Environment

Oil and gas gave big in 2023. The industry flexed its muscles this week.

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Large oil and gas companies gave nearly $800,000 in the past 12 months to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, partisan legislative political action committees and individual state lawmakers, according to a partial review of campaign finance reports filed by lobbyists. That amount almost certainly will grow in coming months due to a quirk in New Mexico’s disclosure laws. Elected officials don’t have to report contributions they received in the last quarter of last year until this spring. 

The amount of money the industry showers on elected officials offers a glimpse into the influence it has at the state capitol during legislative sessions. 

The industry’s ability to shape legislation was on full display Thursday when a House committee substantively stripped a bill of new regulations that would have required oil and gas infrastructure to be set back more than a third of a mile from schools, health facilities, multifamily housing, occupied homes, and at least 300 feet from waterways.The political giving reflects the industry’s outsized dominance in a state that ranks second in oil production nationally and where more than 40% of funding for New Mexico’s state budget can be tied directly to the industry.The money spread around to New Mexico’s elected officials has been well-documented, as has its power. A March 2020 report by Common Cause New Mexico and New Mexico Ethics Watch detailed the largess over the years 2017-2019, with almost $12 million funneled into political campaign coffers, and more than a million more was given by October of that year.New Mexico In Depth also has documented the political spending and the push and pull over regulation through the years. In 2019, the first year Lujan Grisham took over as governor from Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, there was a push by environmentalists to implement greater regulations for the oil and gas industry, but in the end, the oil and gas industry had little to fear. 

The industry far exceeds other industries in its political giving, and has for many years.

Environment

Oil in, water out: Lawmakers timid about tackling booming oil and gas industry

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New Mexico legislators’ latest run at regulating the oil and gas industry by updating the 90-year-old Oil and Gas Act illuminated the continuing struggles faced with trying to craft rules for an industry that produces nearly half the state’s revenue. Their efforts at finding a balance continue to leave environmentalists frustrated with the ripple effects, including costs, that they see reaching frontline communities and ecosystems.

Before its first hearing Thursday, lawmakers struck a requirement that oil and gas infrastructure be more than a third of a mile from schools, health facilities, multifamily housing, occupied homes, and at least 300 feet from waterways from a bill heard by the House Energy, Environment & Natural Resources committee. “I know there’s a lot of disappointment about that, and I share that disappointment,” said Rep. Matthew McQueen, D-Galisteo, chairman of the committee and a co-sponsor of the bill. McQueen presented a “substitute” bill during Thursday’s committee meeting. Substitute bills often come together following behind-closed-doors negotiations among lawmakers, lobbyists and various other parties.“The setback requirements were a sticking point,” McQueen said.

Education

New Mexico In Depth editors and reporters discuss education in second legislative chat

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New Mexico In Depth editors held the second of five online chats about the 2024 legislative session yesterday. Indigenous Affairs reporter, Bella Davis, joined Executive Director Trip Jennings and Managing Editor Marjorie Childress to chat about education in general, and tribal education specifically. 

Childress mentioned that 42% of the proposed $10 billion state budget was earmarked for education. Education is “always a big ticket item,” said Jennings. Both mentioned low proficiency rates and low graduation rates as big educational challenges as New Mexico attempts to improve instruction for the 305,000 children enrolled in public schools around the state as well as move the state up the national education rankings. The backdrop to the conversation was the 2018 landmark Yazzie Martinez lawsuit, which found the state had violated the educational rights of Native American, English language-learners, disabled and low-income children. 

Davis went into detail about three legislative initiatives that would allocate public dollars to tribal education efforts, including bringing more teachers into the educational system from under-represented communities.

Indigenous Affairs

Lawmakers want attorney general to create new task force on missing and murdered Indigenous people

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This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T). Five New Mexico lawmakers want the state attorney general to establish a task force focused on missing and murdered Indigenous people. 

They’ve made the request via Senate Joint Memorial 2, which they introduced this week. The memorial puts on display the disagreement some lawmakers have with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s quiet shuttering last year of a task force dedicated to finding solutions to what’s been identified as a national crisis. Indigenous women in the state, according to the memorial, have the highest homicide rate among all ethnic groups. Because this year’s 30-day session is reserved for putting together the state budget in addition to whatever priorities the governor pinpoints, the lawmakers were limited to proposing a memorial, which is not legally binding. 

Task force members decried the governor’s disbanding of their group last year, telling New Mexico In Depth in October their work was just beginning.

Alcohol

New Mexico recorded second deadliest year for alcohol deaths in 2022

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Alcohol killed more than 2,000 New Mexicans in 2022, according to new data from the Department of Health, the third straight year the state exceeded that grim threshold. 

Although New Mexico has long suffered the nation’s highest rate of alcohol-related deaths, the crisis has often been overshadowed by the state’s other problems, such as  gun violence, an issue Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham spotlighted last week in her State of the State address. She made no mention of alcohol, however. In recent years, deaths by drink in New Mexico have outstripped deaths by bullets nearly four to one. Arriving as the state’s 30-day legislative session gets underway, the alcohol mortality data underscored the enormous stakes of debates about New Mexico’s drinking problem, which policymakers have clashed over in previous years but largely failed to address, even as the crisis worsened. The number of alcohol-related deaths in 2022 was 28% higher than 2018, the year Lujan Grisham was first elected governor.

Politics

Debate over independent redistricting commission moves to Senate this year

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Every ten years, the United States counts its people, tabulating where they live and who they live with, plus a range of factors about them, like their sex, race and ethnicity, age, income, and more. 

That census in turn affects people in significant ways, such as the once-a-decade process where local and state governments redraw political district boundaries based on how their population has changed. The goal is to ensure elected officials represent roughly the same amount of people. 

A Senate concept map, one of several the 2021 New Mexico Citizens Redistricting Committee voted to forward to lawmakers for consideration during the official redistricting process. This map-making process is called redistricting, and in New Mexico and most other states, at the state level it’s lawmakers who draw their own political district maps. 

But a coalition of advocates and civic groups, and some lawmakers, want voters to decide this November if an independent commission would do a better job than state lawmakers of drawing political districts in the future. 

A joint resolution sponsored by Sen. Leo Jaramillo, D-Española, and Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, would place the idea on the ballot during this fall’s statewide election. 

“I heard from New Mexicans from before I won the senate about how they thought a commission should be the one helping decide the district lines to make it fair for every New Mexican and every voting district,” Jaramillo said. 

Rep. Natalie Figueroa, who has championed the idea over several years, said there’s “a very direct conflict of interest in the legislators drawing their own boundaries for their own districts.” In order for the public to have faith in democracy, the Albuquerque Democrat said, there needs to be no question that lawmakers might create maps in a way that intentionally protects their own ability to get elected in the future. 

In 2019, in a New Mexico In Depth report on redistricting, experts said New Mexico’s redistricting system offered few constraints on how lawmakers choose to draw political district boundaries. After that report was produced, lawmakers created an independent committee to gather input statewide, and then create a series of maps to inform the Legislature’s redistricting process. The Legislature ultimately adopted maps drawn by legislators, and not those recommended by the independent committee.

Money in Politics

New Mexico In Depth editors chat about the state budget, public safety, and transparency

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New Mexico In Depth editors held the first of five online chats about the 2024 legislative session yesterday. In a wide-ranging conversation, Executive Director Trip Jennings and Managing Editor Marjorie Childress covered the highlights of the first week, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s State of the State address which was disrupted by young protestors on three different occasions. New Mexico In Depth will host weekly conversations each Thursday at 12:30 during the 30-day legislative session that kicked off on Tuesday. 

Jennings and Childress, with 30 years or more combined reporting at the Roundhouse,  discussed the competing state budget proposals from Lujan Grisham and the Legislature at a time when New Mexico is swimming in money thanks to a historic surplus. A theme of the coming budget discussions between the governor and state lawmakers will center on how much to spend and how much to save, they said. New Mexico relies heavily on the volatile oil and gas industry to pay for services and programs, with more than 40% of the state’s spending every year underwritten by revenues generated by the industry.

Money in Politics

Public blind to money flowing to lawmakers as session kicks off

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As the New Mexico legislative session kicked off this week, the public was blind in one very important respect. 

Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth

In the next four weeks, lawmakers will create a state budget worth at least $10 billion dollars, pass another quite large capital outlay budget, and pass influential tax and policy bills. But who gave money to those lawmakers in the last quarter of the year – in the form of campaign contributions – will largely be a mystery. That’s because lawmakers aren’t required to file a public report in January about campaign contributions they received in the run-up to the legislative session, if they didn’t run for office the year before. 

Since no lawmakers ran for office in 2023, we do not have a comprehensive data set showing the money that flowed into campaign accounts in the final months of 2023. Their last reports reflect contributions through Oct. 7, 2023, and we won’t have an update until April, when their next reports are due.I’ve been looking at campaign filings for many years. I promise you that among year-end contributors will be corporations and often, their owners and employees. There will be executives and public relations specialists for trade associations, labor unions, and public policy organizations. 

Some of those contributors will be registered as official lobbyists for their organizations, and in those cases we can see what they gave because lobbyists must file a January report. But while the reports of 100 or so lobbyists, or of their employers, are highly consequential, they are just a slice of the money flowing into the campaign accounts of lawmakers. A fuller picture would allow the public to comb through reports by address, employers, and occupation, and better understand how much money lawmakers are getting from a particular industry, special interest group, or simply from a handful of big donors. Last year, lawmakers were poised to pass a bill with several transparency measures, including one that would have shifted the reporting schedule to capture donations at the end of the year in a January report, showing how much money was given to lawmakers in the run-up to the legislative session.

Ethics

Gov. Lujan Grisham will greenlight fixes to gutted anti-corruption law

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The New Mexico Supreme Court in September 2022 removed the ability for prosecutors to criminally charge public officials for a range of ethics violations. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office confirmed via email Friday afternoon that she will empower state lawmakers to consider returning that power to prosecutors in the legislative session that starts Tuesday.Because it’s a short session, putting together the state budget takes priority, although a governor can add non-budgetary topics to the agenda. In this case, the topic will be the  state’s Governmental Conduct Act, the statute affected by the 2022 court ruling. 

The Supreme Court decision came out of litigation involving four separate cases featuring unethical behavior by local and state public officials between 2011 and 2018.A Doña Ana County treasurer offered money to an employee for sex.  A District Attorney in Grants used her position to intimidate officers investigating her use of a public vehicle for personal reasons. An Aztec magistrate judge was removed from the bench by the state supreme court for illegally recording her colleagues in secure areas of a court building.  A New Mexico Taxation and Revenue cabinet secretary used her position to access the tax records of a previous employer. (Prosecutors alleged Demesia Padilla was trying to prevent the audit of a former client, from whom prosecutors alleged she had embezzled money.

Education

Lawmakers will again push for more tribal control over how Indigenous children are educated 

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A proposal to create a trust fund that would give tribes in New Mexico more money and control to run their own education programs is back for the 2024 legislative session. Supporters are optimistic about their chances this year after last year’s unsuccessful attempt to include it in the state budget.There are reasons for optimism.Tucked into the Legislature’s proposed $10.1 billion budget is $50 million for the new fund. Rep. Derrick Lente, a Democrat from Sandia Pueblo, says top lawmakers have assured him the fund will get another $50 million, for $100 million total, during the 30-day session.The question is whether Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham will go along. 

If the $100 million request navigates the sometimes-perilous budgeting process successfully, tribes would use annual interest earned on the fund for language revitalization efforts and career readiness programs, among other needs. 

“What we want in tribal communities is for our elders, our own people to teach our children about what’s important to our communities,” Lente told New Mexico In Depth. “We need to be fluent in our language. We need to know how our government works.