Bonanza! Our water worries are over! All our desert state has to do is give a New York water company carte blanche to drill a bunch of wells west of Socorro, out on the San Agustín Plains past the radiotelescope array. Then we'll find ourselves with 54,000 acre-feet of water we didn't even know we had ...

Gee, that'd go a long way toward paying our interstate-stream debt to Texas. In turn, it would allow the alfalfa farmers of the Río Grande Valley to cash in their water rights with developers dying to sprawl Albuquerque from horizon to horizon. The Phoenix-Las Vegas-Los Angeles triangle of subdivisions would have nothing on us. And is anybody interested in buying beachfront lots at Jornada del Muerto Estates?

Felizmente, not even this latest bunch of promoters, nor their Albuquerque attorney, are indulging in that kind of hyperbole so long familiar to Westerners. But they are making a big deal about the benefits to a New Mexico under increasing pressure to deliver water downstream. Allow us to drill three dozen wells in the Datil area, and sell you the water, goes the pitch to State Engineer John D'Antonio; we can deliver as much water per year as Albuquerque uses today — 10 times Santa Fe's consumption.

Presumably, the water would be piped to the Río Grande. Once there, its fungibility, and lawyerly juggling of water rights, would make it available upstream or down. Santa Fe could buy it. Albuquerque could buy it. Anybody could buy it — for the right price ...

But once it reaches the big river that rolls through the middle of our arid state, how much, for starters, would be lost to evaporation? To D'Antonio and Interstate Stream Commissioner Estévan López, who know the value of water, this should have all the appeal of mining for gold and tossing its dust into the wind. Wouldn't it be better to leave that geologically ancient water where it is, shoring up aquifers and otherwise serving nature's purpose?

The strongest bases for public protest of the applications are that the project would:

• Harm existing water rights;
• Run contrary to water conservation;
• Or be detrimental to the public welfare, which covers a multitude of sins.

Those issues should send environmentalists clamoring in opposition.

But in the meantime, D'Antonio — who we'd like to hear sounding warier of the deal — should be listening closely to López: The commissioner wants to be sure the pumping of so much water won't interrupt underground flows already on their way to the Río Grande — and, for that matter, to the Gila River basin on the other side of the Continental Divide. Arizonans as well might have something to say about that.

And, says López, he has no pressing interest to buy that water for complying with interstate river compacts.

He also noted to The New Mexican's Staci Matlock that this isn't the only pump-and-pipe scheme in the works; another, down in the southeastern part of the state, would take 90,000 acre-feet from underground and pipe it to the Pecos River, or maybe farther west to the Río Grande. That application's been around for more than five years. "There hasn't been much movement on it," López notes — wryly?

New Mexicans should hope for similar lassitude on this proposal — and, perhaps, for input from any number of state agencies and our Legislature to boot.

Commercial interests in our neighboring states seem tireless in their quest to turn New Mexico into a water-and-energy colony — as if we had enough water to ship south and west for centuries to come.

We commend Commissioner López on his resistance to efforts at stampeding our state into what the flinty folks of Catron County perceive as a water grab. And we urge State Engineer D'Antonio not to be in a big rush to drain Datil.