Granite Cutthroats

The granite sculpture of 27 Rio Grande cutthroat trout is being installed between the new convention center and city hall. This is a nice tribute to our state fish, but as I wrote a year ago, it is unfortunate that we don’t have any real cutts swimming in the Santa Fe River, a mere couple blocks away.

For a city that considers itself “enlightened,” it is an enormous embarrassment that the city’s river runs dry for a good portion of the year.

The city committed something like 700 acre feet to the river this year after a good snow pack last winter, but the politicians fall short of understanding that the river needs to flow all year round to be a living river that holds living fish. Instead of a sustainable flow, we get a cosmetic flow put on during the summer to impress the tourists.

The mere fact that a city was able to totally shut off a river when they built the dam is unbelievable. They’d never be able to get away with that today. And the city likes to impose conservation measures to make us think we are all saving a valuable resource, but when we peons save water, it just goes into more development.

It’s time.

It’s time the city deal with this problem and commit the water savings from the citizens, not to new development, but to a sustainable year-round flow in our river.