Progress and
Protection Can
Both Win.

This county takes its name from the Black Range, not from the water — Sierra County was founded in 1884, more than three decades before Elephant Butte Dam was even built. But its modern economy has leaned on that reservoir for over a century. Elephant Butte Lake State Park is the largest state park in New Mexico, has drawn as many as a million visitors in a single year, and regularly pulls in over 100,000 people on a single summer holiday weekend.[10] That's not background scenery — it's restaurant tables, hotel rooms, and boat rentals in a county of roughly 11,000 people. And lately, the reservoir has been giving less back: local hotel operators are already reporting occupancy near half of what it was when the lake ran full, and the city's own interim manager has said plainly that tourism here is directly tied to water levels.[11] As of this week, Elephant Butte sits at 1.4 percent of capacity, with managers warning it could bottom out further before the year is out.[1] That is not a drought statistic happening somewhere else. That is the ground outside my door, same as the Black Fire was in Memo 018.

It is also not just us. Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two reservoirs that anchor the entire Colorado River system serving forty million people across seven states — hit their lowest combined storage level on record this month, lower than at any point since before Lake Powell existed. Lake Mead sits near 27 percent full. Lake Powell sits near 22 percent.[13] Every major reservoir in the American Southwest is telling the same story at once, on a different page of the same book. A regional problem this size does not get solved by any one county's reservoir refilling. It gets addressed by every county in the region finding water it hasn't been counting on the river for.

This memo picks up where that one left off. 018 asked whether ranchers, farmers, oil and gas, utilities, and conservation groups could find common ground on wildfire water access. This one takes a position on a resource that touches all of them at once, and that New Mexico has spent decades knowing about and doing almost nothing with: brackish groundwater. Salty, unusable straight from the ground, and — depending on whose estimate you use — somewhere between two and four billion acre-feet of it sitting under this state, most of it never pumped, most of it never even mapped.

Water isn't simply fresh or salty. It's a spectrum, measured by total dissolved solids — mostly calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, bicarbonates, sulfates, and chlorides, the same minerals a mountain stream picks up crossing rock and soil on its way downhill. It comes in named bands along that spectrum, though the exact lines shift depending on who's drawing them — the U.S. Geological Survey's convention, used throughout this memo, puts fresh water below roughly 1,000 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids. Brackish runs from there up to about 10,000. Saline picks up from 10,000 to roughly 35,000 — seawater sits right around that upper line. Above 35,000 is brine.[12] For a sense of scale from something already familiar: most bottled spring water on a grocery shelf runs somewhere between 150 and 500 milligrams per liter — Evian around 357, Perrier around 475. Even the EPA's own recommended ceiling for everyday tap water sits at 500. So the 1,000 mark where "brackish" begins isn't some lab abstraction — it's roughly double what a bottle of spring water already carries to your lips.

Here's the part that matters for how to think about this resource: nature already runs a distillation process, and it happens in the sky, not underground. Rain and snow form through evaporation, which leaves salt behind entirely — precipitation is close to pure the moment it falls. From there, water spends time moving through soil and rock, and the longer that journey, the more mineral content it typically picks up. A shallow well tapping last winter's snowmelt is fresh largely because it's young. A well drilled 4,000 or 5,000 feet down is often brackish partly because it's old — sometimes tens of thousands of years old, sometimes water that has sat in the rock since a shallow sea covered this part of the continent millions of years before anyone was around to drink it. Salinity, in other words, is a rough proxy for age and depth. Fresh water is mostly this year's snowpack, working its way through the system on a human timescale. Deep brackish water is closer to a mined resource, banked over geologic time and drawn down, not replenished, once it's pumped. That distinction is exactly why brackish groundwater is worth developing deliberately rather than treating as a backup for whatever the river fails to provide — it isn't standing in for the river. It's a separate account entirely.

The federal government has been saying this for years. The U.S. Geological Survey's National Brackish Groundwater Assessment — the first national accounting of this resource since 1965 — found that the brackish groundwater underlying the country is more than eight hundred times what the nation currently uses in a year.[14] Texas alone is estimated to hold roughly 880 trillion gallons of it,[2] a figure the state's own water planners have spent years trying to pin down more precisely. New Mexico's own share is, by the state's own estimate, larger still: somewhere between two and four billion acre-feet[3] — on the low end alone, more than double Texas's widely cited 2.7-billion-acre-foot brackish reserve, despite New Mexico being the smaller, less-studied state of the two. USGS data on New Mexico specifically puts a finer point on it: roughly three-quarters of all the groundwater in this state is too salty to use for most purposes without treatment.[21] That's not a marginal resource sitting at the edges of the state's water picture. It's the majority of what's actually down there.

None of that is new water. It's water that has been down there — some of it for tens of thousands of years, some of it since the region was covered by ancient seas — waiting on a use case and a treatment plant. What's new is that New Mexico finally has a state program built to develop it: the Strategic Water Supply Act, signed into law in 2025, which funds mapping, piloting, and treatment of brackish groundwater specifically so it can supplement — not replace — the freshwater this state's rivers and senior water rights are already stretched past their limit to provide. It passed the House 57 to 4 and the Senate 33 to 6.[4] That is not a fringe idea. That is close to consensus, in a legislature that agrees on very little else.

Memo 018 covered the May 2026 Supreme Court settlement in Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado — thirteen years of litigation closed, New Mexico committed to reducing groundwater pumping in the Lower Rio Grande, an accounting system built to track it. Brackish water never came up in that settlement, not once, despite the two to four billion acre-feet sitting under the same state. That's worth asking about directly rather than assuming it was an oversight, because it wasn't one.

The Compact governs a shared river — specifically, the fresh groundwater pumping that is hydraulically connected to the Rio Grande's surface flow, because that's the water whose depletion actually shorts Texas's share. Deep brackish aquifers, sealed off from that flow, were never part of what Texas could sue over in the first place, because they were never part of the river system the Compact was written to divide. That's not a loophole. It's the reason brackish water is worth developing as its own account rather than folding it into the same fight: whatever gets built here doesn't touch the river the last thirteen years of litigation were about, and it isn't subject to the same accounting the new settlement just spent a decade building. A community that understands that distinction is asking a better question than "why wasn't this in the deal" — it's asking "why would we want it to be."

Here is the uncomfortable number underneath all of this: New Mexico does not currently have a single fully operational desalination plant turning brackish groundwater into usable water at any real scale. The state's flagship facility, the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, is a research site — companies and universities pilot equipment there, but it doesn't deliver water to anyone's tap. Alamogordo's own municipal desalination plant was actually built, years ago, and still sits idle today because the city never finished the sixteen-mile pipeline needed to connect it to its brackish well field.[15] The resource is there. The mapping is only now getting funded. The delivery infrastructure, almost everywhere in this state, does not yet exist.

That gap is the opportunity, not a reason to wait. A county that helps build the first working example — rather than the next stranded pipeline — is a county that gets to write the playbook instead of borrowing someone else's.

Brackish water does not need to be treated to the same standard for every use, and that matters more than it sounds like it should. Fire suppression doesn't care about salinity at all — coastal departments fight fires with straight seawater, several times saltier than anything called "brackish." A brackish well that would be useless for a city's drinking supply can go straight into a hydrant or a helicopter bucket today, no treatment plant required. Stock water for cattle tolerates a meaningful range of salinity too, but not an unlimited one — and wildlife using the same pond or trough deserve the same consideration a rancher gives a herd. That's a real middle tier between "no treatment needed" and "full municipal-grade," and it's not a hypothetical one. Containerized brackish units already exist, sized for exactly this: Fluence's NIROBOX BW, for one example, treats water in the 1,000-to-10,000 ppm range at up to 90 percent recovery, housed in a single 40-foot shipping container that can be ordered, deployed, and — if a well runs dry or priorities shift — relocated rather than abandoned.[20] A rancher doesn't need a municipal plant to bring a brackish well down to a safer standard for the herd and the deer sharing the trough. Both fire and stock-water uses extend directly out of the node concept in Memo 018 — every brackish well becomes a candidate site, not just the fresh ones, which measurably widens the map of where a rancher's pond or a farmer's well could double as fire infrastructure.

Farming is the harder case. Crops vary widely in salt tolerance, and a mature pecan orchard — the backbone of this region's agricultural economy — shows measurable harm well within the range the U.S. Geological Survey calls "brackish." Getting brackish water safely onto farmland means real treatment or careful blending with existing fresh supply, not a straight substitution. That is a genuine engineering problem, and it is exactly the kind of problem a state research facility already sitting forty minutes from Sierra County's own fields ought to be solving for this region specifically, instead of leaving it to whichever county funds a pilot first.

Recreation and drinking water sit at the far end of that same ladder — the highest treatment bar, and the place where a proven, well-run plant does the most to restore what a nearly empty lake has been taking away from this county's tourism economy for three drought years running.

The Strategic Water Supply Act did not pass without real, organized opposition, and that opposition deserves a fair account here rather than a footnote. Environmental and Indigenous advocacy groups raised genuine concerns that deep brackish aquifers remain poorly characterized, that the health and safety implications of large-scale extraction are not fully understood, and — most concretely — that the original bill moved through the Legislature without a finished plan for disposing of the concentrated brine that desalination leaves behind. A former state water engineer separately argued the money would be better spent shoring up New Mexico's actual Rio Grande Compact compliance than funding a new resource category. None of these are bad-faith objections. Brine disposal in particular is a real, unsolved engineering question — the same one every version of this idea runs into, from the Permian Basin to Alamogordo to whatever gets proposed here.

The public's right to raise these objections, loudly and at length, is not up for debate. It is the same right that let this county's own residents pack a commission meeting over Project Jupiter's water use roughly 115 miles south of here — and they were right to show up. There's a separate problem underneath that one: a public hearing only works if the room is arguing from the same facts. Tymmber Outdoor has its own framework for that discernment — The Authentic Method (TAM), built to separate a claim that holds up under its own scrutiny from a claim that was never meant to survive one. It doesn't tell a community what to conclude. It tells a community how to tell the difference between a concern that was reasoned to and a concern that was engineered to spread. A community that can't make that distinction is vulnerable to being used by whoever is best funded to shout the loudest — regardless of which side of an issue they're shouting from.

Existing water rights holders will have a related, more concrete demand: proof that pumping deep brackish aquifers doesn't draw down the shallow, fresh aquifers pecan orchards and other senior rights already depend on, or cause subsidence at the surface. This memo has leaned on the geological separation between deep, old brackish water and shallow, young fresh water throughout — that separation is real, but it isn't automatic protection at every site. Any actual well field needs site-specific hydrogeologic modeling proving the two aquifers won't interact before a single well gets drilled, not after.

The White Sands Missile Range and the adjacent national park sit on some of the largest documented brackish reserves in this part of the state, and tapping them has been raised, in one form or another, for close to a quarter century — federal interest in the Tularosa Basin's brackish water dates to a 2001 congressional directive that eventually produced the Alamogordo research facility. Nothing has resolved it either way. That's not a reason to leave it out of this conversation; it's a reason to say plainly that federal land, an active military mission, and a national park make that specific site a far more complicated proposition than the state or private land this memo focuses on, and any real answer would need the Army, the Park Service, and the state at the same table — not a county acting alone.

Brine disposal keeps getting treated, in every version of this conversation, as a cost to be managed. It's worth asking whether that framing is complete. Zero liquid discharge systems don't dispose of leftover brine as a liquid at all — they crystallize it into solid salt, and that salt has real, proven value elsewhere in this region. New Mexico already runs a century-old industrial economy built on solar-evaporation mineral recovery: Carlsbad is home to some of the country's largest solar evaporation potash operations, producing fertilizer-grade mineral salts at industrial scale, in a climate — over 100 inches of pan evaporation against roughly 3 inches of rainfall a year[17] — that makes evaporation-based brine management dramatically more efficient here than almost anywhere else in the country. That's not a hypothetical advantage. It's a working industry, forty minutes from where this memo is being written.

The clearest proof that "waste" brine has real value is already happening in the same basin this memo keeps returning to. Companies operating in the Permian Basin are extracting lithium directly from oilfield brine and refining it to battery-grade lithium carbonate — independently verified, under agreements tied to U.S. battery manufacturing supply chains.[18] That is the same lithium that goes into an electric vehicle. It is being pulled out of water that used to be treated as pure liability. Sierra County's brackish groundwater sits in a lower salinity band than Permian produced water, so this isn't a promise that our own brine holds recoverable lithium — nobody will know that until it's tested. What it proves is that "brine equals waste" is no longer a safe assumption anywhere in this region, and testing what's actually in the water under this county is now a real, answerable question rather than a rhetorical one.

A smaller-scale, more directly comparable example exists too: a brackish desalination plant built for the township of Oakey, Queensland — facing the same problem as any county here, groundwater too saline for its residents to use — runs at 85 to 90 percent recovery, and sends its leftover brine to a nearby coal mine, where it's used for dust suppression and coal washing rather than disposed of as pure waste.[22] That's not a Permian-scale industrial operation. It's a small-town plant finding a use for its brine because someone asked the question instead of assuming there wasn't an answer.

There's a second, more testable idea here: recovered mineral salt, refined and verified safe, is chemically adjacent to what ranchers already buy for wildlife and livestock mineral licks. Whether Sierra County's specific recovered salt could ever serve that purpose depends entirely on what's actually in our local water — some New Mexico aquifers carry natural arsenic or fluoride that would need to be screened out first. That's not a reason to dismiss the idea. It's a reason to test it, the same way the state's own research facility in Alamogordo is already testing how aquaculture species tolerate this region's brackish water.

Renewable energy projects carry a real, documented wildlife cost, and this memo isn't going to pretend otherwise. In New Mexico's own Four Corners region, researchers with the Bureau of Land Management and Wildlands Network are collaring pronghorn to study how utility-scale solar fencing cuts off migration routes and habitat access — pronghorn struggle to jump fences, and their numbers are already declining across the state. A separate peer-reviewed study of a solar facility in the Nutt grasslands, south-central New Mexico, found measurable effects on breeding bird communities. This is documented, ongoing, and close to home — not a distant California problem.

A desalination plant isn't a wildlife-impact-free alternative either. It uses land, it uses energy that has to come from somewhere, and a badly sited or badly run brine pond can do real harm instead of good. Saline evaporation ponds have become significant habitat for migratory shorebirds and waterfowl elsewhere in the country — but only where they're designed and managed for it. Left unmanaged, the same kind of pond has done the opposite: concentrated selenium bioaccumulated through the food chain at California's Kesterson Reservoir starting in 1983, causing widespread bird death and deformity.[9] A feasibility study for any Sierra County pond needs to account for toxicity management as a design requirement from day one, not something addressed after birds start showing up.

Large water-intensive projects like data centers raise a related question this memo doesn't fully answer here: what happens when a community is, or isn't, brought in early. Doña Ana County's own Project Jupiter data center, and Ohio's recent fight over data center wastewater discharge, are real, current, well-documented examples of exactly that question — and of what a well-informed community can do about it in either direction. That case is detailed in full in Memo 020.

This isn't an abstract statewide case for us. The stretch of the Rio Grande immediately south of Caballo Dam — the Rincon Valley — has documented brackish-water conditions in its own basin-fill sediments. The Socorro Basin to our north, upstream of Elephant Butte itself, shows the same signal, with high chloride concentrations at both ends of the basin. And the dry riverbed that already exists below both Elephant Butte and Caballo — the same channel that fills on cue every irrigation season and sits empty the rest of the year — is infrastructure this county already has, not infrastructure it would need to build. A rancher's brackish well becomes a fire-suppression asset without a treatment plant. A treated plant, sited well, could put water back into that channel on days nobody currently expects to see it flowing at all.

New Mexico's Legislature already took this position by a wide margin. The federal government has been mapping this resource for a decade. What hasn't happened yet, anywhere in this state, is a county doing it well — publicly, transparently, with its own ranchers, farmers, and residents in the room from the start, instead of finding out from a headline. Sierra County, with the reservoir its economy has leaned on for a century now sitting at 1.4 percent, has more reason than almost anywhere else in the state to be the one that does.

A plant sited north of Elephant Butte, drawing on the Socorro Basin signal upstream, is a real enough idea to deserve a real enough number attached to it — and an honest one, not an optimistic one. Industry cost data for small-to-mid brackish reverse osmosis plants puts capital construction in the range of roughly $25 million to $70 million for a facility in the 2-to-5-million-gallon-per-day class, the scale that would actually fit a county the size of ours, with operating costs typically running $1.80 to $2.80 per thousand gallons once the plant is running.[5] Brackish treatment costs 40 to 70 percent less than seawater desalination for a simple physical reason: brackish water needs a fraction of the pressure to push through a membrane, which means smaller pumps, less energy, and higher recovery rates — 75 to 90 percent of the water pumped comes out usable, against roughly half for seawater.[16] That's the same math that makes El Paso's Kay Bailey Hutchison plant, the largest inland desalination facility in the country, cheaper to run than anyone assumed when it opened in 2007.

What isn't yet knowable, and shouldn't be pretended otherwise, is the exact number for a Sierra County plant specifically. Brine disposal — the same unresolved cost driver flagged earlier in this memo — can swing a project's real total meaningfully above or below any industry-average estimate, and nobody will know which direction until an actual site, an actual well field, and an actual disposal plan get engineered together. That's not a reason to wait. It's the argument for a feasibility study, not a groundbreaking, as the next concrete step.

Reverse osmosis, even at brackish pressures, pulls real, continuous power — a 2-to-5-MGD plant is not a load the local grid absorbs for free. Pairing the plant with dedicated solar generation and battery storage isn't a nice-to-have; it's the difference between a project that strengthens Sierra County's grid and one that strains it. That pairing should be part of the feasibility study's scope from day one, not an afterthought bolted on after siting is settled.

Who actually commissions that feasibility study is a concrete, answerable question, not a vague next step. The path already exists: a county commission resolution requesting inclusion in New Mexico's Strategic Water Supply program, paired with a grant or contract application through the New Mexico Environment Department and Office of the State Engineer — the same process that already funded the Middle Rio Grande mapping study, the Indewater mobile pilot, and the southeastern New Mexico cattle-operation pilot. Sierra County doesn't need a new law or a new agency. It needs a commission vote to start the application.

The return side of the ledger is where the honest ROI case actually lives, and it isn't primarily financial. New Mexico's Strategic Water Supply fund already has capital sitting in it — more than $75 million appropriated across two legislative sessions[6] — specifically earmarked for brackish water projects like this one, which means a well-built Sierra County proposal is competing for money that already exists rather than asking taxpayers for something new. Set against that: a tourism economy built around a lake currently at 1.4 percent, an agricultural sector one bad settlement away from further cuts, and a wildfire season that has already burned through this county once this decade with no better water access than it had the day the Black Fire started. The honest return on a brackish water plant isn't measured only in dollars per acre-foot. It's measured in what this county stops being exposed to.

The Black Fire point is worth pressing harder, because it isn't hypothetical. Air tankers and scoopers fighting fires in this region have relied on Elephant Butte's long, open expanse of surface water to refill and get back in the air fast — exactly the kind of large, accessible water source that a shrinking, cracked-mud reservoir stops being able to provide. A lake at 1.4 percent isn't just a tourism and agriculture problem. It's a firefighting capacity problem, for the next fire this county doesn't get to choose the timing of.

New Mexico is not a state short on capital. Its sovereign wealth funds — managed by the State Investment Council — now total more than $68 billion,[7] putting New Mexico on track to hold the largest state sovereign wealth fund in the country within a few years, ahead of even Alaska. Most of that money is legally spoken for: the Land Grant Permanent Fund, the largest piece, is constitutionally dedicated to public schools and a handful of other named beneficiaries, not sitting in a discretionary account waiting on a new use case. The honest version of this argument isn't "the state has $50 billion, spend it on desalination." It's a sharper question than that.

New Mexico already built a fund for exactly this purpose. The Legislature created the Water Trust Fund in 2001, and protected it by constitutional amendment in 2006 — the same year it received its first real capital, a $40 million appropriation, with another $15 million following in 2007. It exists specifically to conserve and protect the state's water resources and secure a supply of clean water for its future. It's invested the same way as the Land Grant Permanent Fund. It started with barely $55 million combined, distributes only $4 million a year to water infrastructure projects statewide, and by the state's own estimate, has roughly a fifty-fifty chance of running to zero within twenty years without new capital.[8] That is the fund New Mexico built specifically to prevent the crisis this memo opened with — sitting starved for capital, in the same state that is about to hold more sovereign wealth than every state except one.

The state has already shown it's willing to bond against future resource revenue for a single, speculative bet — nearly a quarter billion dollars committed to Spaceport America, with the executive director who runs it still telling reporters it will be years before taxpayers see that money again.[19] It has also already used severance tax bonds for a live water program, funding the Strategic Water Supply's first appropriations the same way. The tool exists. The precedent exists. What's missing is applying either at the scale this problem actually needs, to the fund the state built specifically to hold it.

Elephant Butte Dam took Americans a decade to build and a century to prove out. It turned a boom-and-bust river into the backbone of an economy that still runs on it today. That's the standard this memo has tried to hold itself to — not nostalgia for what a previous generation built, but the same willingness to look at water differently than the generation before had.

Brackish groundwater is the first front, and it's the one this memo has made the case for. It isn't the only one. This state gets hit by monsoon rains hard enough, often enough, to flood streets and arroyos for a few violent weeks a year — and lets nearly all of it run straight to waste the other eleven months. Three hundred miles west, in Tucson, one resident spent thirty years proving that the water already falling on a neighborhood's own streets is a resource, not a drainage problem — an idea that started with an illegal handsaw and a street curb, and now moves over a million gallons a year through basins that used to be asphalt.[23] Neither of those is a brackish-water story. Both are the same story: a community deciding a resource it had been treating as a nuisance was actually an asset nobody had bothered to build for yet.

This memo is the first of three. The next two are already waiting to be written.