having already spent hours preparing for and attending a court hearing to resolve a payment issue with the Yah-ta-hey water system, one of three he is currently working on to establish a more efficient collaboration between water users and its water system.
Since 2023, Sanchez has been applying his vast financial knowledge from decades of banking experience to serve as the court-appointed receiver for Yah-ta-hey, a small unincorporated village in McKinley County, made up of a few hundred households.
Statewide, there are thousands of water utilities like Yah-ta-hey’s. In McKinley County there are more than 70 – a large amount for a relatively small county. Most of these utilities only serve a few hundred customers. Others provide for fewer than 100. Some only a small handful.
This hyper-local setup is typical of communities in this mostly rural state, but it’s at a breaking point. The resources required to oversee the day-to-day delivery of safe drinking water, maintain the infrastructure, manage wastewater treatment, and set rates that are both fair and affordable to customers, are significant.
On top of that, water operators must manage personnel and bookkeeping tasks while keeping up with multiple, ever-changing regulatory frameworks that apply to water in New Mexico.
While larger towns and cities have paid staff who are trained, certified professionals, smaller communities often rely on volunteers to do the same work. This is a time-consuming and costly challenge, regardless of an area’s population. Unsurprisingly, the well of people willing
to do this work is starting to dry up.
“Most people don’t see the far-off lagoon that’s processing their sewage. We take for granted turning on the spigot and the amount of work it takes for it to get there,” Sanchez says.
The lack of attention to water issues has frustrated him for many years. “We’re paying attention to all the wrong things. This is our livelihood. This is our lives. If you don’t have the basics – which is water – it’s like lacking blood. We’ve lost sight of how important it is, how scarce it is. I just hope the people in power get that.”
No one knows more about these challenges than Ramón Lucero, the Regional Field Manager for the Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC), an organization that provides technical and financial assistance to communities across New Mexico. Every day he works with water utility managers and people like Sanchez, who he says, like many New Mexicans, “have long careers in water without ever being paid anything.”
Fortunately, that system is changing. Thanks to a decades-long effort led by community advocates and championed by Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, and co-sponsored by Senator Stefanics and Representative Herrera. in 2023 the New Mexico legislature unanimously passed and the governor signed Senate Bill 1, which allows smaller communities to pool their resources to save on administrative costs so they can focus on what matters – ensuring a safe, steady water supply for their people. An important component of the bill is allowing communities to organize without legislative approval, which prior to passage created an often-insurmountable barrier.
Lucero’s organization called the bill a “game-changer for New Mexico” that will help communities define what their future looks like by building economies of scale at the regional level.
This new policy is already showing signs of encouragement here in McKinley County. Under Sanchez’s leadership, Yah-ta-hey – alongside nearby Gamerco – is partnering with the mutual domestic water users association in White Cliffs to lower costs and put together a more sustainable system. To him, delivering our most basic necessity – water –is about civic engagement and self-governance, “the core of who we are as a country,” as he put it.
But like all water utility managers across the state, Sanchez can’t do this work forever. He’s hoping the recent legislation will create more opportunities for people in communities like his. “You have to be able to pay someone to do this long-term. You can’t expect someone to come in and waive a wand, say ‘ok you’re trained,’ and expect it to continue.”
Despite the challenges, Sanchez remains optimistic – seeing a future in which the three communities will successfully work together under a common system.
Since becoming involved, Sanchez has taken Gamerco’s financial situation from the dire position of having a mere $6,000 in the bank and facing a million dollars in necessary repair costs to now more than $100,000 on hand, on top of their usual operating fund.
To Sanchez, the effort has been worth it. Water is “what’s going to make or break us going forward in our future,” he says. “I just hope the people in power get that.”
To be sure, the signing of Senate Bill 1 in 2023 was an important milestone, but it marked the beginning of a process, not the end.
And while the story in McKinley County is encouraging, not everyone has a Jason Sanchez.
While the state gave local jurisdictions the green light to re-organize, it’s up to each individual community to decide when, how and with whom. That means new fee structures will have to be created, along with long-term budget design and planning.
And on the human resources side, new leadership elections must take place while beginning the process of recruiting and hiring people to do the work – everything from reporting, billing and bookkeeping to more manual tasks like shoveling debris and cleaning out water systems. As new funding becomes available at the state and federal level, grant writers and managers will also be needed to ensure money flows to these communities.
Just who those people are – where they come from, where they live – is important too. As anyone in New Mexico knows, local cultures and customs come into play, especially when it comes to water issues.
Together, this could mean years before new systems are up and running – years that communities don’t have, as they face the ever-growing threats of wildfire, flood and other effects of climate change.
New Mexico communities can learn from the success of McKinley County, but they still need all the help they can get to meet the challenges ahead for their water security. Because these communities – and water issues – can’t wait anymore.