## Facts

- The dispute arose within a subfile proceeding in the general adjudication of Pecos River system water rights, focusing on the City of Las Vegas’s claimed rights in the Gallinas River.
- For decades, the City planned, built, and operated its municipal water system based on an asserted “pueblo water right,” treated as permitting diversion of as much Gallinas River water as necessary for municipal use and growth.
- The City’s claim rested on prior New Mexico precedent recognizing “pueblo rights” for certain municipalities as successors to Spanish/Mexican colonization pueblos.
- The State Engineer sought a declaration of the City’s rights and challenged the existence of pueblo water rights in New Mexico and, alternatively, their claimed scope (including groundwater, reservoir storage, industrial uses, and delivery outside city boundaries).
- The district court declined to reconsider the doctrine but limited the parameters of the City’s asserted right; the court of appeals refused to follow the earlier pueblo-rights precedent; the Supreme Court granted certiorari.

## Issues

1. Whether the pueblo water rights doctrine is consistent with New Mexico’s constitutional and statutory system of prior appropriation.
2. If inconsistent, whether prior cases recognizing pueblo rights should be overruled and municipal rights adjudicated solely under prior appropriation based on beneficial use.

## Decision

- The New Mexico Supreme Court rejected the pueblo water rights doctrine as inconsistent with New Mexico prior-appropriation law.
- The Court overruled Cartwright and related pueblo-rights precedents.
- The Court held that the City of Las Vegas does not possess a special pueblo right allowing open-ended, growth-based withdrawals from the Gallinas River.
- The Court directed that the City’s municipal water rights be determined under prior appropriation, quantified and prioritized like other rights in the adjudication.

## Legal Principles

- New Mexico does not recognize pueblo water rights as an independent doctrine granting municipalities superior or expanding rights.
- All municipal water rights must be determined under prior appropriation, with beneficial use as the basis, measure, and limit of the right.
- A growth-based, ever-expanding municipal right that can exceed historical beneficial use and disrupt priority cannot be reconciled with prior appropriation.
- Stare decisis does not require retention of precedent that conflicts with the state’s constitutional water-rights framework.

## Conclusion

The court abolished the pueblo rights doctrine in New Mexico, overruled contrary precedent, and required that municipalities—regardless of claimed historical pueblo origins—prove and quantify water rights under the same prior-appropriation and beneficial-use rules that govern all other appropriators.


State ex rel. Martinez v. City of Las Vegas, 135 N.M. 375, 89 P.3d 47 (2004)