Rio Grande Compact Violation

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United States Supreme Court

Case Name: Texas v. New Mexico

Case No.: 141

Focus: Rio Grande Compact Violation

To resolve their disputes over water rights in the Rio Grande, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, with Congress’s approval, signed the Rio Grande Compact. The Compact requires Colorado to deliver a specified amount of water annually to New Mexico at the state line and directs New Mexico to deliver a specified amount of water to the Elephant Butte Reservoir. The Reservoir was completed in 1916 as part of the Federal Government’s Rio Grande Project and plays a central role in fulfilling the United States’s obligations to supply water under a 1906 treaty with Mexico as well as under several agreements with downstream water districts in New Mexico and Texas (Downstream Contracts).

Texas brought this original action complaining that New Mexico has violated the Compact by allowing downstream New Mexico users to siphon off water below the Reservoir in ways not anticipated in the Downstream Contracts. The United States intervened and filed a complaint with parallel allegations. The Special Master filed a report recommending that the United States’s complaint be dismissed in part because the Compact does not confer on the United States the power to enforce its terms. This Court agreed to hear two exceptions to the report concerning the scope of the claims the United States can assert here: The United States says it may pursue claims for Compact violations; Colorado says the United States should be permitted to pursue claims only to the extent they arise under the 1906 treaty with Mexico.

The United States may pursue the Compact claims it has pleaded in this original action. This Court, using its unique authority to mold original actions, see Kansas v. Nebraska, 574 U. S. ___, ___, has sometimes permitted the federal government to participate in compact suits to defend “distinctively federal interests” that a normal litigant might not be permitted to pursue in traditional litigation, Maryland v. Louisiana, 451 U. S. 725, 745, n. 21. While this permission should not be confused with license, several considerations taken collectively lead to the conclusion that the United States may pursue the particular claims it has pleaded in this case. First, the Compact is inextricably intertwined with the Rio Grande Project and the Downstream Contracts. Second, New Mexico has conceded in pleadings and at oral argument that the United States plays an integral role in the Compact’s operation. Third, a breach of the Compact could jeopardize the federal government’s ability to satisfy its treaty obligations to Mexico. Fourth, the United States has asserted its Compact claims in an existing action brought by Texas, seeking substantially the same relief and without that State’s objection. This case does not present the question whether the United States could initiate litigation to force a State to perform its obligations under the Compact or expand the scope of an existing controversy between States. Pp. 4–7. United States’s exception sustained; all other exceptions overruled; and case remanded.

Remanded

Dissenting:

Concurring:

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