Past, Present, and Future Water Use in Santa Fe
A Salon Talk by Jesse Roach
Thursday, July 24th, 3pm
Thaw Education Center
553 Canyon Road
ABOUT THE SALON
The mission of City of Santa Fe Water is to provide a safe, reliable, and resilient water supply to meet the needs of our community. Come learn the story of water development in Santa Fe for the past 100 years, and plans for maintaining resiliency for the next 80 years and beyond. This talk will touch on a nationally renowned conservation program, and explain why water from the Santa Fe River and the Colorado River is used preferentially to save our wells for a not-so rainy day. The presentation will also look to the future of water use with a focus on a planned return flow project and what that will mean to the future of water use and conservation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jesse Roach P.E. Ph.D. is interim Director of the City of Santa Fe’s Public Utilities Department, overseeing the Water, Wastewater, and Environmental Services Utilities. Jesse started at the City as Director of City of Santa Fe Water in 2019 and moved to the Utility Director role at the beginning of 2025. During his time at the City Jesse has helped tell the remarkable story of the past, present, and future of water development and use in Santa Fe, especially since 1995. He has pushed for data driven operations, led development of a Water Resources Indicator to guide seasonal conservation policy, led a strategic planning effort, led development of a long range water resources planning process, and provided leadership in support of new water resources development. Jesse’s technical areas of expertise include municipal operations and demand, potential climate change impacts on water resources, and surface water – groundwater dynamics. Jesse was the technical lead on an assessment of potential climate change impacts to water resources, and possible resulting changes to water operations in the Upper Rio Grande basin (http://www.usbr.gov/WaterSMART/wcra/reports/urgia.html), and a contributor to technical evaluation of water utility scale adaptation to potential hydrologic impacts of climate change in Santa Fe (https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/SantaFe/Santa-Fe-Basin-Final.pdf).
Jesse grew up in Santa Fe and holds Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Hydrology and Water Resources. He worked at Sandia National Labs from 2006 to 2014 as a senior member of the technical staff focused on building system level simulation models, and as a Senior Water Resources Engineer at Tetra Tech Inc. from 2014 to 2019.
