"Every homeowner is told to protect the water we all share. The same should apply, especially, to a luxury resort."
That's Bernadette Jaramillo-Romero, a lifetime Tesuque resident and Protect Tesuque board member, speaking after New Mexico's environment secretary signed off on Bishop's Lodge's new wastewater permit on September 25, 2025. If you only caught that headline, you'd reasonably assume the fight was over. The resort got its permit. The story ended.
It didn't end. It split into three separate legal tracks that are still moving, on three different timelines, in front of three different bodies. If you live anywhere near Bishop's Lodge Road, or you've driven past the protest signs on your way into the village, the single-headline version of this story is the one thing you can safely stop believing.
The Permit Was Never the Finish Line
Start with what actually happened last September. Cabinet Secretary James Kenney approved a permit letting Bishop's Lodge discharge up to 30,000 gallons of treated wastewater a day into a new low-dose disposal field, more than double the roughly 14,700 gallons a day allowed under its old permit. The water comes from a membrane bioreactor treatment plant the resort installed in 2024, replacing an aging system that had been malfunctioning and requiring the owners to truck raw effluent to Santa Fe for treatment.
The disposal field sits between 75 and 100 feet from Little Tesuque Creek. That proximity is the entire dispute in one sentence: Protect Tesuque's members, most of whom rely on private wells and septic systems, argue that distance is too close to a waterway that feeds the shallow groundwater they drink from.
Kenney's approval followed a 66-page recommendation from hearing officer Felicia Orth, who had already rejected several of Protect Tesuque's specific arguments as unsupported, including language calling the project "an open sewer." She did require Bishop's Lodge to test the treated water for additional pollutants within 90 days of her order, with more testing required if anything turned up.
So the permit is real. But Protect Tesuque said in a news release the same week that the group was "disappointed, not surprised, and absolutely undeterred," and that it intended to keep pushing for an outcome that relocates the disposal field away from the creek and shallow groundwater, with independent, periodic monitoring going forward. That's not a group that considers the case closed. It's a group that just moved to a slower, more procedural track: appealing the secretary's decision through the Water Quality Control Commission and, if that fails, the state Court of Appeals. That process alone can run for a year or more.
The Second Front: Who Gets to Stand on the Road
While the permit fight worked through NMED's administrative process, a completely separate lawsuit opened up over the protests themselves.
Protect Tesuque had been holding weekly Saturday demonstrations on Bishop's Lodge Road for months. In July 2025, Bishop's Lodge filed a civil complaint in state district court asking a judge to bar Protect Tesuque's board members from protesting within roughly a mile of the resort. The complaint described protesters blocking State Road 590, sounding horns and drums, and in one instance flying a drone over the property. It also objected to signs telling passersby not to drink the water and alleging the resort was pumping "poison" into local supplies.
Protect Tesuque called it a SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit meant to intimidate, and denied the specific allegations of blocking roads or trespassing. Rusty Day, a Tesuque resident and Protect Tesuque board member, put it bluntly in a September 2025 release: "This lawsuit isn't about justice, it's about silencing community members who are standing up for their water, their land, and their rights." The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico weighed in on the group's behalf, with attorney Kristin Greer Love calling the suit "a textbook example of using the legal system to retaliate and intimidate."
A Santa Fe judge set a hearing on the matter for November 3, 2025, the last confirmed date on record for that specific case.
Here's why this matters as its own track and not a footnote to the permit story: the environmental question and the free speech question are being decided in entirely different venues, on entirely different legal standards, by entirely different judges. Winning or losing the permit appeal has no bearing on whether the protest injunction gets granted. Residents who assume the wastewater case and the protest case are the same fight are tracking one thread and missing the other.
The Question Nobody Answered Yet
Then there's the wrinkle that surfaced this past July, nearly a year after the permit was approved.
In a July 22, 2026 letter to the Santa Fe Reporter, Rusty Day raised a question that hadn't been part of the public record before: whether the New Mexico Supreme Court and the Water Quality Control Commission actually had the resort's own test results in front of them when they ruled on earlier challenges to the permit. Day asked directly whether NMED's hearing officer was given that information before recommending approval, and if not, why not.
That's not a new lawsuit. It's not a new appeal. It's a transparency question aimed squarely at the agency that approved the permit in the first place, and as of this writing it remains open. If the answer turns out to be that decision-makers ruled without seeing data that existed at the time, that's the kind of detail that reopens conversations people thought were settled. If the answer is that the information was available and simply wasn't material to the outcome, the story stays where it is. Either way, a full year after the headline announcing approval, the underlying facts of the case are still being contested in public, not just relitigated in court filings.
What This Actually Means If You're Nearby
None of this means the outcome will change. New Mexico's water quality permitting process is built for exactly this kind of multi-year, multi-front fight, and Bishop's Lodge has operated on this site for more than half a century under one discharge permit or another. Juniper Capital's Chris Kaplan, who oversees asset management for the resort, has said consistently that the upgraded treatment facility meets New Mexico water quality standards, and NMED spokesperson Drew Goretzka has echoed that the department retains authority to test further and will do so.
But if you live in the village, the practical takeaway isn't which side is right. It's that three clocks have been running at once, on three different schedules that never synchronized. The administrative appeal on the permit itself could take a year or more to resolve through the Water Quality Control Commission and potentially the Court of Appeals. The protest lawsuit was working through district court on its own separate calendar as of that November hearing, independent of anything happening at NMED. And the transparency question Day raised this July doesn't have a formal deadline attached to it at all. It's a question sitting in public, waiting for an answer, with no clock on it whatsoever.
If you want to follow any of the three threads directly rather than through secondhand summaries, NMED's Water Quality Control Commission maintains a docketed matters page where filings in the Bishop's Lodge case are posted as they happen. That's the actual record, not a recap of it.
Tesuque has always been a place where the water in Little Tesuque Creek matters to more people than a map would suggest, from the working ranches up toward Tesuque Ridge to the wells behind homes closer to the village center. This dispute is a reminder of how tightly that shared resource ties neighbors together, whatever side of the permit question they land on.
If you're a Tesuque homeowner or simply keeping an eye on what's unfolding along the creek, Darlene Streit Team has spent years working this specific valley and is glad to talk through what you're seeing on the ground. Request a private consultation any time you'd like a second set of local eyes on your corner of the neighborhood.
