Santa Fe staff show water dashboards to support operations, conservation and transparency

City of Santa Fe water division staff demonstrated interactive data dashboards to the Public Works and Utilities Committee on Monday, describing how the tools combine regional and local datasets to support operations, conservation, reporting and public transparency.

Steve Schultz, water resource coordinator, said dashboards aggregate large datasets into web-accessible visualizations so staff can "support our decision making." "A dashboard is an interactive display page that rolls up large datasets into simple interactive visualizations," Schultz said.

Schultz outlined multiple operational benefits: the dashboards let staff pull near-real-time water-demand and reservoir-inflow charts without manual spreadsheet work, support weekly operations meetings, and enable interdepartmental collaboration (for example, connecting park irrigation meters to water-use pages). He said the city's workflows now let staff spend time interpreting data rather than assembling it.

Staff described technical and data sources that feed the dashboards, including the Bureau of Reclamation, the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, USGS, and the city's SCADA systems. The dashboards use a cloud database and a commercial visualization tool (Power BI) to display results. Schultz said the water division plans to publish selected groundwater monitoring data to the New Mexico Water Data Initiative and to post high-level system summaries on the city website.

Committee members praised the work but the meeting lost quorum before extended questions or a live demo. Councilor Alma Castro thanked staff for providing detailed data and said the dashboards help show "where the water come[s] from" and how the city is tracking supplies. Councilor Carol Romero Worth and Chair Amanda Chavez also affirmed support for the dashboards and the city's wastewater effluent monitoring display.

What the demonstration covered: automated BDD (basin diversion/depletion) reporting, park-meter integration, apartment-meter analysis for conservation targeting, near-real-time wastewater effluent E. coli data, and plans to roll up technical dashboards into higher-level public summaries.

Formal action: No formal committee action or vote was taken on the dashboards; staff offered to provide a live demo at a future meeting and to continue quality-assurance work on the dashboards.

Next steps: Staff plans to continue QA/QC on the dashboards, prepare summarized high-level system-status pages suitable for public display, and publish monitoring datasets to the New Mexico Water Data Initiative. The committee requested that staff continue outreach to other committees and the public when the summaries are available.