Water finally coming to local residents

Emerson Willie hooks up his large water tank to his home water pump system on Wednesday evening at his home south of Boardman Dr. Willie is one of 16 families who live just outside of city limits and have not been able to get hooked up to the city's water system due to decades-old problems. The city has recently started to remedy the problem by installing new water pipes and water should be flowing to the residents within the next few months. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — For the past dozen years, the municipal golf course across the street has been taunting Emerson Willie.

To Willie, who lives on the east side of Boardman Drive, its synchronized sprinklers have been a constant reminder of something he doesn't have: a connection to the city's water system. To cope, he's been making the three mile trip to the nearest water station to fill up his 300-gallon tank every two or three days. His neighbors on the west side of Boardman, meanwhile, just a stone's throw away, have all the water they need at the turn of a tap.

Fortunately for Willie and the 15 other families on the wrong side of Boardman — 23 homes in all — that's about to change. City officials say they should have the homes hooked up to Gallup's municipal water system within five weeks.

"We've lived here 12 years now, and it's been hard," Willie said. "This water coming in means a lot to me and my aunts and everyone out there."

"These citizens have had to look across the road at neighbors getting services they've been denied," said Lance Allgood, Gallup's utilities director.

The problem, explained former Mayor John Pea, was a city ordinance that denies hook-ups to those outside of city limits, which happen to run right past Willie's driveway. A series of public meetings about the Navajo-Gallup water supply project, a pipeline that will deliver water to Gallup from the San Juan River, brought the problem to the fore in 2000. Within a year, Pea and his fellow councilors had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority and the Indian Health Service suspending the ordinance.

Securing all the land clearances the partners needed, however, took time. It was only a year ago that the contractor finally broke ground on the $455,000 project. The city will provide the water when it's done. IHS, which designed the project, will foot the bill.

"It's been a long time coming," said Mayor Harry Mendoza, who was a McKinley County commissioner when the memorandum was signed.

Now, said Arvin Trujillo, executive director of the Navajo Nation's Division of Natural Resources, "we're seeing that agreement come to fruition."

But both city and tribal officials see this as just the beginning. Trujillo called the Boardman families a "microcosm" of the 25,000-square mile reservation, where 40 percent of families still haul water. He hopes the parties can learn from the experience.

The kind of collaboration that's accompanied this project has been more the exception than the rule for Gallup and the Navajo Nation, noted Patty Lundstrom, director of the Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments. The local non-profit has been a champion of the Navajo-Gallup water supply project, the glue holding together the myriad government entities that will be needed to pull it off.

"In some parts of the world this sort of thing just happens every day," she said. "But out here, dealing with all these jurisdictional issues, that just doesn't happen."

Allgood hopes to break ground on a broader regional system that will connect Gallup with the Navajo communities around it in the fall. For $3 million, courtesy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the first phase will connect Gallup to NTUA's own water system in Church Rock to the east and extend the city's lines west to Manuelito. The Gallup system will serve as a pass-through for tribal water.

In the long run, the city and tribe also hope the work will prepare them for the day the pipeline arrives — some 20 years from now — replete with the 30,000 acre feet of water per day it promises to bring their way. Federal approval is still pending, and the state's Congressional delegation expects funding, if approved, to come in stages.

In the meantime, the families along the east side of Boardman Drive are getting ready to turn on their taps. Some of the families, said Ray Gilmore, chairman of the Navajo Nation's Water Rights Commission, have already bought washers, eager for the day they can stop making the trip to the local Laundromat.