- Name: Bill Turner
- Fond Childhood Memory: Listening to the Lone
Ranger radio show: “Good will prevail.” - Coffee or Tea: Coffee, black, in a to-go cup
with a few cubes of ice - Resume
Excerpts: Firewall riveter for Navy S2F submarine-hunter
aircraft (1958); Peace Corps volunteer and geologist in Cyprus
(1963-1964); New Mexico natural resources trustee (1995-2003);
trustee of more than five different private companies related to
water rights,environmental projects or hydrology (present). Elected
to board of directors, Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (2005
to present). - Thoughts on the District:
“The (district) will bend and break the law any chance they
get. They won’t go out of their way to do it, but they have a
definite agenda. If the law gets in the way of that agenda, they
get around it.”
A distracted-looking businessman
with thinning gray hair ducks out the back door of the Insurance
Building in downtown Albuquerque. He hops into a red pickup truck,
drives a few blocks, parks and strides into a bank. There, he
deposits a check from a water deal. Next, he heads to a coffee
shop, parking directly beneath a city “No Parking”
sign.
This is Bill Turner, board member and bane of the
Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which supplies water to the
bulk of New Mexico’s irrigators through a system of ditches
and canals. Since elected to the post in June 2005, Turner has
accused the district of hiring unqualified engineers, shirking its
duties to provide notice of meetings and improperly maintaining its
ditches. He’s openly disagreed with the district’s
chief engineer, attorney and other board members, and his antics
have lured the public into packing more than a few of the
board’s twice-monthly meetings.
During that time,
other board members have censured him and accused him of misleading
journalists and harassing and intimidating employees. Visitors
logging on to mrgcd.com will find a lengthy diatribe from the
district’s attorney, who says Turner is fighting a “war
against agriculture.” Now, the district has accused him of a
conflict of interest, because he runs a number of private companies
that buy and sell water rights. It’s gone beyond
name-calling: The district is suing in state court to kick him off
the board.
That, Turner says, is “malarkey.”
He insists his profession is not the problem: “I was hired to
carry out the wishes of my constituents, which was to clean house
over there. (That’s) what I’m doing,” he says,
“and they don’t like it.”
But
Turner’s profession has raised some genuine ire. As the
middleman in water deals, he’s been known to peddle
irrigation water to developers for $35,000 per acre-foot or more.
And in 2003, he and the Canadian-based Lion’s Gate Water
raised eyebrows — and hackles — by applying to the New
Mexico Office of the State Engineer to buy the 372,982 acre-feet of
water that evaporates off three reservoirs in the Middle Rio Grande
each year.
He has the capital, he says, to divert that
water, store it underground and then distribute it. He even has
interested buyers, he says, including the cities of Albuquerque and
Rio Rancho. But the State Engineer’s Office has rejected his
application; Turner says it “just continually puts obstacles
in the way.” He is appealing the decision in state court,
because he believes his plan is a “win-win” situation.
“The return flow to the river from municipalities is about 50
percent. So by dedicating that water back to the river, you get
in-stream flow, which is help for endangered species, and you also
get more water in the river, which improves the farmers’
water security.”
It’s an unlikely plan, to be
sure. For it to succeed, the irrigation districts currently relying
on water from the three reservoirs would need to revamp their own
systems, build groundwater storage systems and, he says, “use
the irrigation system to recharge the aquifer.”
Whatever happens, both conservationists and agency scientists
— privately, at least — are pleased that someone is
shaking up the system. They may be uncomfortable with his water
deals, but Turner is a welcome break from the “good ol’
boys’ ” network that has controlled irrigation water in
the valley for 80 years. If you ask Turner how one gets to be a
good old boy — overlooking the fact that, as a politically
well-connected 67-year-old man, he may already be one — he
answers with a completely straight face: “By turning your
back, by doing things that may not be quite right, just to get
along.” He then smiles, and takes a bite of a blueberry
scone: “I don’t know how you get to be a good old
boy,” he says. “I’m not a good old boy.”
The author writes from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable
Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline New Mexico’s water rebel.
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