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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In a daylong Albuquerque workshop last week devoted to “transformational” solutions to water problems in New Mexico and the western United States, the most revolutionary idea may have been the simple thing we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten: Sharing is good.

In the West, massive water infrastructure is the norm, with giant dams and pipelines moving water to our farms and cities, and litigation, or the threat of litigation, dominates our discourse. A notion as fuzzy and feel-good as “sharing” seems oddly out of place.

“I’ve never seen a pipeline I didn’t like, but that’s not what we’re talking about,” said Socorro water consultant John Leeper. “That’s not transformational.”

Back in 2002, Leeper, who at the time worked for the Navajo Nation, was part of a group of San Juan Basin water users who saw Navajo Reservoir dropping fast.

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“It sucked,” Leeper told the audience at last week’s Sandia Labs-sponsored “Transformational Solutions for Water in the West” conference. “It was a bad year.”

The basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and a couple of big coal-fired power plants. Also, not one but two interstate water compacts lurk in the background.

As Navajo Reservoir on the San Juan River dropped, the risk of conflict was enormous.

“We were looking into an abyss,” Leeper said.

But rather than fire up the lawyers and prepare to fight over the dwindling supplies, the basin’s water users began talking. When 2003 started looking every bit as dismal, they had a negotiated agreement in place to share the shortages.

During dry times, everyone agreed to use less to stretch supplies. Farmers delayed their irrigation season. Even the endangered fish pitched in, with reductions in early-season flows for the pikeminnow and sucker.

It worked. “This is a train wreck that didn’t happen,” Leeper said.

In the decade since, the deal has endured. Most of the time there’s been plenty of water, and the shortage sharing provisions have not been needed. But the agreement’s presence in the background means water managers and users know what to expect if water supplies start dropping again.

The agreement was most recently updated this year, extending the shortage sharing provisions through 2016, which is a good thing. Depending on the snowpack this coming winter, it may face another test in 2014.

In an interview a couple of years ago, John Entsminger, deputy director of the largest water agency in Las Vegas, Nev., talked to me about the advantages of negotiating a settlement rather than fighting.

“Are we going to let guys and gals in black robes start making these decisions for us?” asked Entsminger, himself a lawyer, “or are we going to come together and maybe not have a perfect solution from everybody’s perspective, but a solution that works for everybody?”

Western water law makes sense to people who are immersed in it – things like the “doctrine of prior appropriation” that says the earliest users on a river are entitled to a full supply before latecomers get a drop. Or the rules embedded in the Colorado River Compact that might mean that when climate change saps the flows in the Colorado River, states in the river’s Upper Basin, such as New Mexico, take the full hit while Arizona, Nevada and California continue to get a full allotment.

Could that mean Denver and Albuquerque losing their share of the Colorado River’s water so a farmer in the Imperial Valley of Southern California can grow alfalfa to ship to China?

Speaking to a group of academics, lawyers and water managers last month, Brad Udall of the University of Colorado acknowledged that those sorts of rules don’t make much sense to the general public not steeped in the rococo creations of Western water law.

What they want, Udall said, is to have water come out of the tap, and for the managers in charge of the system to sort out the complications of doing that in a way that respects equity, sound economics and the environment. Water management actions that violate those notions will, to quote Udall, “violate the public’s sense of ‘rightness.’ ”

This is where the San Juan shortage sharing agreement fits. Instead of invoking arcane provisions of water law to fight over entitlements, a community of water users has come together to work out an agreement that makes simple, intuitive sense.

Doug Kenney, also at the University of Colorado, argued that my “kindergarten” example isn’t quite right. Shortage agreements like this, which are increasingly common across the western United States, are tightly negotiated deals, with all the parties taking serious care to look out for their own interests. This isn’t about giving a cupcake to your pal.

“It doesn’t have the cooperative, kindergarten playground vibe,” Kenney said in a recent interview.

But however the process works, figuring out how to share as we move into an era increasingly constrained by shortages seems likely to become the transformational water policy we need.

Speaking at last week’s Sandia conference, Entsminger put it this way: “We have to cooperate with our neighbors.”

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.