Lawmakers push for permanent funding for acequias and land grant mercedes in 2026 session

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who represents the state’s 3rd Congressional District and much of Northern New Mexico, appeared at an Oct. 7, 2025 news conference, celebrating state lawmakers’ push to establish permanent funds for acequias and land grant mercedes in the upcoming legislative session. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM)

BY: DANIELLE PROKOP
Courtesy of Source NM

As climate-fueled disasters cause mounting damages to New Mexico’s acequias amid rising costs, leadership from traditional ditch communities and land grant-mercedes say they need state help.

Those leaders discussed the issue on Tuesday in front of the state Roundhouse, as Democratic lawmakers previewed legislation for next year’s session that would establish two muli-million dollar funds to help pay infrastructure costs for dam repairs and debris removal, as well as for affordable housing developments on community-owned land.

“It’s more than a bill, it’s a promise,” said Sen. Leo Jaramillo (D-Española). “It creates a permanent fund so our New Mexico’s historic land grant and acequia communities can invest in our future, clean water and strong local infrastructure; more so in rural New Mexico where we need it the most.”

Similar legislation brought in 2025 — House Bill 330 — advanced through House committees and a floor vote, but stalled in the Senate Finance Committee. The bill, which would have dedicated $5 million in two funds for both acequias and land grant-mercedes, simply “ran out of time,” Jaramillo said.

“I’m very optimistic for it to pass this year,” he said.

But while acequias and land-grant mercedes count as government entities in law and predate New Mexico’s statehood by hundreds of years, their ability to obtain state or federal funding remains a challenge.

Since 2022, fires and flooding — including millions in damages to dozens of canals in September — have devastated more than 200 acequias across the state, said Paula Garcia, the executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association.

“With about 700 in the state that means one in four acequias is in crisis from some kind of climate disaster,” she said.

Garcia said uncertainty about receiving U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency funds and challenges navigating the state’s disaster funding creates a continued level of precarity as calamities pile up.

“It seems like every time there’s a disaster, we’re starting from scratch,” Garcia told Source NM. “Now having a funding source would be a game changer because we wouldn’t be scrambling every time there’s a disaster on how we’re going to piece together that recovery money.”

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who represents the state’s 3rd Congressional District and much of Northern New Mexico, said she’s had to repeatedly “educate” federal agencies to get funding for acequias, and said this pool of funding may offer chances to seek federal grants in the future.

​“When the State of New Mexico passes legislation like this that not just builds upon the recognition, but says, ‘we are going to provide the funding at these levels, then they can go and seek matching funding from the federal government,’’ said Leger Fernández, who was in the state rather than Washington, D.C., due to the ongoing federal shutdown. “That’s why what the legislators have done today is so essential — because we want to multiply, as much as possible, the funding that comes into rural communities.”